"Kingsport Horror" Is About To Descend!

One of my favourite discoveries of 2007 was the stupendous Fantasy Flight board game Arkham Horror, so you can imagine my joy at discovering that the next expansion for it, Kingsport Horror, is due in February.

Since that's next month, previews have begun in the form of two volumes of an "Investigator's Guide," here and here.

The first, a preview from a while back, reveals that the expansion will be in the vein of the Dunwich Horror expansion, having its own board along with new monsters and cards, 8 investigators, 4 new Ancient Ones, 2 Heralds and 3 Guardians (like Heralds but helpful). Also, all locations in Kingsport will be stable, and some new investigators are hinted at like a Bounty Hunter and another who's so good that even the fact that he's permanently Cursed doesn't make him undesirable. It also states that the new Ancient Ones reach Dunwich Horror-levels of difficulty, like Atlach-Nacha who makes every gate opening into a monster surge. Eep.

The new preview focuses on the addition of optional "epic battles" with the Ancient Ones, in which there's an sixteen-card Epic Battle deck that is drawn from at the beginning of every round adding bonuses, penalties or other special events—the first eight cards are green, which are kinder than the next eight cards which are the sometimes horribly fatal red cards, which together add some much-needed randomness and extra difficulty to the usually predictable Ancient One battles. Along with these are Sinister Plot decks that are personal to each Ancient One—yes, that means that included with Kingsport Horror are an additional sixteen decks of cards, one for each Ancient One.

You know, because defeating inconceivable horrors from beyond time and space used to be so easy.