Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 6

Lovecrat's universe. In this chapter, I will be focusing on Arkham Horror,
because of its popularity and its complexity. Arkham Horror 's connection to
Lovecrat is overt, and is one of the most popular complex board games on
the market. Its original edition, designed by Richard Launius and published by
Chaosium, sold out in 1987. A newer edition, designed by Kevin Wilson and
published by Fantasy Flight Games, also sold out in its initial run, with over
140,000 units purchased. 9 Other board games, like Eldritch Horror and Elder
Sign , also connect to Lovecrat's work, especially in the genre thematic and the
monsters that populate the games. I focus on Arkham Horror because it precedes
the others: Eldritch Horror is itself based on Arkham Horror (the box advertising,
“Inspired by Arkham Horror ”) and Elder Sign makes use of the same characters
and Ancient Ones as does Arkham Horror. Importantly, both Elder Sign and
Eldritch Horror , like Arkham Horror , are complex games with long rule topics
and multiple rule guides: they use their rules to create unstructure within the
game. Arkham Horror is billed on its box cover as being “the classic game of
Lovecratian horror,” and, indeed, many of the places, characters, and enemies
in the game draw their names and characteristics from the writing of Lovecrat.
Game designer Kevin Wilson notes that he used the Lovecratian role-playing
game Call of Cthulhu as a basis for some of his revisions to the game, and the
game box itself calls Arkham Horror “A Call of Cthulhu Boardgame.” 10
One of the consequences of rule-heavy games is a reliance on story and
structure. For instance, in Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings game, which I
explore in the next chapter, certain events must happen at certain times within
the game. Players can make choices about how to prepare for these events,
but this structure must exist. When players have the opportunity to make
more independent decisions, the game becomes less story oriented and more
ludic. At the same time, paratextual board games exist in a system of already
established rules: the cult universe in which they reside has its own system
for how the world works. he rules of Arkham Horror sometimes mirror
Lovecrat's world, but also difer in crucial ways. What happens when a cult
universe reveals an absence of rules? For Lovecrat, horror arrives from the
unknowable—not the foreign made manifest necessarily, but the presence
of things outside the realm of our own human understanding. his mythos
establishes a nonlinear interpretation of narrative, a characteristic Arkham
Horror attempts to emulate.
At irst glance, the Lovecratian mythos would seem antithetical to rules-
based games as its peculiar aspect lies in its indeinability: like Cthulhu itself