The Dunwich Legacy Review

The Dunwich Legacy rests atop a pile of scattered papers on my aged oak desk. Its malevolent presence drives a stake of fear through my heart. What heady foolishness led me to bring this into my home? What flight of fantasy led me to believe I could handle an entire cycle!? Will it be too much? It’s too late to turn back now! I can only hope to make it out the other side with my sanity intact, or that these notes survive my descent into madness…

Players: 1-4
Time: 60-120 mins
Ages: 14+
Designers: Nate French, Matthew Newman
Artists: Tomasz Jedruszek
Publisher: Asterion Press, Edge Entertainment, Fantasy Flight Games, Galakta, Heidelberger Spieleverlag

It begins. The Dunwich Legacy is the first major expansion to Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Horror The Card Game but it represents far more than that. The FFG living card game model has expansions releasing in cycles, with a big box expansion and 6 small clamshell packs spread out over about 6 months. Here is no exception, except each of the 6 small packs that follows is a single scenario of an on going storyline. By buying Dunwich Legacy, you are committing to another 6 purchases to fully experience it. It’s important to know that going in.

The Dunwich Legacy box itself contains two scenarios, a plethora of monsters and associated nasties, and a handful of new character cards, including 5 new investigators. This review will only be looking at that set. Expect future articles looking at the individual scenario packs!

What’s going on!? – The Scenarios

You are summoned to the office of Professor Henry Armitage of the Miskatonic University, an old friend who is afraid for the safety of his old friends, Dr Francis Morgan and Warren Rice. They were supposed to have a lunch date a few hours ago, but didn’t show. You’d think Henry was more than a little obsessive, but then this is the Henry Armitage who just a few short months ago led an expedition to the town of Dunwich to defeat the dark forces of Wilbur Whateley and his monstrous progeny, the spawn of Yog Sothoth. Could it be that other forces are at play connected to that strange town? Armitage has seen the darkness before and knows it’s sign… So you head out to find his friends.

Those of you familiar with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft will know the story of the Dunwich Horror. This expansion cycle will form a narrative sequel! There’s no need to know the story to play, but you might get a little more out of it if you do. With Armitage’s introductions out of the way you are free to search the university for Warren Rice, or slip out to the local speak easy to track down Francis Morgan, who has sadly turned to drink to cope with the stress of his experiences.

The university is deathly quiet in the early evening. Extracurricular Activity really shows off the brilliant atmospheric writing of the creators, a perfectly normal university setting is rendered wonderfully eerie as you explore it. Expect some dark magic afoot here as the encounter deck attempts to drain your player deck, a fate made all the more terrifying by my not being able to figure out what you do if you ever run out of cards. But that’s FFG’s core rulebooks for you! Always a challenge. This scenario has a really clever mechanic in act 2 and an exhilarating conclusion… Damn it’s annoying keeping things spoiler free.

The speak easy of The House Always Wins is a complete change of style making for the most unique scenario so far, at least initially. You enter as guests. The mobsters won’t bother you at first as you visit the craps tables and bar to try and gather a hint of where Francis (first name terms now) has got to, but you also won’t be gathering clues in the normal way. It might be time to push your luck! Pretty soon though chaos descends and you’ll need to make a sharp getaway. Arkham is not a great place to live! The outcome here will certainly have some interesting effects later in the campaign!

These first two scenarios can also be done in either order! This ups the replay value tremendously as there are changes to the scenarios depending on what order you choose to tackle them. There are also more outcomes available than in the core game scenarios. In Extracurricular Activity you have the entire university to explore and, in all likelihood, there will be areas still unrevealed when you finish it the first time. Add to that all the new characters to experience it with and you have plenty of reasons to keep playing.

Is anyone still alive? – The Investigators

The Dunwich Legacy adds 5 fresh faced investigators to Arkham Horror: The Card Game, including a murderous cook and the first non-White character… in the form of a jazz playing mystic from New Orleans. Some room for improvement on the racial diversity front still.

