Arkham Horror Board Game Review

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It is. It so is. But what is it? Arkham Horror is a board game by Fantasy Flight Games. Unlike standard games like Monopoly and Risk, Arkham is cooperative - the players work together to "defeat" the game, and win or lose as a group. The setting is HP Lovecraft's famous Cthulu mythos, which takes place in the sleepy fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts, site of the small Miskatonic University. For reasons unknown, the otherworldly great Ones who slumber eternally occasionally wake up and try to devour all of existence, centering their efforts on Arkham. When this happens, brave (and those caught in the wrong place at the wrong time!) must band together and try to contain the old one, or if that fails, fight them!
It's a 3-4 hour board game for 1-8 players. Yes, you can play it alone, but it's not recommended. I've played it with 2-5 players, and once everyone gets up to speed on the rules, the flow keeps going and there's little downtime.

Briefly, the players randomly choose which of the great old ones to play against for this round. Which one they select determines how strong certain monsters become, as well as how long the players have until the great old one awakens and the final battle begins. The players then randomly select which investigator they'll play as. Investigators have different amounts of stamina (resistance to physical pain) and sanity (mental tolerance) as well as different starting items and a unique ability.
The players then begin in Arkham, and a gate to another dimension appears and monsters come through it. Turns go phase-wise rather than player-wise - instead of one player taking their whole turn before the next, each phase (movement, encounters, etc) occurs for all players before moving on to the next phase.
The goal of the game is to seal the otherworldly gates that open up around Arkham, using a combination of clues found around the town and items scavenged from various encounters, while avoiding (or defeating!) the spawning roaming monsters. In order to seal gates, players must first travel through them to other planes of existence, and if they survive the trip there and back, they're given a chance to close or seal the gate. If too many monsters are allowed to spawn at once, the terror track increases, which closes the shops in Arkham as the townsfolk flee in terror. If too many gates remain open, the great old one will arrive and a final battle will begin. If the players can seal six gates before the great old one wakes, they win. Alternately, they can defeat the old one in combat, which is no small feat, as the old ones start out strong and get stronger each turn.
The locations around Arkham serve as places to hide from marauding monsters, stores where you can purchase new items, get bank loans, or become members of secret societies, and dangerous places to have strange (and often disastrous) encounters with the random denizens of Arkham. Trust me, this is not a place to take a vacation. One wonders how a university started here!

In a word: Yes. Yeeeeeeesssssss. It is very good. It is also fairly complicated (the manual is 25 pages of text and diagrams, but the fonts are large), but after 1-2 games it flows well and makes sense. It takes a while to get used to playing a cooperative board game, the tendency to want to act selfishly is hard to overcome, but most of the time it'll hurt your chances of winning. Talking and coordination between players is absolutely critical - very soon it'll become clear which investigators are suited towards combat, which are good at gathering items or traveling to other realms to seal gates.
Some notes about the construction itself. The first thing I noticed when the game arrived is that it is HEAVY. There is a ton of gear stowed inside. The board folds out to 6 times the size of the box - you'll need a lot of table area to play Arkham Horror. Under the board are 4 sheets of die cut hard cardboard pieces - the monsters, the investigators, and a hundred or so counters to keep track of sanity, stamina, money, and other useful things. Next come the encounter cards - customized decks for each "neighborhood" of Arkham - the terrible (but potentially rewarding!) encounters you have change depending on where you are. Then the mythos and otherworld decks - the mythos deck contains game-wide events and the locations of additional gates and monster movement, while the otherworld deck contains random adventures for investigators traveling to other planes of existence. Lastly we have the investigator cards and great old one cards, from which the players choose their avatars and the villain comes. The pieces are all extremely high quality, which is always the case with Fantasy Flight Games' work.
Overall, the game is great fun, always different, and has tons of neat mechanics that contribute to the theme. The idea of playing cooperatively instead of competitively is a different way to think, but once everyone gets the rules down the game is tons of fun.

There are currently 7 (!) expansions for Arkham Horror. 3 of them have expansions to the map of Arkham, as well as new mechanics and cards, and are more expensive. The other 4 are cards and mechanics only, and are inexpensive. I haven't yet acquired the expansions, but when I do there'll be reviews for them too.