Let’s start off the New Year with our first #newboardgametuesday. (I will eventually come up with a snappy hashtag for that but right now all the good ones are leading to places we definitely don’t want to go.)
Cthulhu is always appealing to us over here. The catch is, it is a bit overused and often just tacked on to a generic game to sell a few more copies. Look how many popular games have a Cthulhu edition. But this game is built around the creeptacular, Lovecraftian mythos that is Cthulhu. It hovers between deck builder, tile laying game and RPG and does it eerily well. Our first try was filled with chaos and death…and we can’t wait to try again. Your character continues on battered and insane from one challenge to the next, campaign style, so choose wisely. How many games have you terrified of tentacles reaching up from the risers on the stairs? Wondering what would be digging its way out of the cellar floor?

2nd – (2 player rating) Being a co-op, I can imagine that this would work well with any relatively small number of people but with two? This game was quick and extremely challenging. 5/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

S – (setup/takedown/instructions) This is where this game suffers a bit. Setup, especially the first time, is fiddly at best. The cards are numbered but the numbers are so microscopically small, that reading them was exhausting. The cards need to be returned to numerical order after play (with the exception of those in your character decks) in order to make setup possible for the next round. Once you’ve run through the setup once, I’m sure that it will run much more smoothly but it is a long process. 3/5 🌟🌟🌟

T – (tactile, components, artwork, etc) The artwork and components are what we’ve come to expect from Fantasy Flight games. Solida quality. Appealing art. The spice text on the cards and in the books was genuinely frightening, and is what makes the game veer into RPG/storytelling territory. Moving through the story, exploring the rooms, playing through the encounter cards, was deliciously tense. 5/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

A – (action, mechanics, general gameplay) This is a combination, card game, area exploration, deck building horror game. While there is luck involved (blind draw of situations and ghouls, etc) your actions and choices have very definite consequences. 5/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

R – (replay factor) The replay factor is average with this game. You would be going through the same scenarios, the spice text would remain the same, but the creatures and challenges you’d face would change every time. Also, it’s a campaign style game, making it unlikely that you are going to play the same scenario in back to back plays. 4/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Final Thoughts – We held onto this game for longer than we should after PAX Unplugged before playing it. We watched reviews. We watched tutorials. It all seemed a bit complicated. Don’t make that mistake. Put it on the table, follow the setup and just dive in. It is very intuitive and you’d be missing out on some creepy good fun by procrastinating. If you are a fan of Lovecraft, this is one of the best thematic applications that we’ve played. Exciting, tense and a good time – and that’s with our characters not even close to surviving. 4.4/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