Arkham Horror LCG Complete Setup and Start Playing Guide: Build a Legal Deck, Set the Table, and Survive Round One

You need one coherent Core Set, its campaign guide or Learn to Play book, the chaos tokens and bag, the Night of the Zealot scenario cards, two legal investigator decks at most, and enough table space to keep player areas separate from the scenario. The Revised Core Set contains everything needed for one to four players on the Chapter One rules path. If you already own it, do not buy another box to make setup easier. Sort it.

For the cleanest first teach, choose Roland Banks and Wendy Adams, or Roland and Daisy if the second player prefers a pure clue role. Roland handles enemies and collects clues as a reward for defeating them. Wendy survives bad tests and evades trouble. Daisy investigates efficiently. Use Easy. Easy is not an apology; the chaos bag still creates tension, and The Devourer Below is intentionally severe.

True solo works, but one investigator must cover clues, enemies, movement, economy, and survival alone. Two investigators make the game’s teamwork visible and reduce the chance that one unlucky weakness defines the lesson. One person can pilot both decks if playing alone.

Separate cards by the symbol and information they carry. Investigator cards and mini cards stay together. Player cards sort by class color and level pips. Basic weaknesses form their own facedown pool. Scenario cards sort by encounter-set icon, not by the artwork or title you remember. The Gathering uses specific encounter sets named on its setup card; the rest remain in the box.

Keep the act deck, agenda deck, locations, encounter deck, and scenario reference card distinct. The act says what investigators are trying to accomplish. The agenda is the scenario’s clock and response. Locations form the map. The encounter deck produces Mythos problems. The scenario reference card sets chaos-token effects and difficulty.

Use bowls or shallow trays for resources, clues/doom, damage, and horror. The same clue/doom token means different things depending on where it sits. A stable tray prevents the most expensive beginner mistake in the game: moving a token without remembering which system it belonged to.

Read the investigator’s front, then the deckbuilding requirements on the back. The front tells you health, sanity, stats, ability, and elder-sign effect. The back tells you which classes and levels are legal, the exact chosen deck size, required signature cards, and any special restrictions. That back is the law even when a deck list online looks persuasive.

Name one primary job before selecting a card: find clues, manage enemies, or flex between both. Then name one emergency contribution. A clue specialist can carry one escape or enemy answer. A fighter can carry one clue event or commit icons to a teammate. A flex investigator accepts that reliability matters more than theoretical coverage.

For a first group, one enemy lead and one clue lead are clearer than two clever generalists. Roles are promises, not cages. Any investigator can take a needed test, move first, commit a card, or rescue a bad round. The role simply tells the group which deck is designed to spend the fewest actions on that job.

First, copy the exact deckbuilding options from the investigator back. Most Revised Core investigators ask you to choose thirty legal cards, then add their required signature cards, required weakness, and one random basic weakness as instructed. Required cards and weaknesses generally sit outside the printed number of chosen slots; follow the exact wording when an investigator creates an exception. Unless a card says otherwise, a deck may contain no more than two copies of a card by title.

For the first scenario, use the official starter list. It removes legality questions and gives each class a functional sample. After that, rebuild around a role. A useful thirty-card target is roughly ten to twelve assets, eight to ten events, and eight to ten skills. That is a recipe, not a rule. The real test is whether the deck can establish one important tool without spending the whole opening hand and whether its remaining cards still help when committed to tests.

Use two copies of the cards you want to see early. Keep six to ten cards at zero or one resource so a bad opening hand can still act. Limit expensive assets that occupy the same slot. A second hand-slot weapon may be useful; five hand-slot assets create a traffic jam. Skills are not filler. They boost the exact test that matters and many replace themselves by drawing a card.

Open the Night of the Zealot campaign guide and read the campaign introduction. Record investigator names and the difficulty in the campaign log. Build the chaos bag with the exact tokens listed for Easy. Then read The Gathering setup instructions line by line. Gather only the encounter sets named there. Set the Study aside or put it into play exactly as instructed, assemble the agenda and act decks in numerical order with card 1a on top, and create the encounter deck from the cards the setup text names.

Choose a lead investigator. This player resolves “the lead investigator decides” moments; it is not a permanent team captain. Put each investigator’s mini card at the starting location. Place clues, doom, and set-aside cards only where setup instructs. Do not shuffle act, agenda, or location cards into the encounter deck.

When later scenarios show a location diagram, match adjacency exactly. Symbols beside location titles determine connections after a location is revealed. Physical closeness on the table does not create a path. Photograph unusual maps before teardown so the next teach has visual memory without relying on rules memory.

Use the campaign guide’s difficulty row to build the chaos bag. The skull, cultist, tablet, elder thing, auto-fail, and elder-sign tokens do not have fixed global values. Their meaning comes from the active scenario reference card or investigator. Put that reference card beside the act and agenda where everyone can read it.

Each investigator begins with five resources and draws five cards. If a weakness enters the opening hand, set it aside, draw a replacement, and shuffle the weakness back into the deck after the opening hand is complete. Then each player may mulligan any number of non-weakness cards at once: set them aside, draw the same number, and shuffle the set-aside cards back.

