I've been enjoying some board & card games with friends lately (Munchkin and Catan, mostly), and we decided to try something a bit different. So I bought Arkham Horror, because the idea of playing cooperatively is really appealing (and the Cthulhu-mythos is hard to resist).
But wow, it looks complicated! Do any of you guys play this game? Any hints? Things I absolutely must understand when I start playing, et.c.?

Go to Board game geek dot com and print off Universal Heads sumary of the rules it helps alot it's not as complicated as it looks we normally play with all the expansions and that a lot of stuff to keep track off but with a bit of practice it's not too hard.
Hope this helps ;)

If you wouldn't mind, Zeewolf, please post some thoughts when you finally do get a chance to play. Some friends and I have been considering checking out Arkham Horror, so I'd be interested to see the thoughts of someone new to the game.

I've played it about eight months ago.
At the beginning you select a character (or two, if you are only two players), who have several attributes, which you can change in certain limits and a special ability. I have never read any of Lovecraft's books, so I have no idea if they are related to them, but it is possible. You also choose main boss.
You can move on the city map to buy items, fight enemies and/or seal gates to another dimensions, which are opened sporadically (event cards). You have to explore the dimension first, if you want to seal it, or use one certain item te seal it immediately.
During the fight you can use various items (pistols, knives, etc.) and your heroes have two health pools - one is physical health, the second is sanity. After defeat you move either to hospital or asylum (depends on what did you lost) and continue from there.
Then after some time you all have to face the boss andthe game is over.
Disclaimer: I've played it only once and that was quite long ago, so I was only mentioning what I was fairly certain about. My memory can fail, though, so please take it with a grain of salt.

Thanks for the replies.
Gambit: That summary looks very useful indeed, it could be a very big help. I think we're going to try playing it today. I'll post some impressions when I've had a go at it. Right, was obviously going to post this a lot earlier, but GOG kind of prevented me.

But anyway, I've played it once, and that took a good few hours. It seems like it'll be quite fun, but the first time we played we spent most of the time reading and following the instructions in the manual, and it wasn't really until the later part of the first session that we could basically do a complete turn (with some fighting and stuff) without having to double check the manual to see if we were forgetting something.

So the first hours with the game were kind of heavy (maybe draining is a better word), more work than fun to be honest, but I'm seeing a lot of potential here and now that I have a slightly better grasp of the whole thing, I'll definitely it again soon.

Edit: Hm, seems I couldn't make a new post. :-/ I hope you get notified of my reply...

I've played it and from a new players perspective the rules can be daunting as the originals are not well set out especially when you're including expansions.
It really needs a masters glossary, but i digress.
What i found as a hick up was to do with the sequence of a specific acts.
With closing a gate with a monster on it. you return on the other world portion and do not have to fight any monsters on that singular turn but as you close the gate on the following turn AFTER the movement phase you in fact by way of page 14 have 'ended you're move & must evade or fight the monster' before you attempt to close the gate.
Thus meaning the monsters of the corresponding symbol encountered and landed on during the movement phase by other investigators also must be fought before banishment.
whereas without that clarity understandably people would place monsters preferably with the gates of their same specific type, not fight them and have them vanish with the portal that spawned them.
While seemingly a trivial thing, playing it single player i prefer to be playing it to the letter as otherwise i feel as though i'm cheating.
None the less it highlights the problem with the original rule set; it states in this occurence you specifically do this... for more clarity on the variations you discover are possible while playing please try to shuffle through a disorganised hobbled together manual equivalent to about 30 A4 pages.
The game is good, the game can be fun, the game with a quick glance appears to be simple.
But look for hard questions like WHEN an investigator can swap items with anouther investigator? before & after.... what about during? Do you have to sacrifice a move point if it takes them 4 moves to get to a meeting point while only taking you 3?
This is the sort of thing that will mire down an otherwise brilliant game and while you can just make up you're own house rules, if every turn you seem to be making up a new house rule what's the point in having the rules in the first place.
It's important to get a firm grasp of the rules yourself because quite frankly the intricasies of the rules are not a 2 minute prep or a throw the book at someone job to get people acquainted with.
Anouther not very clear thing is when you play with expansions (thus reducing the effective no. of players) what happens when certain G.O.O. abilities refer to the number of players? do they mean characters as quite frankly the number of board sections probably doesn't matter when you're all taken to anouther world to fight the great old one because it as a rule is derived to balance the fact that more locations have to be covered thus requiring more characters to be able to adequately cover that area as well as a smaller group did for the base board.
Just some things to think about.