The Scarlet Keys Review
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- Опубликовано: 8 ноя 2024
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Designer,Aaron Haltom, Josiah Harrist, Maxine Juniper Newman, Jeremy Zwirn,
Artist,Christopher Hosch, Marcin Jakubowski, Ignacio Bazán Lazcano, Henning Ludvigsen + 3 more
Publisher,Fantasy Flight Games
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I suspect my group had a slightly better experience than most with the scarlet keys, and i can see why it might be frustrating. But overall, we had a good time, but i suspect a fair bit of that was creating characters who were well suited to the campaign, which was very much a matter of luck. A very difficult box to review after one playthrough as so much is left unseen. Still, while it wasn't the heights of Carcosa I admire the ambition of the campaign. It would have been easy for them to do another linear 8 story campaign, but note, they tried something radically different. And that's good. We should encourage them to break the mold as it will keep the game fresher for longer. And there will always be a least favourite campaign when you rank them.
Forgot to add the Butler deck list: arkhamdb.com/deck/view/3383485
New to Arkham LCG myself. It's interesting hearing long term fans opinions on it. Many make it sound like it peaked early with Carcosa and gradually declined since
I definitely get that vibe from the wider community as well. I mean, Carcosa was lots of fun. But we also enjoyed the keys. I'm in a weird place where I played the original and dunwich campaigns on release, but only really got back into it properly this year. So a lot of this is all new to me and i'm loving it.
I would not say it's a linear decline. We all have our favorites, but even a bad set is still amazing.
Ranking Arkham campaigns is like ranking Beatles albums. They're all good but some are better than others
Innsmouth is my favorite campaign and my next favorite is Dunwich, so it’s definitely not linear. I look forward to each campaign as I’m preparing for it, so you can’t go wrong. Every campaign has its really cool aspects/moments.
100% disagree. I think the peak are some of the PNP fan made campaigns (Dark Matter). Then maybe Forgotten Age and Dream Eaters. Scarlet Keys was pretty epic for my 2p playthroughs of it. Although I do understand the "muh Carcosa" crowd which is yeah okay probably the 3rd best story in the game. But yeah I was much happier with Scarlet Keys over Edge of the Earth. Totally already preordered Hemlock.
We've taken the same progression as you so far (Core, Dunwich, Carcosa, Scarlet Keys) and were quite looking forward to the promise of globetrotting pick your own path adventure. However we were very underwealmed with the experience as a whole.
The first problem was that the path we chose to follow on the map gave us maybe 1 out of 5 locations that had an actual scenario, and the other 4 were just reading. Conceptually that's not a big problem, but it greatly increased the length of our game sessions and felt like we spent half our time reading. And the prose wasn't that well written, and certainly not written with the express purpose of reading aloud. With the shorter introductory passages in the previous scenarios I like to try and get into the spirit of it and make the reading a bit performative, but I found myself tripping over the awkward sentences in these long passages, and sharing the reading duties among the other players didn't help. So ultimately we found all the reading a bit of a chore and a time sink, and rather than add a sense of progression, it felt a bit more like a lot of "stuff is happening, but it's kind of the same stuff we've already seen happening, and now some people don't like us".
The time aspect was also a big issue. There's a huge map with a ton of locations to explore, but you don't have much time, and although we went to a lot of locations and read a bunch of text, we only played 4 or 5 scenarios before the finale, which just felt really short and anticlimactic. The other linear campaigns usually have 8 or 9 scenarios to play through, so that by the time you reach the finale it feels like you've been on more of a journey than this globetrotting speed run.
Which would have been able to redeem itself if the actual playable scenarios were all big set piece events that played differently and gave you a legitimately different experience, but the scenarios we played were all very samey. Move around a bit, search for the antagonists, find them, fight them. Rinse and repeat. Who knows, maybe the scenarios we didn't play were all radically different, but I'm skeptical. All in all it kind of felt like the actual scenarios were secondary to the plot devices in the prose - the very opposite of "Show, don't Tell".
And my final gripe is that I made a really fun character to play that had few opportunities to really shine in this campaign. I played Kymani Jones, a character built around evading enemies, and generating a lot of money and extra XP. But there was relatively little conventional fighting with all the aloof enemies for my evade tricks to be all that useful until the boss battles. And the extra XP obtained at the end of every scenario didn't add up to much due to having fewer scenarios in the campaign, and fewer games to actually get to experience all those upgraded cards.