Mulligan for one affordable asset that performs your primary job, plus enough economy or icons to use it. Roland wants a weapon. Daisy wants a clue tool or efficient tome plan. Wendy wants a useful low-cost engine and cards she can afford to discard to her ability. Do not keep three expensive assets because each is powerful in isolation.

Put locations in the center. Place the act and agenda together above them, with the scenario reference card visible. Put the encounter deck and encounter discard near the agenda. Each player keeps an investigator card, deck, discard, resources, health/sanity tokens, and play area on their side. Enemies at a location sit near that location; enemies engaged with an investigator move into that investigator’s threat area.

Cards in your play area are not automatically at your location, and cards in your threat area are not ordinary assets. Exhausted cards turn ninety degrees. Ready cards stand upright. Keep damage on health, horror on sanity, clues on investigator cards, and doom on the exact card that carries it.

Leave the campaign log and scenario book off the active play surface once setup is complete. They should be reachable, not vulnerable to drinks. The table should show the current state without needing to remember which tray, book, or bag contains a live rule.

A normal round has Mythos, Investigation, Enemy, and Upkeep phases. Skip the Mythos phase in the first round. During Investigation, investigators take turns in any order, and each takes three actions. An action can draw, gain a resource, play a card, activate an action ability, move, investigate, fight, evade, or perform a scenario action. The group can change player order every round.

The first turn should establish one necessary tool and make real progress. Play a weapon or clue tool if the deck needs it. Move or investigate toward the act. End in a position where the enemy specialist can protect the clue specialist. Three setup actions are sometimes correct; installing every attractive asset while the agenda advances is not.

In the Enemy phase, Hunter enemies move, unengaged ready enemies engage investigators at their location, and engaged ready enemies attack. In Upkeep, ready exhausted cards, draw one card, gain one resource, and check the eight-card hand limit. Upkeep does not refill a hand to five.

Choose the test, determine the tested skill, commit eligible cards with matching icons, reveal one chaos token, apply its modifier, and compare the final value with the difficulty. Skill values cannot fall below zero. The investigator performing the test may commit eligible cards from hand; each other investigator at the same location may commit at most one card unless an effect changes the rule. Committed cards are discarded after the test unless they say otherwise.

Cards with a lightning-bolt free-trigger ability do not cost an action. Reaction abilities wait for their trigger. An action arrow costs one action each time it is used. Read “at your location,” “your location,” and “an investigator at your location” literally; Arkham’s teamwork is spatial.

A ready enemy engaged with you makes an attack of opportunity when you spend an action on something other than fight, evade, parley, or resign. The enemy exhausts only after its normal Enemy-phase attack, not after an attack of opportunity. If a card’s play action provokes, the attack occurs before the card resolves, which can matter if damage or horror defeats the investigator.

During the Mythos phase, place one doom on the current agenda, then check whether the total doom in play meets or exceeds its threshold. Doom on enemies, locations, assets, and the agenda all counts unless a card says otherwise. Do not check continuously after every doom token appears. Check when the rules or a card explicitly instructs you to check.

When the agenda advances, resolve its reverse side and remove all doom in play unless the advancing instructions say otherwise. A common beginner error leaves doom on cultists after the agenda advances, causing the next agenda to collapse early. Another common error advances immediately when an encounter places doom during encounter resolution. The phase sequence is the cure.

The act advances differently. Investigators usually spend the required clues as a group while at the proper location or timing window. Read the act text. Some acts advance automatically; some require a free-trigger ability; some care who spends the clues.

Read the resolution that matches the game state. Arkham campaigns continue after many losses. Do not replay automatically because the ending was ugly. Record every named instruction in the campaign log: experience, trauma, story choices, earned assets, chaos-bag changes, and defeated or surviving characters. Each investigator earns experience from victory-point cards in the victory display plus any resolution award.

Spend experience by replacing level-zero cards with legal upgrades or buying legal new cards. Keep the deck at its required chosen size unless an effect changes it. Upgrade the failure you observed: more reliable weapons when enemies consumed the round, clue compression when locations stalled, economy when assets stayed trapped in hand, or movement when actions vanished into travel.

Return every scenario encounter set to its labeled home. Keep investigator decks assembled with their trauma and experience state. Photograph unusual card additions. Write the next scenario name and date. A campaign is most likely to survive when teardown produces the next setup rather than a single mystery stack.

Do not draw an encounter in round one. Skip the first Mythos phase. Do not check doom continuously. Check during the specified Mythos step or when instructed. Do not keep doom after the agenda advances. Remove it from play unless told otherwise. Do not refill the hand to five. Upkeep draws one and gains one resource.

Do not treat failure as campaign failure. Resigning can preserve investigators, earned experience, and the story. Do not over-install. The agenda punishes action-neutral beauty. Do not build from a public deck without checking the investigator back and owned-card list. A popular deck can be illegal for your collection or incomprehensible to a first player.

Finally, do not interpret Night of the Zealot’s finale as the difficulty profile of every campaign. The Core campaign is compact, uneven, and intentionally sharp. If the rules loop, table talk, and consequence system worked for your group, the next step is the Revised Core buying path, not a verdict based only on whether Arkham survived the night.