Heart of the Elders Review

What’s better than an Arkham Horror scenario? TWO Arkham Horror scenarios! You better believe it! The Forgotten Age has so much campaign to cram into its mandated cycle size The Heart of the Elders features scenarios A and B to play through. Or, as I like to describe it, you put your creepy cave in, your creepy cave out, in out, in out, you shake it all about…

After surviving your little jaunt into pre-history it’s back to bumble through the jungle starting from the Mouth of K’n-yan. There’s a mysterious set of pillars within whose puzzle you must solve. While I wish there might have been some ingenious TIME Stories like puzzle involving the cards themselves, I’m afraid you just have to imagine what goes down, and focus instead on finding the clues you need out in the jungle. It’s not just standard fair, it’s even re-treading the same locations you visited in the opening scenario. But I’m not going to begrudge card re-use when it enables so much game.

Scenario B tracks your descent into the vast cave network below. If you can get further than the first room, that is. We found this scenario cripplingly, brutally hard. By far the hardest scenario we have played, although a fair amount of that will be down to the accumulated suffering inflicted upon our investigators by the campaign. Fortunately this isn’t a scenario that terminates your campaign, rather marking an unexpected twist in the tale…

Player Cards

No particular similarities to the new cards here. But we do have some cool new neutral cards, which is a rare treat. How have we gone this long with this game without being able to buy a trench coat?? But now we do with a nice boost to agility, albeit at quite some cost. That’s Burberry prices for you. Similarly expensive and, mechanically, pairing quite nicely with your new coat is the Ornate Bow, a ranged weapon perfect for agility-loving rogues sneaking about the edges taking pot shots at monsters. It’s the first weapon to let you fight with feet! Plus it does a mighty +2 damage and has unlimited ammo! At the very thematic cost of having to spend actions knocking new arrows. A weapon for the stalkers in the party.

I suppose these neutrals do lean a bit towards the Rogues, which must be why they only get one new faction card this pack: Lola Santiago, the no-nonsense archaeologist! She’s just here to get the job done. So long as you don’t mind paying for her. Which, in a Rogue deck, is not likely to be too much of a problem. Add some static bonuses and you’ve got yourself a nice little ally.

Survivors follow up with some strong options for dealing with those inevitable failures. You can Live and Learn to just try again (for free!) and with a +2 bonus. That’s, frankly, amazing! Take Heart is similarly lovely even if, as a skill card, it doesn’t actually add any skill points. But in this case you wouldn’t want it to. With this card you actually want to fail as it rewards you with a pile of new resources. Sadly, the good stuff train starts to go off the rails with Against All Odds. A cost 2, experience 2 card that is only useful in the unusual case where your base skill is 2-3 points below a skill test target and you could still pass… so if you have a small mountain of bonuses from elsewhere. But think about all the better cards your hard won experience could go on?

OH GOD I love-hate that Premonition artwork! So brutal, so horrifying, so quintessentially Lovecraftian. It’s also a really cool power, letting you know, with certainty, what the next chaos token will be. This is never not useful. Finally you know how much effort, or not, to put towards a test. Saving you valuable cards or letting you sensibly invest them in an achievable but tough test. And it’s free! Fabulous! The slightly wild eyed Olive McBride is less predictable. And hurts my brain. Reveal 3 chaos tokens instead of one and apply two, discarding the third. I mean, that guarantees you avoid one awful token… but at what level of skill investment do you get value from this? I’m sure someone has done the math and, I suppose thematically, you should at least try her once? Finally you get Defiance, which you know, blocks what are likely to be annoying tokens, especially on higher difficulties. But it costs 2 experience. For a card you can at most use once per scenario… And particularly in recent campaigns where story choices have a big influence on the chaos bag you are probably better off with the lower level version of this card.

Finally we come to the scrapings at the bottom of the Mythos pack. Custom Ammunition is pretty cool, reloading and powering up a firearm. But again, 3XP? There’s some punchy combos in there with this so it’s far from a no. Intrepid struggles even more. The main source of head tests faced by guardians are the mythos deck, and while it certainly feels like I have to face them all the damn time, I can all but guarantee I won’t draw a single one so long as this card is in my hand. At which point, it’s useless!

Otherworldly Compass has a really cool effect! Reducing shroud by the number of open locations adjacent to where you are investigating. That could get quite powerful for a card with unlimited uses. But YET AGAIN at 2XP in a card pool full to bursting with excellent ways of hoovering up clues, it’s probably not getting purchased. Apparently the card effect ‘theme’ this pack is overly expensive cards. Speaking of which we have Expose Weakness with an unjustifiable cost of 3XP. Bad luck Seekers.

Spoilers

Given the two part structure of this scenario, it is perhaps unsurprising that part A is fairly short: a mere 10 doom on the agenda deck. But that’s no bad thing – indeed, it’s a rather pleasant change of pace. And the scenario makes full use of that, by making you play through it multiple times.

