The Trip to Arkham Nights – Day Two: The Horror Begins

Oct 22, 2010

Today began with a great free breakfast at the hotel, hot items and everything, which was nice. We headed to Mall of America and went straight for the Nickelodeon Amusement park in the center of the mall. It was expensive! $35 each for a special all day wristband and admission to the underwater adventure aquarium, plus tax. Here is a hint. If you are a chaperon to a little one, you get to ride the kiddie rides for free, no wristband needed. I wish I had known that beforehand. I must admit however that some of the rides were a lot of fun, more than I would expect from an indoor amusement park. We ate lunch at the mall food court, which was packed, and more rides after lunch. By 3:00 we were really tired, so headed back to the hotel for a nap.

We left for the FFG Event center at around 6:00. My wife and the baby stayed back in the room to relax, so me and the teens were on our own. It took no time to get signed in, which was nice. The event center is fairly large, with the FFG store right there and all of their games for sale (at full retail price of course) They have all the Arkham painted miniatures for sale, but I didn’t get any.

I was disappointed with the swag bag. They give you this gigantic bag with like only a couple of things in it. There is a nice booklet with info in it on the games, plus the first chapter from the newly announced line of fiction books set in the Arkham Horror universe and to be published by FFG. It is called “Ghouls of the Miskatonic” and will be book one of the Dark Waters trilogy by Graham McNeill. I’ll read it tonight and let you know what I think so far.

There were 2 new Ancient One cards included, A new Cthulhu card and Daoloth “The Render of Veils”. Those are cool, plus a bag with an elder sign on it for use as a monster bag. 3 cards that are for Call of Cthulhu I assume, but they have no writing on them so I am not sure what they are for. A 5″ x 7″ Cthulhu art print which is nice, but I wish it was bigger, and that was it. They could have thrown in a figure or two, or a set of Arkham Horror dice, or an expansion pack for CoC LCG, something else. I didn’t feel that I got my $25.oo per person worth in the bag. I also thought that the name badge was going to be an Ally card that I could use with my Arkham Horror game that had my name on it. At least, that was the impression I had. I thought “Wow, I will have cards with all our names on them to use as Allies in Arkham Horror, Cool!” Instead it was just a piece of paper wih my name on it (misspelled) that was in the shape of a card with some Ally artwork. Not to be used in any real game. We’ll see how the rest of the weekend goes.

You needed to sign up for each event for the weekend on these sheets lying on a table behind the check-in desk. Most of the Friday stuff was full, so I signed us all up for a couple of things on Saturday. Tomorrow at 10:00 am we’ll all be learning how to play Call of Cthulhu the LCG.

I should point out that the schedule wasn’t included in our bag, they had a couple printed out and I was able to get one, but not the descriptions of the events. This was available online, but I never printed it out for 2 reasons. 1) the background was black with white text, that is just too much darn ink; and 2) I figured they would have them available there. Well I was wrong. So we’re signed up for a session of “Two Hours to Save the World” tomorrow.

I took the kids to the designer seminar for Arkham Horror. Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson were there, plus someone else who never introduced himself. They talked and answered questions for about 45 minutes. I would guess there were between 100-150 people present. It was pretty cool! After that they announced the new Cthulhu Fiction books I mentioned earlier, and drew names for people to be able to play the new “Mansions of Madness” game. We also had a chance to win a play of Arkham Horror with either Richard or Kevin which would have been nice. Unfortunately we did not win anything.

So we decided to get the heck out of there. We looked at the games to maybe pick something up to play back at the room, but geeze it was frigging expensive. They could have at least included a 20% off coupon in our bag but no. So we headed to Walmart, picked up some hot dogs and mac ‘n cheese to make for dinner, and bought a copy of “Apples to Apples to go”, which we will be playing shortly.

We’ll be up early and at the center tomorrow morning. Stay Tuned….