'Arkham Horror: Final Hour' Review
The hour is late, you have failed. The rite is already way. Now you have one last chance to save the world from certain destruction, one last attempt to thwart the Ancient Ones, can you save the Earth in its final hour?
If you look carefully you will see that Tommy is riding a bike called âOld Oneâ which is just asking for trouble.
The main claim that Arkham Horror Final Hour makes is that it can be played in just that time. One hour. A bold claim to be sure, given that generally, games from the Arkham Horror Files series from Fantasy Flight Games tend to be epic undertakings rather than quick pick up affairs. Time to find out if this is the exception and see if anything is sacrificed (apart from the hapless humans). So we set the timer for an hour and off we went.
It's certainly a compact affair, the box being a sight smaller than its full-blown predecessor with a more wallet-friendly price to match. Opening it up reveals two sheets of tokens, a board featuring Miskatonic University with the 15 locations split into three zones, standees of your six investigators and a couple of packs of cards, one of which is split by character. The minimalist nature of the contents might take you aback at first, but I assure you there is a depth of strategy hidden within. The game setup is pretty quick (I did not include this in the final time). The Ancient One sheet that you are using (you have three to choose from) describes the setup and there are easy and hard variants to add playability.
Itâs a good thing itâs smaller, room is scarce these days and thatâs Gloomhaven at the bottom.
One universal is that there will be a ritual site and three gates where monsters will spawn every turn. Other than that, depending on difficulty there will be a horde of monsters placed in different locations on the board to make your final hour as trying as possible. You need to fend off the monsters and stop them overrunning the ritual site whilst gathering clues to reverse the rite. All while trying not to get eaten by the horrors swarming all over the university. Hey, they said it was quick, not easy!
All the components are of the usual FFG quality, which is to say high.
Letâs explain a few mechanics, which are gloriously simple but offer heaps of strategic depth. On the investigators turn they will play a total of four action cards from the top of their deck. (so if there are two players they play two each, if four, one each, you can work out the rest) there are also separate rules for solo play which I haven't tried yet. Each action card must be played face down and you are are not allowed to communicate what is on the card at all. Each card has a top and a bottom action. The top action allows the investigator to move, attack or repair locations that have been damaged by monsters and the bottom action often allows for investigation. However, it always has a drawback, be it more monsters spawning, activating all monsters in a zone or even damaging the investigators. Of the four cards, two top actions will be played as well as two bottom actions, so you cannot avoid the Bad Stuff. The only way that you have of communicating your desire over which you would prefer as you play the card is with a priority card. You will have a hand of four of these at all times and they are numbered 1-30, you play one of these and the lower the number the more likely the top effect will be resolved, though in my experience it is by no means guaranteed!
A typical game set up. Things havenât gone TOO badly wrong yet.
This sets a real tension in the gameplay where you plan for the best but are at the mercy of the overall round, finding that your best-laid schemes are torn asunder and you have to think on the fly. Once all of the cards and their effects have been resolved, in ascending priority order, the old ones act. The Priority cards that you played have up to three reckoning symbols on them and the more that were on the four cards you played, the more horrifying the Old Oneâs vengeance will be. It may just spawn or activate monsters (a word on that in just a second.) or it could be something much more significant like damaging locations, investigators or even something like making you play all the priority cards in the next round face down! Each old one has in character results, Shudde Mell, for example, delights in damaging locations, meaning that any monsters that spawn there move on to the next available space instead.
Duke to the Rescue indeed, but what will the trade off be?
You then flip over one of the gate tokens and whichever gate is represented then spawns a number of monsters matching the amount of tokens accumulated at that gate. Therefore as time goes on, more and more monsters spawn and the stakes become much more dire as they begin to take over the board
So letâs talk about the monsters for a moment. All monsters on the board are represented by tokens which take up a space at a location. Each of the 15 locations has a varying amount of space, so some can fit more monsters than others. If all the spaces are full, then the monster moves via a prescribed route depending on if the token is blue or red till it finds an empty space. When monsters activate they either move as described above, attack investigators at that location or damage the location, removing a space and making it more likely that monsters will move on. If too many locations become damaged or full you may find that monsters end up far from where they spawned, causing major problems as they sweep around the board to an area you thought you had cleared. Bringing an abrupt and dramatic end to the game as you are defeated.
Sealing walkways is GOOD any monster that goes over a seal is destroyed. Itâs a great way of stopping things getting out of control, albeit temporarily.
Aaah yes, how you lose. Well, there are many ways to lose, only one to win. If any investigators lose all their wounds then itâs game over. If the Ritual location has no space for a monster, game over. If all the Gate tokens are used up (8 rounds) and you canât reverse the ritual, you lose.
The only way to win the game is to reverse the ritual. At the beginning of the game, you take two clue tokens and place them face down in designated spaces on the board under a field of symbols. The rest are spread out amongst the locations. You are looking to work out what the two hidden ones are by investigating the tokens on the board, as you turn over each token you place it on one of the matching symbol spaces, eliminating it from the possible combination. Once you have eliminated enough symbols you can try to reverse the Ritual at the end of any round after the Ancient One phase. In another clever use of the Priority Cards, they have one of the symbols in the corner as if they were a suite. When attempting to reverse the ritual the players play three cards each, aiming to match the symbols. The required amount of matches is two times the amount of players so effectively each player can only make one mistake. This leads to a frantic race to uncover clues while holding the spawning horrors at bay while also trying to navigate the board and stop the ritual site being overrun. Hey, it is the end of the world like we said.
To summarise:
Arkham Horror: Final Hour does a great job of making the most of its parts and delivering a tense strategic experience from a small box. By stripping down the mechanics, they have streamlined the game considerably while still delivering a dramatic and exciting experience. Some of the wonderful narrative present in the other games has been sacrificed but you still get an idea of what you are doing and the Ancient Oneâs reckoning phase is awfully thematic.
Cthulhu: Ruining your day sinceâĶ forever.
More importantly, it can be played in under an hour, (we finished in 57 minutes, pausing the clock for the occasional rulebook consultation which really is not bad for the first game.) meaning that multiple plays in a session are possible. Lose the first time? Try again, having learned valuable lessons. That is one of the massive advantages that this game has over the big âepicâ Arkham Horror Files titles. Those games can easily take three hours to play and it can seem like a big investment, only to be cast down to defeat by the whimsy of fate in a mythos phase. The loss of story and immersion seems a fair trade-off for a game that can be completed in half the time.
The rules are straightforward, belying the gameâs hidden depth and the three Ancient Ones included combined with the varying difficulty should provide plenty of replayability. I really like the way that you cannot plan exactly how the turn will go. It feels like cultists sabotaging your plans and means you have to adapt quickly, often abandoning a strategy that you had developed as you find out that youâll be fulfilling the other half of the card instead. This coupled with the Ritual mechanic where you are trying to eliminate symbols from the potential combination gives something a little bit different to most Arkham games. Yes, the Mythos phase more or less works the same, but everything built around it has been streamlined into a much more accessible title that should be a lot easier to get to the tabletop.
Arkham Horror: Final Hour is thoroughly recommended and it will serve as a great gateway title to the other more intense Arkham Horror Files. What could be more Lovecraftian than a gateway to more horror?
