tabletoppingboardgames 
Arkham is not exactly the first destination that comes to mind when planning a relaxing holiday. Between the strange gates, unsettling landmarks, and the faint sound of cosmic horrors muttering in the background, most people would probably book a week by the coast instead.
In Arkham: Travel Guide, that is exactly the fun of it. Players become tour guides leading groups of slightly reckless tourists through the city’s many districts. Instead of museums and cafés, your itinerary might feature the university library, a curious little shop, and, if you are unlucky, a gate to another dimension.
You will draw routes across your map of Arkham, collect tourists of different types, and try to meet secret objectives. The trick is to keep everything connected while managing the creeping madness that comes from walking too close to the city’s darker corners. And at the very end, you will face one of the dreaded Old Ones in a final confrontation. Think of it as sightseeing with a touch of Lovecraft.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 30-40 minutes
📝 Designer: Dan Lièvre
🎨 Artwork: Ekaterina Mamontova & Ekaterina Tsoy
🏢 Publisher: CrowD Games
Gameplay Overview
Each game is played across ten rounds. At the start of a round a curio card is revealed, offering a small twist for that turn. Then the dice are rolled and chosen through a drafting system. Two dice become the shared “round dice,” while others are set aside and unavailable. The exact procedure changes slightly with three or four players, but the idea is the same: everyone will be using the same two dice each round to place tourists.
Tourists are marked onto your personal map of Arkham, which is a 6×6 grid of city blocks. Once placed, you then chart new routes. By default, you draw two route sections: the first touching the block where you just placed tourists, and the second extending from that one. Alternatively, you can draw just a single section anywhere on the map. If the coordinates rolled were already full and you could only place one tourist, then you are also limited to drawing just one route section that turn.
At first this feels generous, as if you are leisurely sketching a holiday plan. Later, when the map is crowded, every choice matters. Do you push your route toward an attraction, or do you risk stepping into a horrible place that will add to your madness? Curio shops, placed around the city, provide useful boosts like extra tourists, extra route sections, or tomes for the final confrontation. You can only trigger one per round even if you pass by several, which makes the timing of visits quite important.
When the tenth round is finished, players determine their final route. You must trace a continuous path through the city, erasing any stray roads or tourists not directly connected. Gates can be used to link separate paths, though each such connection increases your madness. Routes may cross themselves or even loop back around, which often helps squeeze in a few extra attractions.
Finally, everyone confronts the chosen Old One. Each player rolls three dice, and results can be adjusted with any tomes collected earlier. Failures bring penalties, successes bring rewards, and neutral rolls are safe but uneventful. The exact effects depend on which Old One you are facing. There is one important catch: if all three dice come up failures, you are eliminated on the spot and do not score at all. For everyone else, victory points are then counted from tourists, city blocks, objectives, and the Old One’s effects. The player with the most points wins.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
The presentation of Arkham: Travel Guide does a good job of being both thematic and practical. The art gives you a sense of Arkham’s atmosphere, but it never gets in the way of clarity.
Each player gets a dry-erase board with a colourful 6×6 grid of city blocks. The blocks are filled with simple illustrations of banks, churches, restaurants, and libraries. Icons for special places like curio shops or gates stand out clearly, which makes planning your route much easier.
The cards follow a consistent style. Curio cards use a rich green palette, objective cards display little mini maps, and the Old One cards have a darker look, with illustrations that are appropriately eerie without going over the top.
The dice are one of the nicest touches. They are cream-coloured with engraved symbols in red, blue, green, and purple, giving them the look of ancient artefacts without sacrificing readability.
Finally, the coloured markers. Each tourist type has its own colour, which makes your map grow into a very lively and slightly chaotic mix of routes and icons. By the end of the game the boards resemble colourful tourist maps that have been sketched by someone who really should have taken a break from guiding tours through Arkham.
Our Experience
When we played Arkham: Travel Guide the flow of the game became clear very quickly. The first few rounds felt light, as if we were gently filling the city with tourists and sketching some neat routes. After a while though, space grew tighter and choices became harder.
The dice selection added tension. In larger groups there were several moments where the one result you were hoping for ended up in the “unavailable” pool, forcing you to rethink your plan. It made us pay attention not just to our own map but also to what others were aiming for.
The curio shops stood out. Reaching one at the right moment gave a strong boost, whether extra routes, extra tourists, or tomes to hold for the finale. They often changed our plans in the middle of the game and pushed us in new directions.
We also enjoyed the dilemmas of risk. Was it worth adding madness for one more cluster of tourists? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it always sparked some table talk.
And the ending, facing the Old One, gave a final bit of drama. The outcome was not always kind, and occasionally someone was knocked out completely by a bad roll, but it was never dull. Even when the confrontation only changed the scores slightly, it kept the result uncertain until the very last moment. Turning Arkham into a tourist puzzle might sound absurd, but it worked surprisingly well. By the end, our finished maps looked like colourful, crowded, and completely different visions of the same city.
Our Thoughts
Arkham: Travel Guide will appeal most to players who like route-building puzzles and planning with dice. It gives you the pleasure of building your own map, but the shared dice system adds just enough interaction to stop it from feeling solitary.
The game scales well across player counts. Solo mode works with challenge cards, two players feel tight and tactical, and four players bring more pressure to the dice draft. At around half an hour to three quarters, it is easy to fit into an evening.
Strategically, the main challenge lies in connecting your personal objective to your route without wasting time. Curio shops, madness management, and preparing for the Old One’s final twist are all important factors. The variety of objectives and Old Ones adds replayability, and the confrontation at the end ensures that no game feels too safe or predictable.
That said, the mechanics themselves will feel familiar. The route-building and dice selection reminded us of games like Railroad Ink or Welcome To. The Old One finale is thematically fun but is mostly a dice roll with modifiers. The game also adds several layers—curio cards, madness tracking, Old One rules—which make it a little heavier than some players might expect from a draw-on-your-board game.
Overall, Arkham: Travel Guide is a clever and charming puzzle that looks great on the table and finds a fun twist on the Arkham setting. It is not revolutionary, but it is entertaining, thematic, and leaves you with a colourful map full of tourists. Whether your tour ends with victory or with everyone going slightly mad is, of course, part of the charm.
📝 We received a copy of the game from CrowD Games to try out.
