The King in Yellow - Arkham Horror 2e Expansion (Review)
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Transcript
Hey folks, welcome back to the dungeon dive. Daniel here. I hope you're doing well and if you're not, I hope you are soon. And hey, yes, finally we are returning to Arkham Horror uh for the Arkham Horror retrospective. And today we are taking a look at the small box expansion, The King in Yellow. We will do a brief overview of this. I will talk a little bit about the last game I played because it was one of the most fun games of Arkham Horror I have ever had. It was just so cool, so well paced. And we'll also do a very brief addition to the appendix M fiction. Okay, so yes, the King and Yellow. This is one of the four small box expansions for Arkham Horror second edition. And uh this is one of my favorites. I really love this expansion. I think it adds a lot of variety. It doesn't add a ton of new rules to keep track of and it's just fun. It has a really cool kind of progression system to the game where the play, you know, the cursed play, the king in yellow is going on. And if the play ever reaches that third act, then the entire city of Arkham Horror of the entire city of Arkham, not Arkham Horror, has been taken over with madness and people go crazy. And that's another way that you can lose the game. And that almost happened on my game. So, let's read a little bit about The King in Yellow, then we'll take a look at it.
The King in Yellow expansion. The infamous theatrical play of The King in Yellow has come to Arkham to steal the sanity of those who watch it. With it come artists who paint things that cannot be, writers who dream of black stars, and mad men who wish to drag the rest of humanity into the dark abyss. Lording over all of them is the King in Yellow himself. With the town's folk being corrupted by the baleful yellow signs, can a few courageous investigators stop the King in Yellow before madness takes its toll? So, like a lot of the Arkham Harbor expansions, there are things in this expansion that I use and things I almost never use. I don't think there's a single expansion for this game that I use everything. I use them kind of in a modular fashion and I appreciate that even though I don't always get the full value of each expansion because I don't use all of it. speaking of something I almost never use. And uh these are the heralds. And so these are kind of like mini bosses. And in this game, we have the king and yellow. And when the king in yellow is the herald, you will set up this card. And this changes the game a little bit. You uh the the allies that you can draw might get corrupted. Things might change. But what this does is it really does make the game a lot more difficult. Now, I already find Arkham Horror to be a pretty difficult game,
and so I don't need another layer of difficulty on top of that. I don't really find it that much fun. And this also adds just more things that you have to keep track of. And there's already a heck of a lot of stuff to keep track of with this game. And so I don't find that the overhead and the new things to keep track of add really any amount of fun. And so I almost never ever play with the Heralds. You know, Arkham Horror is already a game that I've probably never played a single game 100% correctly without making some mistake. And those mistakes go both ways. Sometimes they make the game easier for me. Sometimes it might make the game harder. But when it comes to the Heralds, I usually end up ignoring them. You know, for every 10 games I play, I might use a Herald once.
So, that's something I don't use. Uh, we also get a nice little rules pamphlet that gives you the game components and the overview of everything. And then it tells you kind of like the the two ways that you can play this game. I usually play it as a permanent performance style where I mix the things that I'm using from the expansion into the decks of cards from the base game. There is also a way that you can play where you really focus only on this expansion and that can make the game a little more difficult because the play will pro progress progress faster thus ending the game quicker. So, I usually use the permanent performance style. Just mix it in. Of course, for this series, I'm keeping things unmixed. I think at the end of this series, I'll kind of go back and we'll take a look at everything and I will pick out the things from each expansion that I use and put them into the base game and kind of show how I will store that for my future games of Arkham Horror. And then, of course, we also have the Herald variant, which that will add this card here. And that's something I will probably never do again.
So the large cards, we have the three acts of the play. And at certain points during the game when you draw certain mythos cards from this expansion, you will progress the play. And uh act one comes out. That's the first card. uh you can add two doom tokens to the uh track of your great old one that you are fighting in order to prevent this act from triggering, but that will also push the game closer to the end. Once act one is out, if you draw another one of those mythos cards, then act two comes out. You can do something to prevent it or you can keep it up. my last game progressed to act two and it was very stressful. And if I drew that one last methos card that made the uh act progressed or the play progress to act three. So if act three comes out, the curtain falls on Arkham. The investigators have lost the game. Songs that the Hiades shall sing or flap the tatters of the king must die unheard in Dem Carosa. So that would be an additional way that the game can end.