Your objective is to unlock all 6 of the pillars within the cave. This is simply a matter of gathering a couple of clues per pillar and spending them in the cave. This does mean you’ll have to explore the jungle to get access to them. Importantly, you save your progress after each attempt, so an unlocked pillar remains unlocked on your next attempt.

On your first go though you’ll need to even figure this much out. That’d be act 1 then. After you complete the first act you never have to do so again, which significantly speeds up your subsequent plays. You might rightly wonder what adds the pressure? How can it be so hard to collect a few clues that you might need multiple playthroughs? That would be the giant snake monster on the back of the act card.

I don’t care how often they do that it ain’t ever getting old. This beasty can never be killed so I hope you’ve brought along someone with good evasion. Especially as each replay starts with you and the beast in the cave together! We found ourselves doing enough to get one pillar unlocked and then resigning to avoid taking more trauma. Which makes for a strange experience. The scenario feels inevitable, but it could be a bit of a grind. While the idea of pulling back to camp to rest and return the next day feels thematic, turning to say good night to the giant monster hunting you each evening feels more than a little weird!

It helps that, after the first, an attempt didn’t take us more than half an hour. It also helps that how well you did in the previous scenario, The Boundary Beyond, gets you multiple steps forward on this one. For each ancient location you fully explored in old Mexico City, you will have already unlocked one pillar at the start of this scenario. Indeed, it is possible that you can skip this entire sub-scenario if you unlocked them all. But good luck with that!

Descent into Madness

Part 2 is the real test. One chance to reach the depths. A vast doom threshold on the agenda deck giving you the space to explore the hauntingly vast cave network below. Where I feel like such locations should warrant an encounter deck emphasising the dizzying scope described by the act and agenda decks, and location cards themselves, what you instead face is a collection of perfectly unpleasant effects, but ones emphasising claustrophobia: darkness, cave paintings, skeletons, traps. Perfect for the temple in The Doom of Eztli, but nothing capturing the scale suggested by the Perilous Gulch, Vast Passages and Crystal Pillars locations. The one set of encounter cards added for this scenario: No Turning Back, is a rock fall which, frankly shouldn’t be such a cause for concern in Vast Passages. Don’t get me wrong, it fits the theme of caves, but less so the unique features of these caves.

The locations themselves do add some very nice thematic rules which go some way to making up for the encounter deck’s missed opportunity. Those Vast Passages say, require an extra action to explore, if no investigator has their binoculars. The scenario once again leans into the frustratingly random supplies mechanic. Although it goes some way to mitigate it: the opening location lets you avoid the treacheries in the explore deck if you have the map, making exploration considerably easier, and so the Dark Hollow provides more clues for the investigators, so they need not explore so often. At least not to advance the first Act. Of course, once they do, they better hope someone has some chalk or you all get lost and probably lose a hard won location.

Of course, the explore deck is not the main source of suffering in this scenario. Although it certainly makes those initial steps harder. No, the real issue is the blasted snake people. Not that they’re all awful, I’m sure. Some of my best friends are snake people. But Heart of the Elders has been deviously structured to make them as awful as possible. You see, between parts 1 and 2, you keep any cards from the previous part in the victory display. Including any Vengeance cards. The Yig *!@$*!*s get brutally powerful when there is any vengeance being called down upon you.

To make matters worse, after playing part 1 there is a good chance you’ll be poisoned, but there’s no break for you to take medicine and clear it. As such, the rest of the deck gets even more evil and, to cap it all off, a frankly insane number of the cards you’ll face will have the Surge rule. Meaning you’ll be burning through encounter cards like aspirin during a hangover and if any scenario is going to feel like a hangover, it’s this one. Those tough as nails snakes will be pouring out of the deck faster than you can say ‘slither’.

I’d like to think you’ll struggle to survive this one. If only to salve my damaged ego. But not to worry. No matter what you do you find yourself at the gate, in the deepest darkest depths of the caves. And there you also find Alejandro (unless he was already with you) and Alejandro’s friends. His 10 foot tall, conical, clawed, alien friends. Alejandro is a baddie and by God I called it way back in the Forgotten Age review! The slime! I complained in The Boundary Beyond about throwing random enemies at us without due build-up but this reveal was handled perfectly. He has been a major player throughout and there was always just enough doubt around his knowledge and motivations to make this reveal satisfying without necessarily being guaranteed from day 1.

But where does this leave us? Apparently no longer with any form of human body, but apparently that doesn’t stop the campaign! We are off to The City of Archives to discover what on Earth… or rather, not on Earth, we’ve ran into.

Our copy of Threads of Fate was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £14.99 RRP from your local hobby store.

Next Review: City of Archives