Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 23

from Lovecratian monsters, to be sure). During Phase III, she may draw one of
seven cards geared toward Rivertown, each with a diferent event. Wilson writes
mini-narratives into the Encounter Cards drawn at each location. For example,
one card reveals that at the Graveyard, “You ind a man painting a picture of
one of the horrible gargoyles lining the walls of the graveyard. Seeing you, he
introduces himself as Richard Upton Pickman , a painter visiting from Boston.”
hat player then has a choice (another if/then algorithm): “If you spend monster
trophies [monsters that you have defeated] that have a total of 5 toughness,
[then] Pickman takes a liking to you. Take his Ally card [he becomes an ally of
yours]. If it is not available, [then] he teaches you an incantation instead. Draw 1
spell.” One must have an immense amount of information in order to determine
the efect of this card, and any future events will depend on that uncertainty
throughout the game. Another card for the Graveyard reads: “Entering a stone
crypt, you are surprised to ind a beautiful fresco and some inspirational words
upon the wall. here is an almost magical peace within the chamber” and you
gain two sanity points for entering. Another card reads “A monster appears!”
and you must then evade or ight. he point here is not that the Graveyard or any
other location allows you to participate in the game in these various ways, but
rather that building these types of diferent mini-narratives into the game allows
for more unstructure to enter the game. Understanding the “narrative” of any one
location requires a nonlinear reading of the cards, a nonlinear play of the game.
Regarding one location in the game where a character named Harney Jones
might or might not help out the player, Wilson reveals that “Due to the random
nature of the location decks, it's possible for [Harney] … to die immediately the
irst time a player enters that location. However, with repeated plays, the players
learn and remember the story as [Wilson] intended it.” 46 Only with repeated play
and engaged memory can the player understand this embedded narrative. he
story told within each of these locations allows the play to happen while the plot
engages in a nonlinear structure. Lovecrat's themes of timeless uncertainty and
expansion here ind root in the nonlinear expansion of a micronarrative within
the larger game structure. 47 Drawing cards at random increases the unstructure
of the game play.
As Costikyan reminds us, stories are linear while games are nonlinear. 48
Arkham Horror , though, reveals not only that linearity is not the key to
understanding Lovecrat's universe but also that the whole idea of linearity as a
structure is antithetical to the underlying story. he encounters may reveal part
of a story or may reveal no story at all. But because that game is structured so as