This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of the The Crown of Egil custom campaign by analyzechris for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
In The Crown of Egil, investigators are called to Iceland to help fight against a cult that worships Egil, a mythological poet, trickster, and berserker. The investigators will have to study and re-enact Egil's saga in order to have a chance of stopping the ancient warrior. The campaign packs a lot of challenge in its 4 scenarios, with a focus on pursuing side quests to prepare you for the final confrontation.
The Crown of Egil is a quick, 4-scenario campaign that's easily divided into two halves in terms of design. The first scenarios are relatively easy, but offer optional challenges you'll need to complete in order to gain and use powerful rewards to defeat the extreme challenges of the second half. While the campaign seems light at first, the later two scenarios are quite difficult, pushing your decks for all they're worth. There's a heavy focus on high skill test actions of various types printed on cards, and the climax (appropriately) feels like a struggle the earlier scenarios are all working to prepare you for.
The story for The Crown of Egil isn't anything to write home about in terms of plot - there's not a lot of room to tell anything particularly deep, and there's not much emergent story within the scenarios themselves. There's a bunch of berserker cultists causing problems and getting way too into cosplay - nothing really special. What the campaign does do is have little asides, explaining some of the myths it's pulling on - and then having direct, representative mechanics for the re-enacting of said myths. It's very "to the point", but for what it is with such a short campaign, it works, and it's interesting to see how all the trickery of Egil is represented through the mechanics, although it's all very given to you - an enemy that's meant to be evaded is given an action to easily evade them, for instance.
The first two scenarios are filled with a lot of build-up. There's tons of optional objectives that clearly do something in the future, dangling tempting carrots in front of you with some promise of later riches. This is what had me the most excited in the campaign - waiting for that buildup, as I loved that even when the scenarios weren't particularly hard to defeat, they were filled with things I wanted to explore. How it ends up paying off I found mixed - the rewards are very good, but they're not necessarily telegraphed just how to get them, and random luck can bring them right to you - or put them out of reach and make them difficult to acquire. It's a little deflating after you put in hard work earlier! The general arc of the campaign is such that early on, you're working to obtain bonuses in relatively calm scenarios - and later on, you're absolutely fighting for your life, trying to leverage any bonus you can to survive.
There's not much in the way of new mechanics here - while the "Saga" keyword is used, it doesn't do anything on its own, and is instead just flagging that whatever action it's attached to is a part of the various sidequests. This ends up not being a problem - the campaign is less about exploring a specific mechanic, and more about exploring the connections between the scenarios, and how they play out. The real meat is in the campaign book, in a way. Still, nothing needs to be fancy in order to work - each of the scenarios tries to do something different, which is good enough.
With only four scenarios, there's not a lot of room for variety in The Crown of Egil, which is fine - nothing is used enough that it overstays its welcome, but none of the scenarios can stand on their own, either. None of them particularly wow with anything new, but none of them have anything egregious in them. The most memorable parts are simply the rush and puzzle solving for treating to complete the side quests, especially when some of the nastier encounter cards come out - there's quite a bit of variance, and you never know when things will suddenly ratchet up.
Finally, the rules for the campaign could be a lot clearer - there's multiple cases of actions on cards being labeled "Investigate" or "Evade" when it's not clear if that's intended to still be following all the normal rules for both, and how they interact with the usual mechanics. Encounter cards that ask you to "remember you did X" likely needed to spell out that they only applied to one investigator as well - still, it's mostly possible to figure out how things are supposed to work, and roll through without any major difficulties on the unclear parts.
Overall, The Crown of Egil is worth a look, especially if you're looking for a challenge, or want a short campaign to try that has a lot of local flavor.
More on The Crown of Egil
The Crown of Egil: Spoiler-Light Review