Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 20

of Lovecrat's universe. Speciically, I want to look at how the rules governing
turn-taking and the functionality of each phase of the turn help to deine the
unstructure of Lovecrat. Like many paratextual board games, including Game
of hrones: he Card Game , as I discuss in Chapter 7, Arkham Horror 's game
play is dominated by a series of turns and phases. Each turn is divided into ive
phases, and each phase sees each player performing various actions. As the rule
book states, “during each phase, every player, starting with the irst player and
continuing clockwise, performs the actions that take place during that phase.” 44
he next phase continues in the same manner, and so on. hus, for players of
Arkham Horror , a “turn” is quite diferent from what one might expect in a less
complex game like Monopoly. A single turn may take upward of an hour to
complete. Many of the other paratextual games I discuss throughout the topic
have similar structures, although most are not as laborious as this. hroughout
the turn, the unpredictability and random nature of elements within each of the
phases present carefully crated moments of mythos and story. Below, I outline
the phases (and the actions that occur in each one) in order to demonstrate
how the complexity of the structured process of play deepens the underlying
unstructure of the game. By increasing the chaotic randomness of the play in
a measured way, each turn acts like a computerized algorithm. In fact, many of
the actions can be phrased as if/then logical statements (I have added the if s and
then s to the following outline, and the parenthetical statements relect assumed
instructions).

I. Phase I: Upkeep

a. ( If Cards exhausted, then ) Refresh Exhausted Cards
b. ( If character has Upkeep Action, then ) Perform Upkeep Actions
c. ( If player wishes, then ) Adjust Skills

Phase II: Movement
a. ( If character is in Arkham, then ) Arkham Movement
i. ( If leaving area with Monster, then ) Evade (or Fight) Monsters
ii. ( If character ends movement on Clue, then ) Pick Up Clues
b. (If character is in Other World, then ) Other World Movement
c.

II.

( If character is Delayed, then ) Delay Investigator

III. ( If character is in Arkham, then ) Phase III: Arkham Encounters
a. ( If character is not on Gate, then ) No Gate Encounters and player picks

Encounter Card