And it got really close and it was really fun. So, I like this. It adds kind of a little bit of a structure to the game. And as those acts ticked tick up, you can kind of imagine the madness and the craziness kind of just going off the charts in the City of Arkham. So, that is super cool. So, we get a handful of new gate cards of other world cards, and these can just be added to your uh deck. There aren't any new spaces because there's no new sideboard in this expansion. So, this just adds some variety. Now, one thing, you know, I had completely forgotten about uh during uh when I repurchased all of these games is the uh the size of the of the cards. The expansion cards are quite a bit bigger and it does make shuffling a little difficult. I guess this is one area where card slevers have an advantage over me because it's easier to uh shuffle cards when they're sleeved if the cards are different sizes because you can just do a mash shuffle. So um I forgot about this. I forgot about how much bigger uh the cards are. I mean you can do a really nice card lift with this right to the card that you want. So, um, you know, I guess that's also one kind of advantage of the way things are done now where with Kickstarter, the base game and five expansions all comes out at the same time and so they're all with the same print run and so everything is the same. But, you know, with these older expansions like this, there were months or maybe years in between
expansions and sometimes the print run would get a little messed up. You know, the colors would be different or the sizes would be different. So, that's just something to keep in mind. But, uh, this is a great number of cards. Just adds a ton of variety to your other world encounters. I really like that. We also get a whole bunch of new mythos cards. We'll take a look at some of the special Mythos cards that I held out from the last game I played. And so, there are a few there are a few different things in here. Um, a few different uh wrinkles that can happen. There are quite a few cards in this new one, in this new expansion or this expansion that uh where gates don't come out and usually that's when the act progresses or the play progresses to the next act and it can make for some pretty interesting turns just very different. I think there's only one card in one mythos card in the base game that doesn't add a gate and that is the story continues cards uh card where you reshuffle your deck. You reshuffle the discards back into the deck. But almost always in the base game, you know, 99% of the time when you draw a Menthos card, a gate's going to come out. But that changes a little bit in the King and Yellow. And that's one of the things that I like about it. One of the coolest things is we get four new encounter cards for each of the locations in Arkham. And I love this. You know, these are the encounter cards that I will always keep mixed in. I will always once once I assemble my ultimate game of
Arkham Horror at the end of the series. Uh these encounter cards will always be in because in in the base game we had I think seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, we had seven cards. And so adding four, you know, that's 50% more uh random encounters for each of the locations. And so that's pretty fantastic. And uh the expansion does have a very very tiny icon. So if you do want to remove things once you have mixed them in, then you can do that. So that is all of the large cards. Now we also get some investigator cards here. We get a new complement of spells and everything that you would need. So, we have our Let's see. Well, these got kind of messed up in the box here. So, we have a few new uh regular items here.
Common items. Uh this is a cool weapon. The Aame or Aame, not sure how you say that, but this is a physical weapon. That's really cool. A a layline map, safety deposit key, um a press pass. The understudy script is always fun. There's another copy of that weapon, the director's diary. So, as you can see, a lot of these have to do with that play. So, I think this expansion just is really good on the thematic level. We also get some uh cool uncommon items, some magical items. The Carcosen page, the Gladius of Carcosa. Awesome. It's always nice to get one of the magical swords in this game. I love it. the Cryptozoolology collection, map of the mind with the yellow sign there, the warding of the yellow sign, uh the elder sign pendant. So, really cool. Uh once again though, I do wish that each of the expansions that added uncommon cards, you know, these these special magical cards. I wish it came with a few elder signs so that when you mixed these into your existing deck, it would keep the uh the ratio of elder signs to non-Elder sign cards intact. Just if you're going for that Elder Sign Victory, I'm thinking about maybe going on eBay and seeing if I can buy just a few Elder Sign cards. I don't know if people are selling singles, but um you know ju just to add them to my deck when I do mix
everything together because when you mix all of your uncommon cards together, it does make getting those elder signs a lot more difficult. And then we also have a handful of new spells. I'm not a huge fan of the spells in this game. Uh Arkham, I don't know, the spells are rarely exciting. I did use a couple of the spells during my last game, especially the uh the mists of Arlier, I think, where you can evade because I was evading a lot of monsters in the last in the last game. So, that did come in handy for one of my investigators. But we have a storm of the spirits, we have Call of the Azure Flame, Open the Third Eye, Arcane Insight, the Yellow Mist, and Summon the Beast Within. And and there, you know, just once again, the art in this game, the art on the cards is just so good. I I love the art. It's my favorite art asset library that's ever been uh created. And some of the spells do have special magical effects cards. So, we have a magical effect card for the Azure Flame, Inner Beast, and the Third Eye.
