My First Thoughts on THE FEAST OF HEMLOCK VALE Campaign (Spoiler-Free and Spoiler Discussion!)

[@BlackStarsRiseGaming]

"This is the Arkham I love." Same. After three playthroughs it's my second favorite campaign below Carcosa. Regarding the preludes, the one complaint I have is a lack of clarity regarding rules in the final prelude. Thanks, Justin!

[@banjothulu]

I agree with most of your points. I recently finished my first play and really loved it. You've still got a lot to look forward to. The night 2 scenario is my favorite scenario in the campaign, and probably makes my top 10 scenarios of all time. It's really good. The finale is also really cool. It felt challenging, but we were just barely able to squeak through it.

[@jmerranko77]

I didn’t read elusive as a mechanic that was supposed to screw you over. I saw it as how some animals in the wild actually behave. Even if they are aggressive toward you, if you wound them, they fall back and regroup. Some of them are also only elusive when they aren’t in their ideal environment, so you can imagine they are retreating back to a place where they are more in their element. It also creates the setting for a different type of strategy where if you don’t have the firepower to kill them outright, you can instead focus on fighting them off until you can finish the scenario and hit the bricks. “Back! Stay back mutant lobster!”

[@dozensofdonuts8695]

It's crazy hearing your thoughts about the clever scenarios having not played The Longest Night yet (night 2). The lantern one is actually The Twisted Hollow. But night 2 is batshit insane and absolutely unlike anything you've ever played in Arkham

[@Yrevnoc]

I generally prefer the ordered structure of the original release campaigns, where there are 8 scenarios and you play them in this exact order. I don't find choosing a path through Scarlet Keys very satisfying. For our first playthrough of Hemlock we mostly picked scenarios at random and I was worried it was going to be another Scarlet Keys. But for our second playthrough we picked 2 residents we wanted to be friends with and just followed them to the scenarios we knew they'd be at and it actually provided the feel of the prescribed path I liked.

[@xahpookx]

Love seeing the enthusiasm. I absolutely loved HV myself. Looking forward to playing through it again and trying the other scenarios i didn't play.

[@bm5251]

Compeltely agree with your opening statement. This campaign really brought back my excitement for the game after a year hatius. I think they learned from the last two, took the parts that were good, and distilled them down to make a really fun experience.

[@spiekerboxx]

New to the game and am a big fan of the channel. Sick mewithoutyou shirt.

[@Yrevnoc]

On the wonkyness of preludes my most radical take is you should just fudge it to be as close to an agenda flip as possible. If someone at my table put a Tarot into play with it's reaction ability during a prelude then it's covered under the category of "asset that would normally start in play" so they get to keep it along with another asset, but if they spent resources to play it then it counts as their 1 asset to keep. Or as a different example I would keep the 10 Short Supply cards out of the deck when you shuffle up for the scenario start.

[@benwillingham6823]

Happy to hear you’re enjoying it! Can’t wait to see the play through on the channel! I’ll echo some of the other comments in saying that I think this campaign feels like a breath of fresh air. I think with the release of HV that it is clear it was time for MJ to step aside. I don’t mind Innsmouth or Edge-I’ll still play them, I just kinda feel like they fell flat and didn’t meet my expectations for how a campaign based on those iconic source materials should’ve been. I really don’t want to go on a SK rant so all I’ll say is I really can’t find anything nice to say about it so I’ll say nothing at all. For HV, I think scenarios are overall cool and fun. Main complaints about the campaign are: 1. Seems to be a lot of recycled ideas and throwbacks to things we’ve already seen. This is ok for now because I feel like they were revamped and mostly done better than before, but I’m hoping for more novelty in the next campaign. 2. Hard to understand setup/rules text. This rears its ugly head outside of just preludes. There were way too many times where my group had to stop playing for like 30 minutes to try and figure out what we were supposed to be doing or how we were supposed to set something up. This can be easy to fix, they just need someone proofing the campaign guide better to make sure it is crystal clear what players are supposed to do. Final thoughts: This feels like a huge step in the right direction after 3 consecutive campaigns of “MEH”.

[@jmerranko77]

I have always said I prefer to read story elements during the actual scenarios as opposed to between scenarios via massive walls of text. This campaign pulls that off rather nicely.

[@ZovcDrafts]

About to dip because spoilers, but happy to hear it's made a good impression. My group is starting this week!

