Call of Cthulhu

Not an octopus pooping. It is in fact the Great Cthulhu. Fhtagn.

Type: Strategy / Combat / Card
Players: 2

Time to explain to others: About 10 to 15 min

Time to play: About 30 minutes, possibly bit more

Difficulty: To play 5/10, Game difficulty 6/10

Portability: High
Overall: 9/10

I absolutely love this game. Oh no, I hear you grumble, another Lovecraftian game. Shush, says I, just listen.

CoC is a simple (?) duel game, a great-great-great-grandson of Magic. The overall dynamic is similar, you need to spend resources to 'build' creatures and support cards, and then you use these to fight over Story cards. If you win, you take the card. 3 story cards and the game ends.

And here is where CoC starts to come into its own. A few things start to takes us away from Magic: a) Most creatures (about 2/3) are weak, and will die with only one hit, b) Each fight over a Story breaks down into 4 struggles: Terror, Combat, Arcane and Investigation, and c) You need to sacrifice cards from your hand to turn them into resources (teaches you not to fill your deck with only amazing cards).

No creature in CoC is a jack of all trades. Most, if not all, will be better at some struggles than others. Without going too much into the rules, my point is this: A weaker character(s) might be more than a match for a huge creature, as it might have strengths in different struggles, as the fights for the stories progresses. I've lost count on the number of times I've won Stories from under the nose of huge monsters, whilst playing aged Librarians. True, each turn 1 or 2 of them would crumble to dust, but as the monsters won the struggles of madness and death (the 1st two), the old guys would win the 2nd two (readying tapped characters and adding more success tokens to the story, (you need 5 to win)).

There are about 8 different affiliations in the game, and you are more than encouraged to make different experiments with different combinations in your deck (1 or 2 colours being the norm).

At times, in a kinda of odd, more complicated way, I like this game more than Magic. It is not what your creature is that matters, it is what it can do.

Rui's conclusion: By no means a simple game, but with really nice and smooth mechanics. Perhaps one more for fans or more experienced players, but a great one nonetheless.

Arkham Horror

Who knows what evil lurks in Arkham....? The Investigators know!....

Type: Strategy / Board
Players: 1 to about 6

Time to explain to others: About 20 to 30 min

Time to play: A minimum of a few hours. Depending of number of players, 5 isn't unreasonable

Difficulty: To play 6/10, Game difficulty 9/10

Portability: Non-existent. Hundreds of tokens.
Overall: 9/10

Arkham Horror is a name spoken in whispers wherever two or more geeks meet. It is a name spoken in hushed tones, as you hear described how long it took to play, how many were killed by monsters.... And how amazingly fun it was.

The game is set in the Lovecraftian universe, in the titular town of Arkham, Massachusetts. Once again, it looks like the stars are right, for the Great Old Ones are restless in their sleep....

And are about to wake.

And they're hungry.

As the action progresses, portals start to open all over town. From these portals, nameless obscenities are crawling forth, heralding the coming of the End.

The players will have to move one or more characters around the board (both in Arkham and in other dimensions), fighting monsters, closing portals and trying their best not to die. Horribly. In pain. Pretty much forever.

To try and describe the intricacy of this game would be a disservice to it. There are layers upon layers and circles within circles of complexity, that just add atmosphere and depth to the game.

The fact that, like most Lovecraftian games, you feel like you're playing against unwinnable odds, has a tendency to unite players. That's another thing, you HAVE to play cooperatively. Even then it will be damn hard. There are a number of expansions, that introduce a number of SECOND town boards (more fictitious town in the area, like Innsmouth), taking the dial all the way to 11.

Rui's conclusion: Not for the faint hearted, it will last a bunch of hours. Oh you have hours? And a half dozen geek friends? And you're in the mood to go tentacle-busting? Then stop whatever you're doing and play this. Highly recommended.

Elder Sign

Get the Great Old One before it gets you!

Type: Cards + Dice, Strategy
Players: 1 to about 5

Time to explain to others: Oddly, possibly not that much. 20-30 min
Time to play: About an hour, hour and a half

Difficulty: To play 4/10, Game difficulty 9/10
Portability: Dozens of cards, hundreds of tokens. Low.

Overall: 10/10

This, for me, is Genesis. The first few times I walked into my BG shop, I was totally overwhelmed with the offers at hand. Then, on a shelf I saw this. Elder Sign. I had already read some H. P. Lovecraft, and I vaguely recognised the name, so by sheer impulse, I took it.

I opened the box and my heart sank. Dozens, upon untold dozens of tokens. It was like there was no end to them. And of more than a dozen different varieties! I felt crushed. Felt like there was no way I was ever going to wrap my head around this game.

And then, I started to read the manual. Fairly straightforward (starting a good relationship I have still with Fantasy Flight Games, one of the biggest publishers), and accessible. And the Lovecraftian horror started to shine (slither?) through: we are investigators in the Arkham Museum, where strange things are happening. Cultists are using the evenings to collect secret, mystic, cursed artefacts to call forth one of the Great Old Ones, beings of immense majesty and unspeakable horror.

To close the gates and prevent the end of the world as we know it, one or more investigators need to go on adventures, to try and collect mystic runes to seal the monstrosities away. In an adventure, a number of dice needs to be rolled, and a specific sequence of faces needs to be collected. Certain abilites allow you to roll more dice, and to save some rollings etc. Ultimately, you are at the mercy of probabilities: you can roll a die 6 times, but it still doesn't mean you'll roll the 1 in 6 face you want.

As you can imagine, there is much much more subtext to this game. If you lose an adventure, there is a penalty, be it your investigator being damaged and/or smaller monsters appearing, making your adventures even more difficult.

Oh and did I mention that you're on a timer? Certain penalties increase the Doom Track, which as you can imagine, counts the time to pink fluffy unicorns.... Kidding, it counts how close to destruction everything is.

Elder Sign is increadibly entertaining, but frustrating. THE GAME IS TRYING TO KILL YOU. I don't think I ever ever lost by reaching the end of the Doom Track, but I've lost about 80-90% of the games I played by loosing my investigators to either death or madness.

To me, this is what I like about the Fantasy Flight Lovecraftian games. The odds are stacked against you. You are fighting beings from beyond, older than Man, older than Earth, Beings of which the mere glimpse turns humans into gibbering idiots. And what do you do? You put your hat on, pick up some ancient statuette for protection, a gun, and you hit the back alleys of Arkham.

Rui's Conclusion: Deep, random, exciting and entertaining. Elder Sign is one of my top games ever. Complex, with a sharp learning curve, but totally doable, once you play a few times. Also you will die. Loads.