This past New Year’s Eve, I opted not to attend a drunken bash or brave the throngs of the cities. I got myself some hot action. I laid railroad tracks across Europe, penetrated high-tech defense systems to deliver hamburgers in stealth, and came close to the brink of insanity when I gazed upon the horrific visages of beasts no mortal was never meant to witness. That’s right, friends: I am a big dork. Also, I had a good, low-key time playing board games over at Tony’s.

Well, mostly low-key, anyway. The truly hellish thing about the last game referenced there was the headache it gave me.

Don’t get me wrong: Arhkam Horror is a fun concept for a game, and some aspects of it are pretty neat. It’s your basic Lovecraft scenario: an ancient horror stirs from its millennia-long slumber, and you must prevent it from devouring the human race, so you traverse a quaint Massachusetts town, sealing gates leading to forbidden worlds. Easy as pie, right? Well, the really tricky part is that the game requires keeping track of roughly a bazillion separate pieces of cardboard.

I don’t even really mind the game’s complexity in itself. It’s designed for board game geeks, which means that there are a lot of things going on at any one time that you should keep track of. For example, each player has a character with unique special abilities, and each character has six ability scores, arranged in pairs: Speed/Sneak, Strength/Will, and Luck/Lore. The higher your Speed (which controls how many spaces you can move in a turn), for example, the lower your Sneak (which controls how many dice you get to roll when you attempt to avoid fighting a monster on the same space as you). Between turns, you can actually shift these scores, moving a little cardboard counter over on your cardboard character sheet, changing your scores from 4/5 to 3/3 or 5/4 or whatever. Your character sheet will also be covered in little cardboard bits of money, cardboard magnifying glasses representing Clues, cardboard hearts representing Stamina, and cardboard brains representing Sanity, all laid out next to an array of cards detailing the abilities of items on your person, such as your gun, your bullwhip, your slain vampire carcass, and your tome of secret knowledge and unknowable power. In addition to all the players’ character sheets, the aforementioned ancient horror has a sheet of its own, gradually covered with little cardboard eyeballs as it slowly wakes.

The game board has various cardboard tokens on it as well: stand-up figures of the player characters on streets, in shops, in the mental institution, lost in time and space, etc.; a marker indicating the level of Terror in the town as it becomes overrun with monsters; boarded-up doors placed on shops that have closed as the Terror level rises; gates to other worlds, and smaller tokens representing the locations of sealed gates; and a variety of demons, cultists, and maniacs, who all move around the streets and the skies at different rates and in different directions indicated by tiny symbols on each token. I’d like to hazard a conservative guess that the game also has at least twelve stacks of different sorts of cards, and that I probably missed some other stuff.

Is that too much for a seasoned board game geek to worry about? Maybe not, though I did find myself wishing on several occasions that this had been done as a computer game so someone else could keep track of all the details. After chatting with Tony, however, we seemed to come to the conclusion that this is not a game design problem so much as a graphic/product design problem. The designers could have made this game with the same rules but used far fewer pieces.

Specifically, I wonder what the trade-off would have been in cost if the game used slightly lower-quality cardboard but required more assembly (either on the manufacturing side or out of the box). Keeping track of numbers like the ability scores, Clue Tokens, Stamina, and Sanity could have been a lot neater with sliding or rotating pieces built into the character cards, like that old star chart you had as a kid that you could turn to see what’s in the sky depending on the date. (Disclaimer: that might have been my star chart, not yours. Maybe you had something similar with dinosaurs..?)

Another possibility would be to make pieces fit into something, like slots or indentations in a piece of cardboard, or like the plastic, snap-on ship expansions in another complex game, Starfarers of Catan (which are so cheaply made that the game is packaged with a disclaimer refusing liability if the pieces break—and they will, eventually, even if you follow the instructions, but that’s another story). As Tony points out, making all the pieces out of cardboard kind of leads to a potentially less interesting product anyway. Even if the creators had used polyhedral dice for different stats, with the relevant stat on top (like the hit point system used in another game by the same publisher, Shadows Over Camelot), it could have reduced the number of tokens flying around.

Yet another possibility would be to provide a few pads of specially-designed paper to keep track of relevant stats; this game is so involved that I can’t imagine anyone playing more than 20-50 times in an entire lifetime, and that amount of paper can be included really cheaply. And sure, some pieces you can’t really do without, like the characters and the monsters on the board, though even those could use a bit of redesigning. I appreciate that a lot of information was packed onto those monster tokens, but some graphic touches like colors corresponding to movement patterns (rather than tiny green shapes) would have been really helpful.

Thinking about this reminds me, though, of some designers on a tabletop games panel at the Penny Arcade Expo. As these industry professionals and self-avowed gamers explained, part of the appeal of tabletop games is that they’re physical objects, and that’s something video games can’t replace (echoing the comic book fans and artists who sound vaguely threatened by web comics but promise that the enjoyment of holding a book in your hands will keep the medium alive). They suggested that some technology can still be of use to tabletop gaming, however, to help keep track of changing statistics and other such details.

I admit that I’m having a hard time imagining what this would look like—would each game come packaged with a little device, like a calculator with several different readouts? Would there be a CD with software you could pop into your laptop (or even a free program at the manufacturer’s site as a supplement to those who have the option of using all the physical pieces)? Or we just talking about cheap plastic objects with moving parts, like Heroclix?

Even as I write this, I realize I’m asking a lot. I’m basically calling for hobbyist game developers to be as accomplished in graphic and product design and potentially even software development as they are in game design and writing. This isn’t like the video game industry, where you can compartmentalize every single job and throw a ton of money at a project because you know that the occasional blockbuster will offset your losses. Most small tabletop game publishers are probably happy to break even after all the employees get paid. Depending on how you define “the industry,” I have to imagine that many or even most operate at a loss. But … I still kind of feel like if you’re going to make a game of such complexity and at such a grand scope as this, you have to consider that the product design is as much about the game experience as it is about being professional-looking.

To be fair, I imagine that Arkham Horror is more fun and runs more smoothly with experienced players. Generally I feel that games should be accessible to newcomers, but with a board game of this complexity, you kind of know what you’re getting yourself into. And I’ll admit, I did have fun. The fun wasn’t as much from the game mechanics, though, as from the social context set up by the game. It could have been a Lovecraft-themed expansion pack to Chutes and Ladders, for all that mattered—there’s just something amusing about sitting around a table and making stupid jokes about the kindly folk of a quiet Massachusetts town being ravaged by unspeakable terrors from beyond our world.

All in all, then, I enjoyed myself, and it got me thinking about game design, but the experience left me feeling like I might wait until next New Year’s before I try playing this one again. Complex games can be a tough sell when you only have a few friends who like tabletop gaming at all. When you’re trying to get friends and loved ones to play board games with you, the last thing you want to hear is, “Not tonight, honey—it gives me a headache.”