[@n.kirkevans6256]

I've played it twice, and my impression is that it does a great job of taking mechanics and story ideas from earlier campaigns. They took the flipped doom mechanic from "The Pallid Mask" in "The Longest Night." They took treachery cards in hand from a couple of campaigns. They took "you're now a different character" from "The Forgotten Age" in the final story. Ditto for theme/story elements: ocean monsters, ghouls, cults... it has it all! I could do on, but this campaign definitely strikes a good balance bw introducing its own story with a couple of peculiar mechanics while borrowing a lot of really cool ideas from early campaigns with new packaging. P.S. The elusive mechanic is fine, and occasionally challenging. I'd be happy to see it occasionally pop up in the future if the designers thought it through in that context. Glad to see no redo of concealment. It made sense thematically in The Scarlet Keys, but it is highly dissatisfying as a player. If I want to play "Whack-a-mole," I'll go to Dave & Busters.

[@astutedunsparce4036]

Interesting to mention the traditional 8-scenario structure; we haven't seen that structure since Innsmouth so it's been awhile. Didn't even realize until this video dropped.

[@Nerdmeetsyou]

We had the same situation in the Forest, and I think it is a templating issue of the scenario. Even if you are outside the light, you can easily avoid getting the enemies. And it is always better to do so, as these Enemies come out before the Enemy phase, meaning they attack you -- so even if you need to avoid damage/horror it is always better to not take an Enemy. Considing that the alternative to drawing an Enemy is "take 1 Horror", you always will opt for taking the Horror. I assume there must be a templating issue: I think the scenario must work much better if you are forced to take an Enemy if possible, but you take 1 Horror, if no Enemy is available in Persuit. Assuming this is the intended ruling (and they just messed up the wording) the scenario become less of a cake walk. In our playthrough 1 and 2 we just NEVER took an Enemy and just took like each 3 Horror over the cause of the scenario to avoid them. And I think that cannot be the intention of the designers. So I assume that the 1 Horror is just an "outlet" to punish you even if there are no Enemies in Pursuit.

[@themediater]

Really jealous of this experience and wish it was how I was feeling about my playthrough , it's been kind of an unusual experience seeing the positive reaction to the campaign when I'm utterly not feeling it. I'm at the same halfway point of being at scenario 4 but hit it like 3 weeks ago and haven't mustered the enthusiasm to pick it back up yet. Probably should just finish it out and examine the full feelings on it at that point really. I don't like to have more than one Arkham campaign on the go at the same time either so it's kinda mentally blocking me from playing any others as well. Theme wise it's right on the money for me and I was incredibly hyped for it over the gap between TSK and this releasing, the delays didn't help either but I don't think that or being overhyped are contributing to my disappointment. I just didn't like the 1st and 3rd scenarios I did at all, 2nd one was "ok" at best. Those other 2 felt really full of "gotcha" moments that I despise. Right now it's probably gonna be at the bottom of my ranking of the official campaigns alongside Dunwich (which suffers cause it was the first imo, some teething issues). Unless the last 3 scenarios utterly turn my opinion around of course, could happen. I think I'm generally pretty ok with some amount of a campaign being "fine" scenarios that are just classic Arkham with maybe one aspect being twisted or changed in some way. So far every scenario in Hemlock has felt like a Horror in High Gear to me. I don't have the long experience with the game, only got into it in late 2021 and have swiftly played through all the campaigns since then so I don't have that "ah I thought I was feeling it but I wasn't really feeling it" subconscious experience of those last two campaigns that you've expressed here, however, this one is kinda making me actively question if I even like the game at all. I'm hoping it's just my first extremely rough blind playthrough and I'll appreciate it more if/when I replay it.

[@tcr7]

I also got into the game in 2021 and, yeah, my group ranks this as the worst campaign. Ah well.

[@MattCrawley_Music]

@@tcr7 why?

[@davidko9289]

Kudos to the spoiler free section. I'll come back at some point to watch but not yet.

[@MAnto19-666]

Feast was very good. After TSk i was on the edge of not buying it anymore, FHV kinda rekindled my interest. I just hope with the next one they go back to OG bad guys, last one was with innsmouth, i miss that

[@DrMcFly28]

Same. TSK murdered my interest in the game, and the announced change of designers is possibly the only reason I took a second glance at the new cycle.

[@BalooSJ]

Note: I'm something of an Arkham baby, having only played about 4.5 full campaigns (Night of the Zealot, Dunwich twice, Carcosa, Forgotten Age, and halfway through Edge), so take my comments with some salt. Regarding mythos cards with "whiff insurance", I think Surge is kind of lazy. I prefer something like Mysterious Chanting with its "I'll get you next time!" clause (Put 2 doom on a cultist. If there are no cultists, find one and spawn it.). And if it's a card that whiffs because you don't have a particular thing, it should just whiff. If something says "One of your allies takes 2 damage" and you don't have an ally, that's fine. Allies are usually pretty strong cards, so if you don't have one that's problem enough. Regarding campaign evolution, I think MJ might have suffered some from escalation creep - the new thing has to be more complex and more difficult and more everything than the last thing. And a new team is a good way to reset that.

