Long time no blog. I've been busy, but also a bit lazy. I finally overcame that laziness, though, and have played another random game from my collection for your edification. This time, the random selection isn't even a complete game. The Lurker at the Threshold is an expansion set for the game Arkham Horror. This is a "small box" expansion, so there is no new map, or new monsters, or new heroes. The expansion does come with some new item and spell cards, as well as new mythos and encounter cards, as well. But the big addition with this expansion is in the area of pacts and relationships.
The theme to this expansion is providing aid to others. Many of the items and spells in this expansion allow players to aid other players in various ways, and the relationship cards allow for permanent benefits between two different characters. All of this helps the players to win the game. Not that the expansion is making things easy for you, of course, as the expansion also introduces new gate tokens which generally have nasty surprises and can actively harm you, as opposed to the dimensional gates in the original game which are just kind of there on the board. That is decidedly unfun. Also, the pact cards go along with the 'Lurker at the Threshold' herald card, and adds a whole new dimension to the game. Basically, there is an evil creature who is perfectly happy to aid the players as they try to accomplish tasks in the... for a price, to be named later. And some of those prices can be very high, indeed.
All told, I like this expansion. I like how many of the new cards relate to helping other players, which means that this expansion gets better with more players. If only only playing with two or three people, I'm not sure that this expansion provides much to the game, but with four or more players I can see how it could really increase the interaction among players, which is always a good thing in a cooperative game like this. So, a solid expansion that makes the game harder but adds to player interactivity in a good way. That's a win in my book.
