Call of Cthulhu: The (Living) Card Game Review

Since I really enjoy Living Card Games (or LCGs), for today's review, I tracked down a copy of Call of Cthulhu: The (Living) Card Game.  And, for the purposes of this review, I will be writing about the game system, but will also be focusing on the core set, to let you know how well the basic game plays without buying expansions.

In Call of Cthulhu, each player is attempting to explore various stories that they have heard about.  At any given time, there will be three stories on the table that you may commit characters to investigate.  Once a player accumulates five "success" tokens on a story, they immediately claim that story, and once they claim three total stories, they have won the game.  However, to get to that point, players must alternate in taking turns.  Each turn consists of several phases, starting with making a character sane and readying all of your other characters and resources.  Then you draw two cards.  After drawing cards, the active player may select a card from his hand to turn into a resource.  Next, the active player can exhaust resources in order to play characters, attachments, and events.  Finally, the story phase begins.  In the story phase, the active player commits their characters to various stories, and then the other player may respond by committing his characters.  Next, each story resolves.  When resolving a story, the players have four different struggles - terror, combat, arcane, and investigation, and then the overall story is scored.  Each of the first four struggles compares the corresponding icons that are located on committed characters.  Whoever loses a terror struggle has a character go insane, the loser of a combat struggle has a character take a wound (and probably die), the winner of an arcane struggle gets to ready one of his committed characters, and the winner of the investigation struggle gets to place a success token on the story.  Finally, with whatever characters are still alive and sane, the players compare total skill on the story.  If the active player wins, he gets to place a success token - if he wins and his opponent's skill is zero or less (generally because they didn't play anyone there), then he gets to place an additional success token.  Play alternates like this until one person acquires three stories.

All these do is marked your drained domains

So, before breaking down my thoughts on Call of Cthulhu, I should probably make you aware of something.  Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, like Arkham Horror, is set in H.P. Lovecraft's world of Cthulhu.  I haven't read anything about this mythos, nor is it something that I care terribly much about.  Honestly, in general, I don't care much about horror themes.  So, my thoughts on this one will be based about the game and how it plays.  I'm sure that someone that enjoys this theme will have a different opinion on it - they may love it more because they like the theme and the artwork, or they may dislike it because they think that the theme wasn't applied well.  Either way, it seemed important to let you know where I'm coming from on this review.

My first pro for the Call of Cthulhu card game is that I really like how resources work in the game.  Resources are based on "domains."  To start the game, you take three cards that aren't being used, and place them face down to form your starting domains.  Then, you draw a setup hand of eight cards.  You keep five of these cards, and you place the other three (upside down) under your starting domains.  Then, each turn during your resource phase, you have the option of adding an additional card from your hand to one of these domains.  When playing cards from your hand, you must be able to "drain" a single domain with at least as many cards as the cost of the card in question.  Additionally, at least one of the resources must match the faction of the card being played.  I really like this mechanic.  First, it prevents you from having to draw specific resource cards (like Magic: The Gathering), but allows all of your cards to be dual use.  Second, I like that there is an opportunity cost to gaining resources.  Presumably, every card in your deck is useful (though this is more true when you build a deck than when you use a starter deck).  Thus, whichever card you are using as a resource was a card that was intentionally selected to go in that deck.  And, instead of getting to play it, you now bury it as a resource.  I enjoyed this balance quite a bit.

Though powerful, rare to actually play

My second pro for Call of Cthulhu was that I really liked the different struggles on the stories.  To me, this is really where the strategy of the game lies.  And, yet, in my experience, there weren't very many turns in which both players committed characters to the same story, and where all of the different struggles occurred.  Instead, it seemed that your opponent having certain characters would deter you from participating in different stories.  For example, if (as the active player) if your opponent had a character with terror icons, but you did not, then you would realize that if you committed a character to a story, then they would be able to counter and drive you insane.  Now, if you were able to commit to several different stories, this might be worth doing, but if you only had one or two characters, you would be better off waiting.  Then, if you played a character with combat and willpower (willpower means that they cannot go insane), then suddenly you have turned the tables.  If you keep that character ready, then you will be able to ignore your opponent's terror attack, and respond by killing them in combat.  I thought these different elements were neat, even if they did wind up turning into a large game of "chicken" more than actually causing direct conflicts.

Now, before getting into the cons, I will mention one thing that I was surprised by about Call of Cthulhu.  The game is really short.  I realize that this will not always be the case - it will depend on what cards you use (and draw), and the skill of the players.  Yet, in all of the games that I played, I don't think any of them lasted ten turns.  Many of the characters in the base set have the investigation icon, and often it seemed best to leave stories unopposed (because otherwise the character you would defend with would become insane or be killed), and thus there would be many turns in which a player would score three success tokens on a story (or even several stories) in a single turn.  That many success tokens can make the game go very quickly.  So, some of the really cool cards that are in your deck (like Cthulhu himself), may never get played because their resource cost is so high.  One of the cards in the game costs eight resources.  He does powerful things, but you would have to put all of your resource cards into a single domain for seven turns in order to play him - and the game would also have to last seven turns in order for that to happen.