[@fivifivia1146]

Hemlock made me fall in love with Arkham again ( I hated Scarlet and Edge). Also, agree with your thoughts about the blind playthrough. I cannot remember when i had such an awesome first run, in my head it is seriously up there with Carcosa for the most fun i had in this game for a blind run

[@dtvanderpool726]

Hemlock Vale saved Arkham for me after two very underwhelming campaigns. It has the perfect balance of structure and choice with tons of replayability to boot. It fixed most of the major criticisms of EoE and SK and added some fun new twists to the traditional Arkham gameplay. Best blind play I've had since Dream-Eaters for sure.

[@garybraddick5042]

I’m a big fan of AH and just recently finished Hemlock Vale. And though I’m a big fan, AH has always seemed stingy with the XP. I mean why make you pay for all those high XP cards and then the scenarios offered too few XP to make them available to add to your deck. So I found Hemlock Vale so enjoyable to play partly because it provided so much more XP and I enjoyed actually building up my deck. The Hemlock Vale story is great too. Hemlock Vale is by far my favorite campaign.

[@fredfredrickson5436]

This cycle represents both a design sea-change and a return to true greatness for AH. Shame the production still hasn't quite reach top tier yet, with those trivial scenario bugs, campaign booklet mis-prints, and fairly frequent wooly wording on some investigator cards needing that little extra polish. But a fantastic start by the new design team. We can't wait to see what comes next.

[@M-E_123]

How do you plan to approach the scenarios you don't play in your first run? Immediately do a second campaign to make different choices, or run them as standalones, just to see what they are like? Or do you leave them sitting there for months, until you are ready for a second run through the campaign, to try and keep the replay feeling fresh as there will still be content you haven't played?

[@PlayingBoardGames]

We'll likely visit them in our re-run, which I imagine will be a few weeks after we finish the blind run.

[@gabriel0santiago]

Thanks for the great video

[@shawnc292]

Hemlock vale is the first campaign to be in everyone in my groups top 3. I genuinely will be disappointed if codex isn't in every campaign in some capacity moving forward

[@TheMaskedHero]

Once you've finished. You all should do a video about Arkham in the Campaign Box era.

[@Gaudaloth]

We are about to do second night and we are having a lot of fun, the first scenario was kinda brutal (if you follow the obvious path)

[@dvunkannon]

I wish I knew you were waiting to get a copy. I have a second copy because of the switchover of Asmodee online stores.

[@Chappykinz]

The treachery that is a book test that makes me lose an action per point you fail is BRUTAL on Hank Samson. Lost two turns in a row.

[@blankiecat9302]

What do you see beyond the vaile

[@izzet513]

Honestly I’m surprised to learn folks hated EotE and SK, my group thoroughly enjoyed both. What were the common complaints?

[@MattCrawley_Music]

seriously? TSK is incredibly polarising. The vast majority of AH players I know absolutely hate it. People's main issue with EOTE was the amount of reading. For TSK, it was the confusions with the concealed mechanic, the difficulty, the aimless wandering to pointless locations, the lack of scenario vps, how some paths are clearly better than others, the annoying amount of reading of stuff that isn't even relevant, rather than actually playing scenarios, and general dislike of the final scenario. Oh yeah, and the lack of cohesive story, the lack of cthulhu mythos or horror, and high vp cards getting sucked into the void. There's a general feeling that you have to play the campaign a few times before you finally start enjoying it - I heard the mythos busters guys even say this. All of this is why I will never player TSK again.

[@crisprat7490]

Wait, I think the Bertie scenario is named 'The Twisted Hollow'. 'The Longest Night' is the second night scenario, I should know because that's a b*tch of a scenario lmao

[@PlayingBoardGames]

I think you're right. Our next scenario is night 2, which would make sense why The Longest Night is burnt into my brain.

[@crisprat7490]

@@PlayingBoardGames whoops. Sorry for the mild spoilers (?). But hope you'll have fun for the rest of the campaign! It's a fresh experience and it may be the first campaign we did that we want to repeat again right after we finished it (or maybe it's the same with you where the hype is talking)

[@PlayingBoardGames]

@@crisprat7490 No need to be sorry, I appreciate the correction!

[@Yrevnoc]

Elusive is definitely too easy to game. So many times I've been engaged with an elusive enemy so I just take an attack of opportunity and it disengages, moves and exhausts. Problem solved. Wish it only proced on enemy phase attacks.

[@danielscarpace]

Yeah, it's weird, right? I've even been using one-punch Wendy to just scare off Elusive enemies since it works even if you fail.

[@Yrevnoc]

@@danielscarpace It's especially bad if you provoke an attack of opportunity by moving. You move from location B to location C while sending the enemy to location A where it's now exhausted. It's never catching up.