So all in all the campaign felt both bloated with all the reading to wade through, but light on actual content. It's great that there is a chunk of content left to explore if we return to it for a second go, but we won't be doing it anytime soon.
Next campaign: Indiana Jones and The Forgotten Age
I think the trick in there is that its hard to design scenarios that work at 0xp and at 30xp. Which may be a core reason why the scenario design felt samey to you.
We're currently in Innsmouth!
We're just about to start The Forgotten Age, beginning with playing through the print & play updates for The Blob That Ate Everything Else. Violetta is taking the playable blob character forward into TFA. It's going to be interesting for sure!
We had The Blob expansion and all the parallel investigators and their mini scenarios printed at MPC. Not cheap, but very impressed with the beautiful quality of the cards. Would definitely use again, especially for creating custom promos and stuff like that.
@@whittaker007 Enjoy the Forgotten Age Scott. Innsmouth is going well so far.
@@whittaker007Love the idea of bringing Suzi into the Forgotten Age campaign. Amazing idea.
@@WayOfHaQodesh Suzi was great in that campaign, however we focussed too heavily on making sure we had good fighters when really needed to specialise elsewhere to do well. We got eliminated without even reaching the last 2 scenarios.
We’re starting again with a new team with more of a focus on evasion and healing!
I have corcosa, and am now selecting another out of skeys, fhv, innsmouth, tfa. Your series is perfect, please release fhv asap. 😂🎉
Ive been playing through Scarlet Keys again right now with two Parallel investigators and they are a blast. As for TSK, I think it was a brilliant experiment that didnt fully pan out. I like the freedom of choice, but i wish more locations were of consequence than just read this and maybe get something
Just wanted to say thank you again for all your content. Also, big up to you all for your hard stance, hold stance and great stance against all AI art in board games.
Cheers. I'm going to have two games come out in the next year and a bit, both with massive actual art efforts. And they are gonna look so much better and feel so much better to play than any AI frankenstein stuff.
Not watching the whole video because we haven't played it, but I just wanted to say thanks for introducing me to this game. My partner and I started with the core box and recently started playing the Dunwich Legacy with my brother, and it's a lot fun! That first Investigator expansion really opened up a lot, I feel, though Rogue and Mystic still seem a bit iffy to me. I'm playing Rex this time, my partner's Zoey and my brother (a guitarist) is of course playing Ashcan Pete. Excited for the coming game nights!
Excellent. Rogue starts off quite weak if you are getting the card packs in order. Skids with only the core is hard work. Rogue gets much better as the goes on. Mystic are a neat class, they can inherent flex and do clues and fighting through their spells and can manipulate the mythos deck and bag better than others, which can be very fun.
@@3MBG I tried playing Agnes with only the Revised Core set, but only being able to fight with Shrivelling was enough of a bother to switch to Roland after two scenarios. We got smashed in the third, of course, but I'll probably try again with the new cards next time.
Thank you for this great review with relatively no spoilers or very few. I'm not fully sold on scarlet keys but close, it's got me very intrigued...
You are a brave player - to have that glass of wine sitting just above your gaming surface!!! 😇😇
RDR has 2,681 orders to date - going to printer pretty soon I hear....
Ha, its actually worse than red wine. It's raspberry soda. I'm super relaxed about food and drink at the table, to the point that i have different coasters for each player colour. If you look carefully, you can see the drink is on the red coaster.
As for RDR, the solo mode took a lot of work but its come together well, and it looks like we are getting very close to the printers.
This campaign certainly focused less on gameplay than other campaigns. There's a ton of world building and intrigue that is supposed to immerse you into the story and the plights of you organization. The story content of this was excellent and I hope they continue to refine this in later campaigns.
I overall felt the campaign was great! I'm no old school RPer but I did enjoy the emersion. I also play primarily true solo which TBH was fine. I can see with some people that play in a group, to get together every week or so and spend half your session jumping through a book. For me, playing by myself at a kitchen table, that was just like sitting down to read a good book with a bonus game at the end. The only real problem with that is with most other campaigns I can rattle off 2 (or 3 if I don't care about story) scenarios in a session. This was a lot of decision making and reading so I usually only got 1 in.
