Man, Arkham Horror is kicking my ass with how much there is to learn. We managed to get set up pretty quickly last night (on a table that was too small though, leading to everything being very cramped). Despite my coworker and I having both read the rule book front-to-back, after setting up it was kind of like 'What now?'
We got off to a rocky start of constant looking at the rules and googling stuff and got about three turns in before we hit a part that took a lot of time to resolve what we were supposed to do.
He had first turn of the game and killed a monster/entered a gate on the first round of the game. We spent a while trying to figure out if he fought the monster first or was sucked into the gate first, but then I searched on google and immediately turned up an answer on BGG. By that third round he was emerging back into Arkham but we had difficulties understand the 'closing a gate' stuff. We finally figured out how many successes he needed to roll out of his seven rolls (one success, it took us a long time to find that out though). We were pretty caught up on the "removing the gate after closed and keeping it as a gate trophy" aspect; he didn't have any clue tokens and sealing wasn't an option for him so he went for closing. It seemed like closing a gate is pretty much doing the same thing as sealing it. I couldn't figure out what the rules were saying about a gate re-opening, if the gate had been taken off the board as a trophy by him. He ended up not rolling any successes out of his seven rolls though, so we figured 'Fuck it, we'll figure all of that out when we come to it.'
It took us a while to figure out monster movement too. We saw where it explained the special rules for monster moves, like fast monsters and so on, and saw that it said that unless it fell under one of those rules that it obeyed the rules listed in the text above that section. The text above it listed the rules for determining which monsters move and down which colored path, but we were like 'how many spaces is the basic movement space?' He finally started reading the descriptions of the special movements and saw where some said to move two spaces and deduces that the regular movement space must be one space. Didn't matter anyway though because the monster that had just appeared was a Hound of Tindalos which moved directly to my character and caused me to go to Arkham after making me insane (what a way to end the first turns, him in another world and me insane).
We then ended up running out of time and needed to pack up before shift ended. So three or so hours after setting up and getting ready and we only got three turns in. The first six hours of the twelve tonight should be open for play (after eating it would mean we have five available I guess). So hopefully we can try again and see what happens. I really wish the Arkham Horror wiki wasn't blocked at work...