[@DrMcFly28]

@@Yrevnoc I'm pretty sure the designers didn't realize this tactic even exists (which wouldn't be surprising, seeing how little actual playtesting AH LCG gets lately)

[@tcr7]

I can tell that Justin's read some of my reviews because he called out Geared Up and that was one of my (minor) complaints about the campaign. My wife went into our 4p blind run with a Geared Up Vincent Lee deck and was absolutely crushed. Because in 4p you only get 2 rounds to do things, her time was cut in half because of how Geared Up works. Ouch. I agree that the scenarios are fantastic. That makes me optimistic about the future. The scenarios are, overall, the best in all of arkham horror. That's great! My 4p group still hated the campaign and we all four rank it as the worst campaign. I'm happy to hear that others are enjoying it as that's best for the health of the game.

[@PlayingBoardGames]

I haven't read any reviews, just passing comments in our Discord channel.

[@MattCrawley_Music]

You think the scenarios are the best in all of AH, but your group ranked it as THE WORST campaign? really?? Im curious how they'd rank all the campaigns, and why it is the worst for your group

[@tcr7]

@@MattCrawley_Music I can't speak for how they rank all the others, I just know that during our recaps at the end, we all agreed it was the worst campaign. It was quite a few things. 1. We give ourselves 4 hours to play through a scenario. That's a bit excessive because we play at my house and I have young kids that love to interrupt my wife and me while we play. We stayed in that 4 hour timeframe during the first two night scenarios. We never came close during the other 4 scenarios. Those preludes took up a substantial amount of time (especially the final prelude!) due to having to tear the game down and set up the next scenario, plus the time to actually play them. 2. I've played FoHV multiple times now and I can say those preludes get worse and worse with every playthrough. I love what the devs tried to do with getting the reading sections integrated into gameplay, but those preludes are horrible. We're supposed to be playing but there's no danger. Ugh. Why? Just give it to us like EotE and let us choose who we talk to. That would save so much time and setup. These preludes get worse and worse with every playthrough. 3. The editing. Some sentences make no sense. Some paragraphs make no sense. At one point you have "stalks on eyes". Not "eyes on stalks" like a beholder and what they were clearly going for. No, there are "stalks on eyes". The editing made it really difficult for me to read to the group. 4. We love the atmosphere and storytelling of Arkham Horror. There were references to Jaws, Die Hard, Princess Bride, and a few others that slip my mind. I love Princess Bride but the tone and atmosphere of Princess Bride is very different than Arkham Horror and I would really rather avoid having Princess Bride in my AH game. It makes me not take the game seriously any more when I run into literal "Rodents of Unusual Size". 5. This isn't exclusive to FoHV by any means, but it was the most egregious. The final "prelude" makes no sense from a rules perspective. Duke eventually explained that it's not really a prelude and should not be treated as one. They should have just said that in the campaign book instead of trying to "Surprise!" us with it. Because we tried to combine the prelude rules with the setup rules in the book and it ended up a disjointed mess that made no sense. tldr: We couldn't take this campaign seriously because of the writing and editing. It makes sense now that we know that FFG was screwed over by its parent company so they likely didn't have money for an editor. It still hurts. The scenarios are incredibly fun, Duke clearly has a great grasp on scenarios and using the new release model, but they desperately need a proofreader and editor to bring the tone and atmosphere back to Arkham Horror.

[@Chiungalla79]

For me all of them are at least good. I played all of them a couple of times at least. But I agree that Hemlock is better than most.

[@DrMcFly28]

I am at a weird place with HL. On one hand, it's an incredible breath of fresh air after EotE and TSK which I still consider to be the absolute rock bottom of the franchise. On the other hand, these two cycles (and even Innsmouth in part) have completely soured me on the concept of prominent, story-heavy NPCs. As good as HL turned out to be, I still hope the new design team can find a novel approach that doesn't rely on babysitting a large cast of characters that is continually butting in with their woes and stifling the emergent narrative

[@mathieumartin6372]

I actually do not like Hemlock Vale. I think it's terrible BUT I will argue more rigorously after you guys have played the Final 😶

[@MattCrawley_Music]

Why do you think its terrible?

[@mathieumartin6372]

@@MattCrawley_Music basically because of the final :) Although a lot would have to be said about: - Third prelude rules utterly unclear - Mostly lame "grid maps" on most scenarios - Silent Heath being just a second Blood on the Altar - The Twisted Hollow is a rehash of Depths of Yoth and Pallid Mask - the Lost Sister is Pit of Despair bis - Elusive mechanic failed (too easy to game around) - Sub-par writing (MJ is not Hemingway but it was better) - Grottos. All. The. Time. I have also good things to say about it: - Hemlock House is innovative - Written in Rock is fun (despite being just a [better] rewind of Horror in High Gear) - The Codex and more Parley actions should have been the norm since day 1

[@gabriel0santiago]

0 comments in 3 seconds? Bro really fell off