After lurking on my shelf for measureless eons, Arkham Horror: The Card Game has me back in its tentacles. This is mostly thanks to a friend getting really into it, buying all the cards, and carrying my along in his enthusiasm until it was too late for me. I can’t get enough of it. And playing once or twice a month when the four of us manage to align our schedules certainly isn’t enough. So I began playing solo.

The first thing I found is that playing solo analog games has been a great way to wind down in the evening. The second thing I found is that I get salty when the game doesn’t go my way. This surprised me. I think of myself as a non-salty gamer. Sweet, even. A good sport. It’s something of a core belief about myself as a gamer. But with no one to see my reaction, when I drew the autofail token on a Rotting Remains right before I was going to complete “The Essex County Express”, which killed me just before I was almost certainly going to triumph, I got mad.

Arkham Horror is a game where sometimes the random elements really screw you over. You can do a lot to mitigate and prepare for them, but sometimes despite all your best laid plans, the chaos bag spits out the one token that kills you. This is by design. It’s part of how the theme of cosmic horror is expressed in the mechanics. It creates the sweat, a wonderful term I learned from the Nate Silver article linked below.

As I played through the rest of The Dunwich Legacy campaign, I tried to observe these moments of failure, whether mistakes or bad luck, with mindfulness. I endeavored to observe my saltiness without judgment. There were a few more moments throughout the campaign where some bad draws from the encounter deck and the chaos bag brought out the salt, and I watched the salt rise up, then subside and flow away.

Why play a game if it makes you angry or frustrated? That’s a very big question I’m not going to try to answer in a particularly deep way right now, but I’ve found embracing the highs and lows of solo Arkham Horror to be cathartic. And I think “catharsis” is a useful lens through which to view the experience of negative emotions during play. It was cathartic to get a little salty and for that to be okay. I’m looking forward to starting another solo campaign!

Blog update

As an aside, I’m excited about blogging again. I want to spend more time being curious and thinking about the things that capture my interest, and this seems like a good way to do it. I’m planning to blog more regularly, and also to include links in each post, inspired by the links Chris McDowall includes in his newsletter. Maybe I’ll even figure out how RSS feeds work so I can be a real blog boy. (Edit: the ancient mysteries have been revealed. You can now subscribe with a feed reader using the link in the nav bar at the top or bottom.)

Sparked my curiosity