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The Dunwich Horror expansion of Arkham Horror includes a card called Joining the Winning Team. Basically it's a mission where you have to sacrifice an ally at a number of places. On completion, you win the game and all other players lose the game.

I'm aware of the fact that this is nigh impossible to complete (as of this writing, the Arkham Horror Statistics page says that only 11 of their nearly 13,000 recorded games have ended by its completion), but in the rare event that you might be able to pull it off, can the other players do anything to stop you? Can they attack you or anything?

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There's no direct way people could try to stop you. They can't attack you; there's nothing in the rules about players attacking players.

There are at least a few ways they could try to indirectly stop you:

  • They can try to close gates and kill monsters before you can get to them, so that you won't have any trophies you could use to buy allies.

  • They can deliberately leave monsters that'd block your path alive.

  • They could try to equip themselves for the final battle and let the ancient one wake up quickly, giving you no time for your mission. The gate limit makes it pretty easy to let the ancient one wake up early, if you're feeling daring.

  • If you do get close, they can try to make sure you can't get lost in time and space. If you try to hop in a gate that someone's about to close; they can decline to close those gates. So you'll be trying to get to 0 sanity/stamina in another world. To prevent that, they could also try to prioritize closing the gates to more dangerous other worlds before you're ready to get lost in time and space, so that when you get to that point, you'll probably just waste a few turns passing through. I suppose they could even try to heal you if they have the right character or item!

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  • Thanks! I can see why so few recorded games have ended this way given how easy it is to end it through these means (or threaten to end it through these means). I wonder if most of the games that ended with this card ended because of the players intentionally trying to help the player win with it just for the heck of it.
    – Thunderforge
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 1:45
  • If someone in my play group attempted this, they wouldn't be very popular! It is a very 'troll' type of card. Arkham Horror is hard enough without having one of the players working against you
    – link64
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 21:48
  • @link64 Agreed, though it's actually a little more subtle than that: since they'll be trying to get to specific destinations and also accumulate trophies to buy allies, they'll probably be killing monsters for you, maybe closing gates, and possibly even sealing them in order to buy themselves more time! (Despite the flavor of them joining the winning team, if you fill up the doom track before they manage, they still lose.) But still, quite true they won't be cooperating, and their ultimate goal definitely makes them unpopular.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 23:33
  • @link64 Must be different for different groups. Our group has played often enough that we'd probably try to help someone win this way just because it would be a fun challenge to try to end the game in a non-standard way.
    – Thunderforge
    Commented Feb 10, 2015 at 19:26
  • @Thunderforge If the player with the mission decides on their own to go for it, they're either dooming the rest of the team (in a normally cooperative game!) or forcing everyone to play a different game. It's fine if everyone wants to do that but that's not guaranteed.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Feb 10, 2015 at 19:36

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