A lot of flack this campaign got was from people who play in groups. I think (true) solo players were also taken aback by the pace but the text walls affected them less. I have done every campaign so far save for Dream Eaters (just not ready for a double player deck, dual campaign) and this overall design was VERY ambitious and pushed the limits of what they can do with the meta game and story telling in the new box format. The scenario designs were safe and not flashy which is fine for an overall campaign and design that tries to do a lot. And as mentioned, I also suspect that scaling the non-linear design into the scenarios was tricky (although done reasonably well here). This one gets a lot of hate from a vocal minority but certainly doesn't deserve all of it. It's not the strongest campaign but it's not THAT bad. I too wouldn't recommend it as an early or first campaign but it's great when you have a good sense of the others and what they were doing.
Cheers, and see that's a fascinating perspective as i tend to play a campaign in a group first, then it goes on my solo list of options (hence why ive run dunwich more times than all my other campaigns combined). I 2 hand though, single character i find really limits my character options.
Great video and very happy to hear you enjoyed it especially with its many opportunities for immersion. The long time lead designer for Arkham has moved onto other things, and so went all out in ambition and injecting aspects of their passion into the Scarlet Keys, most notably her writing. Its certainly hard to control the quality of that much narrative with so many pathways, but I'm very glad for it overall. Mechanically, concealed fives lots of options rather than just investigating, and it's opened up so much viability for different decks.
Loving long form … and the tie!
Great to see more Arkham content and the content is so good. Love the clothing for the review. The card/image pop ups are fantastic.
I think you covered the main talking points of the campaign really well.
My 2 cents:
I find the narrative too much and not high quality for the amount there is. I think they should have provided a 3-4 sentence summary box for all the large areas of text. It means little extra work. But allows players to skip text if that is not why they play the game.
Concealed I found interesting. It was an interesting mechanic and im glad it exists within a campaign.
Hollow I hated. The worst part of Arkham are effects that discard cards. Its no fun to play a game that discards your 5xp new card. It just takes away fun an options for the player. It also felt tacked on. It wasnt present enough and when i popped up i would think of yh there is some sort of hollow thing happening in the story.
I felt lost in the overall story of the campaign. Open world often doesnt tell a good story. Every scenario had to narratively be able to go before and after any other scenario. Meaning the story couldnt flow cleanly with the plot being unveiled more and more. For all the words i had to read i felt i knew less about what was going on than in any other campaign.
Overall probably a 4/10 campaign. Scenarios were fine but the narrative and open world design just makes it hard to get to the table. Every other campaign is easier for me to table and play and for me that really detracts from the campaign as a package
Hollow is my biggest gripe, its a funless mechanic
Will need to give this a play, thanks sir!
I had the most terrible time with this campaign. Not fun at all, and so confusing. High hopes for hemlock. Still I appreciate the video and love All that you do
I think we were really lucky with our builds because they suit the missions. And we used an app to track all the details for the campaign, which made things like the finale and who held each key much easier to track
Interesting. A nuanced review, much different from the majority of reviews on TSK. I do think playing the campaign once vs three or four times matters. I find myself somewhere in between trashing the campaign and your take. I agree 100% that Fortune and Folly in particular and side scenarios in general are well suited for TSK. I share many of the standard criticisms of this campaign and it is my least favorite. I don't despise it though. As I mentioned in a reply below, the criticisms I and others have would probably be considerably less boisterous if the scenarios were more enjoyable. Having played the campaign five times, there is not a single top tier scenario for me and some are not good at all--especially the finale. Meanwhile, there are scenarios in other campaigns I've played nearly half a dozen times and am still thrilled to play again and again. This is why FHV, for all of its drawbacks, made a much more positive impression. The Longest Night and The Lost Sister are amazing scenarios. Additionally, FHV does a wonderful job of communicating the campaign's story through actual gameplay, something TSK failed miserably.
Those are my thoughts. Thank you for the review. You must be doing something right, because I've subscribed! Cheers!!
Cheers. I think we went into SK thinking it was going be terrible based on the reviews, and we lucked into a team that worked very well with conceal as well, with a ton of testless effects. So perhaps we were inoculated against some of the campaigns worst bits. And the reading aloud bit is fine, im me, Jared is a teacher and Fraser was on a D&D live stream show. We're all fine with the talking.
But as time goes on, the big point you raise sticks. While some of the scenarios are pretty good, none of them are amazing. There isn't a in too deep or pallid mask in here. Which makes the work to get to each scenario on a replay, less appealing.
