[The posts for this month are reposts from the site www.honotogroabemo.org, on which a host of hirsute individuals including yours truly would grow beards to raise money for breast cancer research. The site is defunct, but I thought I’d resurrect the game-related posts. This was originally posted on 2011-11-11.]

Tonight my wife Mur hit a deer with her car. As you can see, she is fine. The car and the deer are not. It’s not often that I get to play the role of hero, but bravely did Car Man set out on his quest to pick her up and drive her home.

The game for Day Ten, as I mentioned, could be any number of games, but the one I was thinking of was Arkham Horror. Arkham Horror itself is based on another vintage game, the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, designed by Sandy Peterson and published by Chaosium, Inc. in 1981. Call of Cthulhu’s most notable feature is that many, if not all, of the player characters in a role-playing session will end up either killed in horrible ways, or driven insane. No going “unconscious” in this game. But I digress.

Arkham Horror was originally designed by Richard Launius and presented to Chaosium as Call of Cthulhu: The Board Game. The 1987 version was much simpler than the one we see today, with fixed stats on the characters (other than Sanity and Strength, now Stamina), a simpler board, and a more direct path to closing gates. Kevin Wilson of Fantasy Flight Games did a top-to-bottom revision of the game and it was re-released in 2005. In typical Fantasy Flight style, countless expansions followed.

As someone who has played the 2005 Arkham Horror a fair amount and quite frankly has tired of its drawn-out play and complex set-up, the relative simplicity of the 1987 version sounds rather attractive. I really must try it some time.