As always, these new characters come with a piece of special equipment, like Jenny’s awesome twin .45s, and some fascinating weaknesses. The weaknesses were already a great part of the game, but oh boy would some of these characters keep a psychologist busy for a while. Take Jenny, she carries with her the mysterious disappearance of her sister. This weakness is placed on the furthest location from her, and Jenny must visit and search that location for some clue regarding her sister’s disappearance, else she won’t be able to live with the guilt. It’s a wonderfully story focused card, and a tremendous gameplay challenge, especially in as long a campaign as this one.

Each of these characters specialise in one of the player card types, and can use the level 0 cards of any other, giving you a lot of flexibility with initial deck construction, but you need to think carefully about where you go over the campaign. There are no recommended starting decks either: it’s time to learn how to deck build if you haven’t already! Here I do feel like having a second core deck is really valuable, letting you focus on particular cards as part of your strategy. Especially as you don’t really get that many new player cards in this set.

What can we do!? – Player Cards

The key new mechanic introduced this cycle is that of “Exile”. Cards with this rule have a one use ability. When triggered, they are removed from your deck. You need to buy them again with experience points in order to use them again. But there aren’t any included in the Dunwich Legacy box, so… er… I guess we’ll discuss them in the review of the mythos packs!

Interesting cards include… um… Teamwork? Teamwork may have always been involved in this game but now it is officially codified in card form, letting you trade assets or resources with a fellow investigator at your location. Some of the other exciting highlights amongst the player cards include such items as Candles! Painkillers! A hip flask? And you know, they are useful but not especially exciting and I’d almost be disappointed… but then there’s this card:

Talk about screwing with you! The Strange Solution is not a good card to have in your deck. It costs you a lot of effort to trigger, and then when you do, you get the mysterious opportunity to write down in your campaign log that you identified it. But what purpose does it have? Nobody knows! Yet you have to decide whether to take it with you. I love this card! It has built mystery and suspense into what is otherwise a mechanical meta game. Whether you take it or not, you are contributing to the story, and if you do take it, you will be confronted with the choice of whether to investigate it again and again. Never at a good time either.

Dare you begin?

The Dunwich Legacy is a very strong start to the first expansion cycle! The most important part of Arkham Horror The Card Game is its story and here The Dunwich Legacy shines. The core game campaign was a good introduction, but from the word go here the writers are showing off what they can do. There is a tremendous amount of imagination on display with clever twists on the core mechanics being used to great effect to reinforce the setting and the story and you could not hope for two more different feeling locations for your grand opening. This made all the more powerful by some excellent writing on the very limited amount of space they have available.

The one disappointment is how slowly new player cards are being drip fed into the game. On the one hand, I hardly need mountains of options right from the get go as there is still a good amount to explore but if you’ve played the core game a lot already, your new decks are not going to look substantially different to those you’ve already seen. As someone who is new to Living Card games that’s not too much of a problem for me: this game is about the story first anyway.

The scope of an 8 scenario campaign, while intimidating for the wallet, is fantastic for that story. I only hope there are able to sustain the high standards they have started out with! Whether the price is worth paying is not for me to say, but I could not have hoped for a better start to the campaign!

Rating: So not Dunwich you!

This copy of The Dunwich Legacy expansion was provided for review by Esdevium Games. You can pick it up from your local hobby store for £27.99RRP.

Thanks so much for reading this review! I will be working on similar reviews for the mythos packs that follow this over the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe or follow on Twitter if you don’t want to miss them!

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Roger says:

November 3, 2019 at 9:39 am

I have a question. Does this expansion let you play 3 or 4 players with only one core box, or are two core boxes required for this. My impression is that the limitation is only down to the number of player deck cards in the core box (i.e. enough for two player decks) but I was wondering if these expansions give you enough for a third or fourth player deck.

Matt says:

November 10, 2019 at 9:37 pm

If you get the entire Dunwich Legacy you will probably have enough options, though some of the core box cards are exceedingly useful to have multiples of.