Echoes of the Past Review
After last week’s Path to Carcosa review, we start our trek through the Mythos Cycle starting with the Echoes of the Past. As before, we give a short spoiler free overview, then explore the player cards before moving on to a full spoiler discussion of goings on and mechanics.
It appears the events surrounding the King in Yellow have precedent. They are, you might say, Echoes of the Past. Thus you race to the museum! No, wait, that was last cycle. This time you’re at the Historical Society, recorders of all the important events of Arkham, and in a race against the forces of darkness to find the truth. Or at least an idea. Some hint. Please?
It really does a good job of simulating a race too, with players finding it equally valuable to slow the enemies down as to advance their own search. Unfortunately, this does result in a scenario that feels even more beholden to luck than usual. Indeed, my latest solo play through saw me storming to victory with the agenda deck barely advancing. I can’t blame that on knowing the scenario either; it had been such a long time since my first play through I literally couldn’t remember what the scenario was about before I started. Not the most impressive statement.
Echoes of the Past feels rather too much like filler. Its core mechanical twist is a clever system that feels like a race. But neither the discoveries you might find nor the turn by turn challenges were enough to make a memorable scenario. Add to that a more wildly swinging difficulty and this is probably one of the weaker Arkham Horror scenarios. Sometimes when you dig up the past, all you get is dirt.
Rating: Past it’s Best
Player Cards
Echoes of the Past gives us two new and exciting card types. The first are Composures, of which each class gets one and, a little disappointingly, most won’t get a whole lot of use out of them. Thematically, they are great. 1 cost Fast assets that let you spend resources to boost a particular stat, but are discarded as soon as you take a single horror. You only get the benefit as long as your composure holds up to the onslaught you face. But there are more consistent ways of boosting stats that don’t require an experience and won’t be lost so easily.
The second new type of cards are the equally thematic Desperate cards. These neutral skill cards offer up a truly ridiculous 4 skill points for whichever specialisation the card is associated with, but only if your investigator is down to 3 or fewer sanity. These really are the cards of last resort! Particularly sane investigators probably won’t get too much out of these, but those with more fragile minds can all but guarantee to make good use out of these at some point in a game!
The remaining cards are a bit of a mixed bag. Knuckledusters, for all their threatening appearance and delightful +1 damage, leave you helplessly exposed to Retaliates, which is really not something you want to be adding to the weak Rogues we have available. Heroic Rescue is an interesting card for your tank characters, while Anatomical Diagrams is great for helping out your combat types. Both cards encourage sticking together which, honestly, is probably a good idea anyway.
David Renfield continues the Mystic’s obsession with adding more Doom to your play area which remains both fascinating and terrifying to me. Both in character and as a player! He also offers up some valuable resources for your often poor Mystic. Combined with some Doom scrubbing abilities and David could be useful. The final card of the set, Cherished Keepsake, is an essential card to include in all of your games. Not because it’s any good, but because that flavour text is wonderful. Who doesn’t want Mr Pawterson around to keep them safe?
Spoiler Discussion
Right! Now we are past the spoiler warning I can really dig in. Echoes of the Past totally mixes up the Agendas. No longer do you relentlessly add a doom token each Mythos phase. You would seem to have all the time in the world… if it weren’t for the enemies. The mix of cultists and fanatics creates a plentiful source of doom thanks to the Agenda special rule, that any clues gathered by enemies immediately turn into doom. This coupled with some special Encounter cards that help enemies pick up clues from their location means there are plenty of ways for the Agenda deck to advance, but unusually you have a lot more control over it.
This beautifully captures the feel of a competitive search. While there aren’t any monsters about, you can casually hunt through the sprawling society mansion. Then you become aware of others, also searching, perhaps for exactly what you are looking for. Then you have the choice of rushing your own search or knocking out the bad guys to slow down their search. It’s very thematic. But without the relentless clock it’s that much lower in tension. If you can keep on top of the monsters, as I was able to do on my solo play through, it’s even possible to clear the scenario without the Agenda advancing. Which I suppose is kind of rewarding but also misses out on the excitement that makes Arkham Horror scenarios so exceptional.
Should you not pull this trick off you run into Path to Carcosa’s other campaign mechanic. All those characters from the dinner party in the previous scenario are going to turn up again in fully monstrous form. If you didn’t kill them all in the fire, of course. This scenario, it’s Sebastien the wolfman, seemingly in charge of this gang of cultists. Does that mean you were right, that there is something going on? Why else would there be others searching this building too? Surely you can’t be imagining all of them.
I really like how much of an impact your behaviour in the second scenario has on your entire play of the campaign. Interviewed subjects offer a little boost to a particular scenario. Killed VIPs means they aren’t going to come back to haunt you later in the campaign. And doesn’t their involvement clear you for their bloody murder…? That dinner party seemed like an impossibly hard scenario, but the potential rewards for smashing it are impressive!
Of further interest, your choice in the Interlude from the last set doesn’t only increase the currently arbitrary conviction/doubt numbers, it also changes the composition of the chaos bag for this scenario. This is fascinating. The effect of these tokens can now be tailored to your campaign choices. So if you sneaked into the secret meeting and increased your doubt, the cthulhu heads will cause you horror if you are face to face with enemies which clearly cause some cognitive dissonance. Burning the mansion down and increasing your conviction only makes the enemies here search faster. They know they might be next!
The other new special rule involves the map: passageways. The old building the Historical Society resides in is riddled with secret passageways which open up considerable options for movement around the building that the monsters can’t use. At least until you enter the hidden archives. This can be very valuable when the hunter enemies come into play later in the scenario. It’s also the essential means of accessing the hidden library, which is the end of your search. The special ally Mr Peabody can also add the passageway keyword to a card in the building for a round, offering special escape routes to allies and access to that special location. This movement puzzle can get pretty hairy on a tough play through.
Once you finally complete the search (if you complete the search) you find out where to go next (or you dream it, in what feels like a bit of a cop out but I suppose they had to give you some means of progressing) and you find a black clasp. Do you take it? This is another one of those doubt/conviction opportunities but this one feels rather low stakes after the terrifying decision of The Last King. Though perhaps it will have particularly crushing consequences down the line. At this point though, we just don’t know.
Our copy of Echoes of the Past was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £14.99 RRP from your local hobby store.
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