Daniel (@dungeondive) begins his deep dive into the Arkham Horror 2e expansions with the first and lightest: Curse of the Dark Pharaoh. He’s candid that Fantasy Flight themselves must have agreed it was lacklustre, because a revised version followed (now commanding absurd aftermarket prices). He prefers the “visiting exhibit” play mode, which keeps the expansion’s cards separate for a focused Egyptian-flavoured experience.
In this week’s session, he’s facing Nyarlathotep: magically resistant, with minus-four combat in the final battle, endless cultists, and a devouring lore test. His strategy is to ignore gates, hoard clue tokens, buy physical weapons, and accelerate to a direct confrontation. A first-turn misadventure with Ashcan Pete—knocked unconscious by a falling branch and washed downstream to face a Shoggoth in the graveyard—illustrates exactly why these first-turn stories become the game’s enduring charm.
The expansion adds museum relics, a new Mythos deck (with dangerous double-doom cards), new allies, spells, bar-from-neighbourhood penalties, and the “visions” benefit that converts spells into clue tokens. The Appendix M segment recommends three: Daniel Harms’s Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia, plus Nate Pedersen’s Starry Wisdom Library and Dagon Collection, both thematically perfect auction-catalogue anthologies for Arkham fans.
Do the visiting-exhibit rules rescue a weak expansion, or is Curse of the Dark Pharaoh one to skip?