Click to view our Accessibility Statement or contact us with accessibility-related questions
Drop Refurbished
Like-new products you can trustDrop Rewards
Get $5 for every 500 points you earn! Learn more
Drop Keyboard Club
Become a member and expand your keycap collectionCollaborate With Us
For Brands & DesignersFollow Drop
Game Objective: The biggest difference is the players' objectives throughout the game. In Arkham Horror, the objective is always the same: 1. Seal the gates until you get enough seals to win, 2. Defeat enough monsters to keep doom/terror levels low, 3. if all else fails, try to defeat the Ancient One when he awakens. Eldritch Horror is quite different. Instead of Sealing the Ancient One away by closing gates, your team is trying to solve a certain number of Mysteries. Each Ancient One has their own deck of mystery cards, which define the current game objective. If the players can solve 3 (or 4) mysteries before the Ancient One awakens, then you win. Otherwise, like Arkham, you must all make a last ditch effort to defeat the Ancient One when he awakens. Personally, I found that games of Arkham can often feel repetitive. Typically, the players either get ahead quickly and cruise to victory, or they get bogged down by monsters and gate surges and have no hope to recover. Eldritch neatly solves all of those problems by having objectives that shifted throughout the game. Sometimes you need to beat up monsters or close gates, other times you need to collect Clues, Spells, or find a particular Artifact. Also, the objectives are different each game (since you do a random 3 mysteries out of the stack).
Game play itself is very similiar. On each turn everyone takes an Action Phase (Movement Phase in AH) in turn order, followed by an Encounter Phase, and finally a shared Mythos phase.
There are a myriad of smaller changes which help the games feel unique from each other • Combat happens in Movement Phase for AH, but Encounter Phase for EH. • The Doom track starts at 0 going up in AH, but high and counts down to 0 in EH. • AH has a Terror track which increases if you have too many monsters out, EH has an Omen track instead which advances Doom based on the open gates. • Instead of AH's investigator focus that can be changed once a turn, EH investigators can earn permanent stat improvements. • Travelling through gates in AH is a multi-turn process, but in EH it is a single encounter • Locations in AH can be sealed to prevent future gates from opening at that location, this concept doesn't exist in EH. (But unlike AH, you cannot lose by simply having too many gates open either).
I still play both games reasonably often (planning to play Arkham this weekend, actually). However, I do find that I enjoy Eldritch more, and that is the one I refer to new players more often. Eldritch isn't necessarily less complicated, but the rules seem a bit more streamlined and easier for new players to grasp.