Traces to Nowhere: when it lands, and where it goes in your collection

Traces to Nowhere is the next Arkham Horror: The Card Game release, out on 16 October 2026. One to four investigators hunt whoever is behind a run of disappearances while an Abductor follows them around, it runs about 45 minutes, and it plays either on its own or dropped into any campaign as a side-story.

That last detail is the interesting one, and not for the reason you would expect. A scenario pack that belongs to no campaign is the hardest thing in the game to put away.

Why a side-story is a storage problem

Every other kind of Arkham release tells you where it lives. A deluxe box and its cycle belong together. A campaign expansion is its own campaign. Even investigator decks sort cleanly, because an investigator’s cards go with that investigator.

A standalone scenario belongs nowhere in particular and everywhere in principle. Its encounter sets are yours to insert into whichever campaign you like, whenever you like, which means the one thing you cannot do is file it inside a campaign.

So give it its own divider, under its own name, and keep the whole pack together: scenario cards, encounter sets, the lot. When you decide to slot it into a campaign, you pull one labelled block and put it back afterwards. File it inside a campaign and you will spend the next session trying to remember which one you buried it in.

The same logic applies to the other side-stories you already own. They want a section, not a home.

The two habits that make a new pack painless

Sort it before you play it. A new pack arrives in printed order, which is no order at all. Ten minutes putting the encounter sets behind a divider, while the pack is still the only thing on the table, is the cheapest ten minutes in the hobby. Do it after a session instead and it competes with tidying up.

Do not mix it into the pool. The temptation with a standalone is to fold its encounter cards in with the sets you already have, because some set names recur across products. Resist it. Keep the pack whole and note on its divider which of its sets are shared, exactly as you would for a cycle.

What we are not going to tell you

We do not know how many cards are in it. Fantasy Flight has not published a card count for this pack, and every number circulating before release is someone’s estimate. When the count is out we will say so here.

That matters more than it sounds, because the reason people search for a card count before release is to work out whether their storage still closes. If you are running a full Arkham collection with sleeves, the honest answer is that one scenario pack has never been the thing that broke a box — it is the third cycle that does that, and the fix is the same either way.

While you are in the box anyway

A new release is when most people open their Arkham storage for the first time in months, which makes it the moment the collection either gets better or gets worse. If yours has reached the stage where setup takes longer than the first turn, the sorting scheme worth adopting is in our guide on storing the game — encounter cards by set, player cards by class and level, and dividers that you can read at a glance from above.

Then Traces to Nowhere is one more divider, not one more pile.