So, those are, you know, just a little bit more complex. We do have a handful, three new enemies. Now, these don't get added to the enemy cup or the enemy bag. Uh these will come out with certain cards and you know, these are riots and they kind of represent the citizens of Arkham going crazy because of the play and there's riots in the street and so those will come out at certain times. And then these are the blight cards and the yellow sign token. So these basically are used like doom tokens that you put on your elder one on the great old one. And then these are the blight cards and these are used in the in the herald variant. And so these will cause your allies to go crazy and then other bad things will happen. I rarely use the herald so I rarely use these. But I do like the kind of insanity art on these.
all the characters are are driven mad and going crazy. So, it just looks great, but it's just something I don't really use when I'm playing my uh my games of Arkham Horror with the King and Yellow expansion. I use all of the items. I use I think all of the big cards. I use all of the axe, of course, because I like those axe. And I never use the Herald. But let's talk uh real briefly about the last game I played because it really was one of the most fun games of Arkham Horror that I have uh played in recent memory maybe ever. I a lot of times these g a game of Arkham Horror will have a lot of highs, a lot of lows. Sometimes it's all highs, sometimes it's all lows.
There is rarely a kind of natural dramatic uh progression to the games, but this last game I played had such a cool progression as the acts were ticking away, as the axe were ticking down to that third act. Uh the tension was rising. I was very very close to winning the game and certain mythos card came out that made that win possible. And so in a game of Arkham Horror, there are three ways that you can win the game. You can do a close the gates victory, which uh that means that uh you have to close enough gates so that there are no open gates on the board and the number of closed gates equals the number of players that you are playing. So I was playing with four heroes, four investigators. Um, if you go for that victory, you can't really spend your gate trophies on things because you need to have those in your possession to trigger that win. During my game, I was closing gates left and right. It was great. I probably should have g gone for this close the gates victory, but I was spending my gates at the church to be blessed because I love being blessed in this game. Being blessed is always fun because it greatly enchances your uh your chances for victory when you are doing a skill test or a combat test or anything. Four, fives and sixes are considered successes instead of just fives or sixes. And of course that is the direct opposite of the worst thing ever is being cursed
where only sixes count as successes. But um in the game you can also seal the gates. So that's with your elder signs. if you seal the gates or with your clues and you seal them and then you have to have I believe six sealed gates in order to uh win the game or the ancient one, the great old one awakens and you are able to defeat them in a final conflict. And so the four investigators that I chose randomly and I'm only using investigators from the base game because the King and Yellow doesn't come with any investigators and it doesn't come with any new ancient ones or great old ones. So I randomly chose Vincent Lee, Kate Winthrip, Sister Mary, and Ashan Pete. And I thought this was a pretty cool party of characters. Of course, Kate Winthrup is one of my go-tos. She is absolutely S tier. She prevents gates and monsters from appearing in her location. That was amazing. It saved my butt a couple of times. Now, sometimes it can come back and kind of bite you in the butt, though. You know, if you actually want a gate to appear at a certain time, you know, maybe you're on act two and act three is three cards away and you don't really know that.
