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Arkham Horror Third Edition Dead of Night is the first expansion to the base game. It combines Lovecraft’s stories and lore, elements of the second edition of the board game with the best of the LCG card game to build engaging stories and challenging scenarios, keeping players on their toes.
It offers the same thrilling cooperative gameplay as the base game, but with fresh content and variation, improving replayability and bringing more of what made the base game successful.
Building from the base game, one to six players take on the role of investigators working together to explore the recent upsurge in violent crime and horrors of Arkham best left unseen in the light of day.
More Of What Works
The simplest way of describing this Dead of Night expansion is that it’s more content for the same base game. It has new ally, item, spell, special, encounter, anomaly, event, archive, and headline cards, which are all compatible with the base game scenarios, meaning not only does it work for the 2 new scenarios it adds, but it also adds more replayability to the original base game scenarios themselves. Alongside the new scenarios are a bunch of new monster cards too; these don’t change the combat formula drastically, but can be refreshing to face some different effects and stops combat from getting stale. As before, these scenarios aren’t easy, but the inclusion of 4 new characters from previous games in combination with the base game characters and everyone’s ability to be customized to change up playstyles yield dynamic strategies to tackle the onslaught, really providing a lot of replayability.
This expansion also doubles the number of encounter cards from the base game, all of which are compatible with the original scenarios. Not only does this add some interesting variation to the stories and lore as scenarios develop, but it's also something that adds more variability & replayability to the original game. All in all, you may be tempted to consider what this expansion brings in terms of its scenarios, but it’s more promising to consider how the contents affect the base game, as that’s where you’ll find the most value.
What’s New
Most of what’s new in this expansion is more content, with only a wee bit more added as new from a mechanical perspective. The only true one of these is a new condition card, wanted. I won’t go into spoilers for it, but it’s similar to Dark Pacts in the base game but doesn’t have such a drastic, overall negative impact as Dark Pact does (if you know, you know). This is nice for giving you some kind of condition and influencing play, but not feeling like your game goes off a cliff if you roll poorly, like can happen before.
The second new thing is more of a quality of life improvement. Similar to the encounter card stand-holder thing that comes in the base game, this one comes with an equivalent for monster cards. This is helpful as it’s a deck that constantly needs to be picked up and used (if you draw as unfortunately as we do), and so it’s nice to have a way of doing this more easily. It doesn’t change how the game is played but just makes it a little easier and faster. In a game that can sometimes take 3+ hours to play, with many little things and rule checks, etc., every little bit helps!
Downsides
The publisher, Fantasy Flight Games, is known for bringing out certain types of expansions. One of these is the more-of-the-same-type expansion, which this definitely falls into. Thankfully, this can really help games early in their lifecycle. If this is what you’re looking for then this is great (it’s definitely what I was looking for), but if you want expansions to change things up via new mechanics etc. then this isn’t the top choice. But to be fair, if you like a game enough to look into getting expansions for it, then you probably like it enough to want more of it.
There’s also not a lot of content compared to the other expansions. This is thankfully represented with a lower price point, and of course, has some unique elements which sets it apart, but if you were only going to pick one expansion and wanted to add the most content, Under Dark Waves would be the top choice. Still, if you’re looking for expansions and not restricted to only one, it’s a solid choice.
Overall, there’s more content added to a good game, but none of it will drastically change your gameplay or strategy.
Final Thoughts
More in line with the theme of quality of life improvements, the content in this expansion can easily fit inside the base game’s box, which can’t be said for some of the grander expansions - helpful if space is an issue, transport, or keeping everything together.
If you’re someone who wants to change up how Arkham Horror 3rd Edition gameplay feels, Dead of Night might not be for you. If you enjoy the base game and just want some more content to get immersed in, then this is a good choice that I can recommend.
