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Arkham Horror: Final Hour. The world is ending in an hour. What are you going to do about it?
Well, In Arkham Horror: Final Hour you will be working together, frantically gathering clues and defeating monsters to figure out how to stop a ritual to summon a horrifying demon. The game is produced by Fantasy Flight Games and is based heavily on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Aim Of The Game
The aim of the game is to prevent the ritual summoning of a Great Old One. To do this, you successfully work out which two of a possible five ritual symbols are correct, with two of the same symbol being a possible solution. Players must investigate the various locations to uncover ritual symbols. This will help them deduce the answer by process of elimination.
This already tricky task is made harder by the ever-increasing number of monsters moving around the board, wreaking havoc as they go. If ever a monster tries to move to the ritual location when it is already full, the game is lost immediately. Players can also lose by letting a teammate lose all of their health or by guessing the ritual symbols incorrectly.
It is often considered a simplified and more accessible version of the original Arkham Horror game and the Living Card Game version, but in reality it is an entirely different experience. The key difference is in the way players take turns. Final Hour has a unique mechanism for this, designed to take control away from the players.
Gameplay
In Final Hour, players take turns by drawing the top card of their action deck and deciding which of the two options they would like to play. The top action on the cards tends to be more powerful. It's often geared toward thinning out the horde of enemies/ preventing their movement by sealing off walkways. But they can also help heal or even strengthen players! The bottom action usually allows players to perform investigation actions. However, often they have drawbacks like activating monsters and causing damage to locations.
They don’t get to simply choose an action to perform; instead, each player has a hand of four priority cards, numbered 1 to 30. Once they have chosen an action, they play their action card face down, then play a priority card face up on top of it. There can be no discussion about what each player intends to do until the action card is revealed.
The priority cards determine the order in which turns will be taken, with the lowest number going first. Here is the kicker - the first two cards played will perform the top action, then the last two will use the bottom action. So, if you really want to use the top action of your card, you may be forcing another player to use a particularly awful bottom action on theirs.
This creates an interesting dynamic. Final Hour requires efficient teamwork to beat, yet achieving that is next to impossible. The way turns are played means players have to make their own plans and hope it doesn’t either blow up in their face, or cause a teammate to open up a temporal rift and get everybody else killed.
Not So Big Turn Off
There is something which may turn off some cooperative gamers. This is that it clearly limits communication between players. Although, it does prevent the issue of one player telling everybody else what to do on their turns (a problem so persistent in cooperative games that it has its own term: quarterbacking). It also fits the theme, in that the investigators would be panicking in this situation, scattered with no means of communicating with each other.
Priority Cards
The use of priority cards is very clever, as they serve three purposes. Along with determining player order, they also contain between 0 and 2 omens; the number of these played in a turn determines the effects of the monster’s turn, which can involve such things as adding monsters to the board or damaging player’s health directly, amongst other nasty things depending on which Great Old One is being used.
Their third use is in solving the ritual. Each card also displays one of the five ritual symbols. Once players think they know which symbols are correct, they must each choose to “commit” three of their four cards. If the total number of cards shows double the amount of either correct symbol as there are players in the game, then the game is won. Both of these effects mean players must consider far more than just the number on the card they play, because they could end up throwing away the cards they need to win while also causing untold damage at the same time.
Final Thoughts
If you read the victory condition in the previous paragraph and didn’t understand a word of it, don’t be alarmed. It is by far the hardest part of this game to explain. When teaching Final Hour to new players, I personally found getting them engaged in the gameplay was easy enough, with its unique and interesting turn system and fast flow. It usually ended up with nobody knowing what to do by the end. Often, the game being lost simply because the use of priority cards to guess the correct symbols was so needlessly obtuse. It was enough for some players to refuse another game.
That truly is a shame, because everything up to the end is so tightly designed, so cut-throat that the turn-by-turn play places Final Hour amongst my favourites. Once you understand the end-game by playing a handful of games, it presents a challenging roadblock and a lot of tricky problems to solve, which is great if you enjoy that kind of thing.
The real challenge this game provides, however, is trying to store the pieces in the box in an organised manner. The way the insert's designed means every token has to be placed loose, with little means of keeping everything organised. If you store your games on their side, you will find there is no way to keep the pieces from mixing together.
Overall, Arkham Horror: Final Hour is a great game. There is a solid level of replayability too; there are three Great Old Ones to play against, each providing a different gameplay experience as well as multiple set-ups depending on the difficulty you want to play. The very nature of the game means that it is never quite the same each time you play either, and so it is one I see making it to the table regularly and for years to come.