And, you know, you need one gate to win and you're in the unnameable with Kate Winthrip and you draw that gate card for something to happen in the unnameable. and a gate doesn't appear there and so you're kind of pressing your luck that you might draw that that that king and yellow play progression mythos card and that could come back and bite you and that kind of happened in this game because I was going for that sealing the gate victory and the reason was is because the great old one the ancient one that I chose at random is shove and uh this dude is pretty bad and he is completely immune to all physical um all physical combat. And at the beginning of the game when I drew out my cards for my investigators, I didn't draw any cool magical weapons or or offensive spells. And I spent the first couple of turns, you know, trying to get some money and heading over to the uh curiosity shop to try to uh draw like a cool magical weapon or something so I would have a chance. I thought, well, maybe we'll just play where we'll uh force the um the great old one to awaken. You know, we we won't do too well in the map and then shove will awaken and then I can uh fight it and win that way. But I was completely out of luck getting magical weapons or offensive spells. And so very quickly during the game, I switched to do a a victory with sealing uh six gates. Now,
uh, Shub Niggaroth, as well as being immune to physical combat, you also have to have monster trophies or else you get devoured. You know, if it comes around to your turn and you're fighting the big bad and you don't have any monster uh uh trophies, you get devoured. But he also adds a plus one to all monster all monsters. And so combat is harder with the monsters roaming the cities roaming the city streets of Arkham while he is in his slumber. And because the monsters were tougher and I was having a harder time uh getting cool weapons to fight them, I evaded a lot of monsters on uh this last game. And so I was completely ignoring combat for a large part of the game. And so if Shubby if he came out, I would not have been able to fight him at all. So I really needed to get that seal the gate victory. But uh we had some interesting mythos cards that came out.
The very first mythos card I drew progressed the play to act one. Uh that was that was a great way to start the game. I was onethird of the way towards losing because of that final act. I decided to keep the act going. I didn't add doom tokens because um you know I didn't I didn't want to do that right at the beginning of the game because I wasn't sure how the game was going to progress. I was pressing my luck a little bit and then some normal gate uh cards came out. One gate uh came out where Kate Winthrop was and so I had two or three turns right at the beginning of the game where there were no gates. It was a really interesting like I said that this game had a really nice progression. It was like a really good uh book or a really good movie where things start quiet and the heroes have a little bit of their normal lives kind of they were living their normal kind of quiet lives and soon very quickly the tension, the chaos, the horror started to ramp up and we also had the intermission. So, the town of Barkham collectively holds its breath as the terrible play of the king in yellow builds to a crescendo, preparing to reveal its darkest horrors, but for the moment, nothing happens. And so, here we just had to add uh terror to the terror track. So, again, a gate didn't come out. And then the next gate came out.
And around that time, I had sealed I think four uh gates. I was doing really well. And I still had a few turns left. I had one of my investigators was in another world ready to return. They had the clues needed to seal the gate and my other investigator had just gone into another world and so they had the clues to seal that gate. I only needed three more turns in order to seal those two gates and we would have won with a sealed gate victory. And then this card came out at the worst possible time. No one can help you now. This was an environment. environments stay out until they are replaced by another environment. And gates cannot be sealed. And that was really my only path to victory was sealing those last two gates because I didn't have any weapons to fight chubby. I didn't have any monster trophies to prevent myself from being devoured during the final conflict. I had spent all of my previously gained gate tokens, uh, gate trophies to get my investigators blessed because I thought that was a lot of fun. And I just kind of uh screwed myself on that sealing the gate victory, but it came down to the to the wire and it was really really fun.
And I I just love it. I love this expansion. This is my favorite kind of expansion that just adds some good variety to a game that really is made better when you have more variety. And when you are only using one expansion with the base cards, things don't get super diluted. So, you still get to experience the neat things that makes the expansion special. But now, let's do a really brief discussion on Appendix M. And, you know, I I I thought at first maybe I would do something a little different, maybe take a chance, but when it comes to The King in Yellow, really the only book I can recommend is The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. And this is just a fantastic collection.
It is so good. The original version has four stories and it was published in I believe like 1895. Yes, 1895. So this is weird fiction that predates HP Lovecraft. And I talked in my introduction to the Cthulhu mythos that you know HP Lovecraft was not the creator of the mythos fiction. He was another writer who worked in this tradition and kind of continued along the path of creating these kinds of fake gods and how they interact with humanity. You know, uh Lord Denzany did the same thing in the gods of Pagana, one of my absolute favorite books of all time. and Lord Denzani and Robert W.
