4-manning Nyarlathotep

You may think "Hey I don't know Nyarla-whats-his-name, what instance is he a boss in?", well that's because he's not made out of pixels but out of cardboard. And is therefore a part of Arkham Horror instead of WoW.

Arkham Horror is a boardgame set in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The town of Arkham is in pretty big trouble. An old evil is awakening and only a handfull of investigators have any clue to what's going on and have to stop the evil from awakening and taking over.

As you see it takes up a lot of room and your average dinner table can host a 4-player game, but anything above that and you'll have to get creative with the available playing area.

In short, it's a PvE game where the investigators try to save the city by closing gates and killing off the monsters that spawn from gates and elsewhere around the city, think "Violet hold".

I find it has quite some similarities with running a dungeon in WoW. The PvE and objective part I've already covered.

The investigators the players play all have their own statistics, equipment and special abilities. There is both health and sanity to keep track off so they have quite alot of things with WoW characters in common.

Also when we play Arkham Horror we tend to have some roles which me more or less take or are given to. Not the classical tank, healer and dps roles but still. For example this time my photographer got his hands on both a tommygun and a "Sword of Glory". Even without theorycrafting you can probably guess this means he puts up quite a fight.

Gowron's gravedigger pretty quickly became the local deputy allowing him to portal all over Arkham which made him a good troubleshooter. Having a pair of shotguns to hand out to our other two friends who were a waitress and a scientist didn't do any harm either.

About three hours into the game where I spend most my time streetsweeping, Gowron troubleshooting and our other friends actually progressing the game, we had not made too big of a mess and managed to close and seal of enough gates to prevent Nyarlathotep from awakening and we won the game. The whole experience is like a relaxed guildrun to a dungeon. No strangers speaking a language you don't understand, no "gogogooo" yelling and you're not getting votekicked the moment you go AFK for a minute when someone's fighting, especially since you're quite likely to bring more beers with you when you return.

It's a great eveningfiller and even tough it's a different setting and medium then WoW the basics are the same, having some fun with your friends!