This is a personal review of the Code Red at Bleeding Heart fanmade scenario by Myriad for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
Drawn to a strange, haunted hospital, the investigators need to fight misshaped horrors within it to uncover the mysteries of this abandoned place. The scenario involves a mad rush around a map that itself grows hostile, trying to find both clues and a mad doctor. While many of its mechanics are clever, the implementation of them leaves something to be desired.
Code Red At Bleeding Heart has interesting premises throughout its duration. However, many of them end up not quite playing out as well as they do in theory. The most obvious of this is the biggest one - locations with damage on them. A number of cards will place damage on locations, and interact with that - but not enough to ever really feel like it matters, except in the most niche of cases. When encounter cards require you to place the damage, it ends up feeling like a freebie. What should be the main mechanic ends up falling flat most of the time.
Other mechanics stumble as well. A variety of locations require some kind of action to provide extra clues on them - but doing so ends up providing so many clues, there's not a lot of reason to seek out other locations if you find one that works for you - out of the nine randomly placed locations, you'll likely only care about 3 or 4. Once enough clues are gathered, the second half of the scenario begins - which ends up being largely based on random chance, as you need to check four locations for the goal, and each of those locations are four moves away from each other. If you accomplish the goal feels more random than skill based - luckily, the scenario doesn't end even if you fail to accomplish this, and instead just switches to another goal.
One final note has to be made of two seperate enemies. The first, one of the final bosses that can be fought has virtually no scaling health, leading to them being significantly easier to fight as player count increases. The second is an enemy in the encounter deck which is a hidden card - that attacks you every time you take any skill test, and can only be defeated by the character who it's in the hand of attacking or evading it. If you just don't have one of those options, or were relying on other types of cards to defend you, you're out of luck. It's an arbitary design that can just have no play around.
With two 19 XP investigators, I found Code Red At Bleeding Heart difficult, but more due to the random nature and what felt like some unfun mechanics over anything else.
Code Red At Bleeding Heart has a number of cool ideas, but they just don't work out to make an enjoyable scenario.
Code Red at Bleeding Heart also was designed with the custom investigator Julia Fairchild.
Rewards
XP Cost: 2
Potential XP Gain: 2-3 (locations) +1 (Gemini Mannequin, in the encounter deck) +1 (Grafted Seraph) +3 (3x Pulse Mimics) +1 (Doctor Killjoy or Samael) = 8-9 XP or 6-7 XP after costs
In addition, a number of extra benefits can be gained:
If the act was advanced enough to spawn Samael and he was defeated, one investigator may add the Fringe Tourniquet to their deck.
If Doctor Killjoy was found and defeated, a 0 token is added to the chaos bag.
If Doctor Killjoy was found and survived, one investigator may add the Archibald Killjoy asset to their deck.
If doom advanced and the Doctor Killjoy enemy was defeated, each investigator may add a copy of The Quickening to their deck.
If Julia Fairchild was in play when the scenario ended, the Julia Fairchild investigator is unlocked.
