Arkham Horror - History

History

Arkham Horror was originally submitted to Chaosium Inc. by Richard Launius as Call of Cthulhu: The Board Game, a new strategic game based on their Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. It was edited in house by Chaosium, who added such features as the Doom Track, a method to track progress toward the total failure of the players, and was published in 1987 as Arkham Horror. The game won the "Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Boardgame of 1987" award in the Origins Awards.

Arkham Horror was one of several Lovecraft-based board games submitted by Launius, with other designs from the same period including 'The Trail of the Brotherhood', 'DreamQuests', and 'Imprisoned with the Pharaohs'. Arkham Horror was the only of these games to see professional publication.

Arkham Horror was one of the first cooperative board games - a game in which the players were working together to defeat the system. It was also a rare board game which did a good job of adapting roleplaying gameplay. As a result of these two elements, it quickly became a cult classic.

The original printing of Arkham Horror soon sold out, and throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s it was one of the most-wanted out-of-print American board games. Chaosium announced reprints several times, but they never occurred.

In 2004 online game company Skotos acquired the rights to Arkham Horror from Richard Launius, and later arranged publication with Fantasy Flight Games. The game underwent several revisions in this process. Skotos reorganized many of the elements in the game for improved cohesion and arranged for it to more carefully follow the maps of Arkham created by Chaosium and used in their own Lovecraft Country: Arkham by Night online game. Launius added several new elements, including clue tokens and some rearrangements to the decks of cards. Finally, Kevin Wilson at Fantasy Flight massively revamped the game, throwing out a roll-and-move system as well as other concepts and also expanding much of the gameplay. The 2005 edition shares art and other elements with Fantasy Flight Games' other Cthulhu Mythos based game: Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game.

The new edition was released in July 2005 and sold out, with a second reprinting also being released in 2005.

In early 2011, Fantasy Flight released Elder Sign, a game based on Arkham Horror but which provides a much faster paced alternative. By streamlining many of Arkham Horror’s mechanics and using dice to solve encounters, games of Elder Sign only last an hour or two on average, rather than upwards of 3–5 hours like those of Arkham Horror. Elder Sign has also received a digital port to iOS and Android in late 2011.