Chambers were both highly influential on HP Lovecraft. However, The King in Yellow really doesn't read like Lovecraft in fiction. It's very, very good. I think Chambers was a better writer than HP Lovecraft. And one of the stories, the first story in here is The Repairer of Reputations. And it is probably my favorite short story of all time. It is so good. It's one of the few short story horror short stories that I've read that actually makes me feel a little creeped out. I usually do not get creeped out by horror fiction because for me horror really needs to or or benefits from from timing and from sound and from vision uh visual uh clues, visual cues and auditorial cu um audio cues and things like that and timing. Timing is really important when it comes to horror. And uh the things that kind of scare me the most, the the media that scares me the most when I engage with it is actually video games.
I think video games do a really good job of making me feel tension and scared for my characters. However, The Repairer of Reputations is one of the few pieces of horror literature that I have read that really got under my skin. It does such a good job of conveying madness and it almost feels like you aren't supposed to be reading it. It feels a little dangerous. It feels a little evil and I just love it. It's kind of post-apocalyptic in a way, but it's also a weird kind of dystopian future. I don't know. It's it's just it's such a great uh story and this collection is just unbelievable. I love this little addition here. Um, who is this from? Just this little hardback is just really uh really nice from uh Pushkin Press. So, highly highly recommend it. If you've never read the original, read it just to see where all of this really did kind of begin. It didn't begin with HP Lovecraft. We also have the um Hur cycle and this is from Chaosium and this is uh edited by of course Robert Imprice and uh this is one of the best of of Chaosium's cycle books. I think this collection just has one great story after another. Highly highly recommend this uh recommend this if you can still find it. Uh we have other early other pre-lovecraft writers such as Ambrose Beer. We have two stories from Ambrose Beer. We have the
repair of reputations from Robert W. Chambers, the yellow sign from Chambers. We have a Carl Edward uh Edward Wagner story. A really cool story from James Bliss called More Light. And um in More Light, we actually get to read a little bit of the play. It's very, very cool. Uh we have Whisper and Darkness by HP Lovecraft. Now, famously, Lovecraft didn't really write much about the King in Yellow and Haw Stewart. really wasn't his focus at all. It was August Derlith that really brought the king in yellow into the Cthulhu mythos. Yes, it's actually in the introduction to the Chaosium book here written by Robert M. Price where he kind of goes through the history of of the King in Yellow and Hour and those being pulled into the Cthulu mythos by Derilith. And Dererith actually suggested that we should call this the hu mythos and not the Cthulhu mythos because he saw the king in yellow as being the bridge between the really old and the contemporary with the Lovecraft circle and bringing that in and then adding the Cthulhu to the mix and then adding things after HP Lovecraft. And so there's could have been a chance that uh we would call all of these things, you know, the Hour mythos instead of the Cthulhu mythos.
But I think Lovecraft overrided him because, you know, he was like telling Darlith, well, you know, The King in Yellow really doesn't have much to do with what I'm doing. And you know, there there's this kind of back and forth. A lot of people hate August Darlith. A lot of people uh kind of like him. A few people love him. I'm on the love side just because of how much he did for all of this fiction. Just the fact that he started Arkham House and published and collected and saved all of these stories from the disposable pages of pulp magazines and brought them together. I really do think it's because of Derlith that we are still enjoying these stories today. So, I have a ton of respect for August Derlith. But if you end up liking uh the king in yellow, there's also this Chaosium collection here called The Yellow Sign and Other Stories. And this is the complete weird tales from Robert W. Chambers. So this includes a kind of expanded version of The King in Yellow.
It adds a few stories to it and it also has some of Chambers other weird fiction. I have tried to read some of Chambers's other weird fiction and it hasn't done a lot for me. However, I have not read at all. So, I can't really vouch for this collection except for I think you can usually find this for not very much money. And uh I think it's uh cheaper usually than the Hour Cycle, but uh you will get a lot for your money because this thing is just jam-packed with stories. And you do get the King and Yellow, the complete version of the King and Yellow. But if you've never read Robert W. Chambers, I just recommend this small, slim volume here. And it is very, very good, incredibly interesting, very well written, and quite haunting. So yeah, I hope you are excited that we are continuing with the Arkham Horror retrospective. I think next up is will be one of the big box expansions.
I can't remember which one is next. I think it's either Inmouth or Kingsport. I'll have to look at my uh at my schedule to see which one is next. I hope you enjoyed this video. We will talk to you later. Bye-bye.