What’ll it take to get board gamers into this 1920s tabletop role-playing game?

Among the swirling masses of Pax Unplugged, frantically running through the convention’s labyrinthine passages, I desperately search for Room 103. I am late to meet Michaël Croitoriu, the head of Edge Studios, to discuss the new Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game Starter Set— a Lovecraftian pulp-horror game that’s meant to bridge the gap between role-players and board gamers. Earlier that week, a review copy had landed on my front door. While the box intrigued me, its wealth of components (which include character portfolios, an assortment of punchboards, handouts, maps, decks of cards, and 24 dice) were as intimidating to this RPG reporter as any eldritch horror. Ten minutes past the hour, weaving past a frenzy of con-goers holding their latest gains, I find Croitoriu waiting for me. As he explains the game, my anxieties slowly fade, replaced by a curiosity about this earnest effort to convert board game purists through the expansive world of Arkham.

While at first it seems overwhelming, when broken down, each part of the game is relatively easy to understand. “So easy a 10-year-old could learn it,” was a phrase the Arkham team kept repeating when people walked up to the room for demo play, though they also stated the content of the game was more suitable for ages 14 and up. Leah Hawthorne, one of the game’s lead designers, said she “doesn’t like to use the word simple because then people think it doesn’t have strategic depth.” While the system is easy to learn, there’s an element of resource management built into it that adds the crunchy tactical elements board-gamers are used to.

The base mechanic of the system uses a replenishing d6 dice pool, with stats that require a corresponding target number to be met, which are different for each character’s strengths and weaknesses. In combat, damage depletes your dice pool, limiting the number of actions you can take per round until they are replenished. There is no initiative during conflict-oriented scenes, which allows players to strategize with each other and lean into one another’s strengths, rather than place all the focus on a single overpowered character. The set up of the game is also intentionally designed to be game master friendly, adding in more narrative focused elements of the game that ask players to worldbuild alongside the GM in a “bubble of benevolence” a phrase Croitoriu repeated multiple times in our interview. This shared responsibility of play at the table is built into the games’ components, like a GM screen that lies flat on the table, rather than hiding secrets (and rolls) behind it.

“The person I am now is the result of the games I played at the table,” Croitoriu said. While the Arkham franchise has previously been known for other tabletop iterations like the original 1987 board game by Richard Lanius, that personal relationship to TTRPGs is why the Arkham Horror RPG “tries to address different preconceptions of RPGs and onboard people into role-playing games.”

Among those preconceptions are barriers to entry for people unfamiliar to tabletop gaming — which is why the starter set is broken down into one-hour sessions. Croitoriu believes a lot of pre-game prep is also a barrier, which is why the starter set includes a 48-page tutorial style booklet that teaches players as they go. The RPG core rulebook sits at a reasonable 256 pages, a “threshold [EDGE] will never cross,” Croitoriu said, referencing a line of connected materials that would follow the starter set release in 2025: an adventure collection in March, a free RPG day supplement, a box set at Gen Con, and another sourcebook at Halloween.