That all said, we legitimately enjoyed that first play a lot. And its one of my favourite blind playthroughs, a lot more fun than FHV was, because we got so badly smashed in longest night and the finale there.
@@3MBG I'm glad your group enjoyed the blind playthrough of TSK! Yeah, the blind FHV run can be soul crushing in The Longest Night. As you mention repeatedly, any blind playthrough is determined to a large degree by which investigator team and decks you bring--assuming you go into the campaign truly blind of course. Carcosa will likely neither be surpassed nor matched for me because of its scenario gameplay and storytelling. When Echoes of the Past is generally viewed as the weakest scenario, combined with the sheer top-tier level design of a typical Carcosa scenario, it's easy to understand why Carcosa is so beloved. Always nice discussing varying opinions about this game we love!! I'm currently playing through the custom campaign Dark Matter two-handed solo. Another fantastic Arkham blind playthrough experience!
We are doing Circle undone atm, then dreameaters, then I printed out Cyclopean Foundations
i love the scarlet keys just hated a little bit the last scenario because of the setup but overall i love it ❤❤❤
Where did you get the illustrations for each scenario?
I think from the original ffg promo materials
I tend to think that the negative vibes that some of the campaigns get is that they have more complicated problems to juggle, and as you have the re-released format, the needle Scarlet keys had to thread was both accommodating new players that came in at Revised Core / EotE, and the existing playerbase that just always want more stuff. So you got some interesting scenarios and mechanics with the Shadows / Decoy stuff which was always interesting to see how each scenario sort of used that stuff a bit differently. If you played through some of the PNP stuff like Call of the Plaguebearer, then having some different ways to interact with locations / in play / out of play is not unfamiliar. But the risk is you run outside of the average players game knowledge and then you get some very average decks piloted by average players running foul of the shadows / expose interactions and getting annoyed at the game. Couple that with the break from a linear story to having to read the story and make decisions about where to go while being under time pressure (Calendar) probably threw some people for a loop. I thought all of it was done incredibly well. But I have totally seen people not read the intro file stuff and ignore the clear foreshadowing of certain things to consider in where you can go / what you should consider prioritising and just end up aimlessly wandering and getting annoyed at the game. i.e. the game can collapse due to the open world and players refusing to play with what they are given.
Interesting insight. I've played the first half of plaguebearer on TTS and go monstered by it, lol.
And yeah, i agree that sometimes a sandbox to play in for some is an ocean to drown in for others.
Interesting. While I do think some of the negativity for TSK is over the top, most players seem fine playing with what they are given. In fact, TSK is one of the easier campaigns in the series; while some of the rules and structure are complex, less advanced players are not and should not be put off by the campaign. There are so many hours in my day and the single best thing about playing Arkham for me is actually playing scenarios. I don't want to have to play a campaign three to five times to play every scenario, or to play more than six of the ten in a given playthrough. In fairness, some of my criticisms and those of others would probably be much less boisterous if the scenarios were better. There is not a single top tier scenario in this campaign, most are not memorable, and some are really, really bad. The finale is hands down the worst finale of any campaign. Terribly bad.
The Red Gloved Man!
Thanks!
Love the Arkham content! I wish (for both our sakes, I’m sure) you could play this game even more so I could hear you give your thoughts on the campaigns sooner. Haha.
Halfway through innsmouth!
@@3MBG Ooh, that’s exciting to hear. Have a look at the Unofficial Return To… expansion for it, if you all haven’t seen it already. Could help shake up the formula for a later playthrough of it. Cheers!
I probably wont touch that until ive done the campaign multiple times. I still havent used return to dunwich and ive done that one 6 times now
@@3MBG Getting some replay value outta that campaign! Return to Dunwich is a good one. Lots of little QoL bug fixes that you’ll appreciate all the more for how many times you’ve completed it already. Cheers!
It's funny how people think Seeker is the most powerful class in Arkham and then hate the conceal mechanic. It's like, the second seekers are challenged into doing something more demanding than just the thing that wins the game, they show how utterly weak they are. I mean, there's a reason they're the worst class for true solo. And yet some people get so carried away by the awesome feeling of getting all the clues and moving along the act, that they actually think they're an overpowered class.
The Red Coterie seems to be pretty inspired by the marvel movie avengers
Very good video.
Cheers Robert