Playing this greatly tips the game in your favor

Now for the cons.  I didn't find any of these cons to be detrimental, but they are definitely still worth mentioning.  First, some of the cards in the base game seemed to cause one player to (essentially) instantly win.  The cards are very powerful, but I hesitate to say "overpowered" because I haven't played it enough to make that judgment, and because I know of cards in the base set that can counter them.  But, if you aren't using the faction with that counter card (or don't draw that card immediately), then there won't be much you can do.  For example, one of the cards (when committed to a story) inflicts a wound on every other character committed to that story.  Well, if you keep him for defense, then you will basically be able to kill off all of your opponent's characters that they commit to a story each turn.  This will give you a major numbers advantage, and probably win you the game.  There are ways of countering him - driving him insane, or taking away his text.  But, if the person who plays them also gives them terror icons, then they can no longer be insane, and instead they just wreak havoc all over their opponent.

The other con that I have for Call of Cthulhu is fairly common for customizable or living card games.  There is a lot of ambiguity.  It would have been really helpful if the rulebook had a glossary, or at the very least an index.  There are some rules that are buried in unexpected places, and with the number of different cards wording things differently, it would be nice to easily look up what an "ability" is - does this include passive abilities, or just triggered abilities?  Instead of putting a glossary (or index) in the back of the rulebook, they included seven pages of advertisements for other Cthulhu products (with the back of the rulebook being an ad for The Game of Thrones living card game).  As a player, I feel that this space could have been used more productively.

Overall, I give Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game an 8.0/10.  I thought the game was enjoyable, and that people who love the theme could really get into this one.  I was glad to get to play it, thought it wound up as my least favorite of Fantasy Flight's living card games - but that is more of a testament to how good the other games are than a knock against this one.  And, since I'm only willing to invest in a few of them, I will probably pass this one along in a trade in the future.

If you are interested in living card games, make sure you check out Android: Netrunner LCG, Star Wars LCG, and Lord of the Rings LCG.

Arkham Horror Review

When getting together with my sister and brother-in-law, it is a time for playing games.  This time, they brought one, and so I got to play Arkham Horror.

In Arkham Horror, each of the players takes on the role of an investigator attempting to determine what is causing the influx of monsters into the city of Arkham. When doing this, the investigators will often encounter monsters which they will either need to sneak past or fight, and will also be sucked through gates and find themselves in other worlds. Fortunately, if they can find their way back from the other world, they will have the opportunity to close (and maybe even seal) the gate that led them there - thus preventing more monsters from escaping from that world for a short time. If they are able to seal enough gates or close all of the open gates, then they are able to ward off evil and restore peace to Arkham. If they become too overrun with monsters, then they will either be destroyed or have to fight the supreme evil monster in an attempt to restore peace.

Arkham Horror had several definite pros. The first pro was replayability. The game provides you with enough different investigators and supreme evil monsters (or whatever they are called) to play the game through several times without it feeling the same. The supreme evil monsters are also different enough and affect the game just enough that they prevent the feel of repetition (as opposed to a game like Castle Ravenloft where the game is the exact same until you get to the final monster). In addition, there are enough random monsters, items, encounters, etc that, though you will probably see the same ones several times if you play repeatedly, you will not feel like you know them all (until you play it a whole lot - but that happens with every game).

The next nice aspect of Arkham Horror is that it is a very challenging but still possible to defeat cooperative game. This is a very difficult balance to reach, and shows that a lot of play testing has taken place. Many cooperative games are far too easy, which causes players to lose interest; many other cooperative games feel impossible, which has the same effect. Arkham Horror seems to be one of the games that has struck the difficult to achieve balance between challenging yet possible.

However, it is not all roses and sunshine in Arkham Horror (ok, well, it is a horror game so none of it is roses and sunshine, but you get my point). The first aspect that detracts from the game to me is the length of time to play. Our first game took 5.5 hours, and the second one took "only" 2 hours (because we were completely decimated by the game). I think that if we were to continue playing this, it would average around 3.5-4 hours. This is a very long amount of time for most gamers, and so it will probably cause you to wind up playing this game less than most of your others.  Plus it is difficult to keep my attention for quite that long, and, in fact, during the 5.5 hour game I found my interest occasionally waning.

The next negative aspect that I found in Arkham Horror was that the encounters were a bit too random. The more you play the game, the more familiar you will be with the potential encounters, which will help solve this problem. However, when we played, we would have "Other World" encounters that could range anywhere from helping you gain Sanity, Clue Tokens, etc, to causing you to almost instantly die. It seemed very difficult to actually prepare your investigator to go into the Other World in an attempt to close a gate. This detracted from the strategy side of the game as you wind up just going to the Other World and hoping that you can make it, whether your character is at full health or about to die - it took luck to successfully make it through either way.

Overall, I give Arkham Horror a 7.5/10. I debated this score anywhere from 7.0-8.5, as I think that some people will love the game and others will be less excited by it. I think that the two major things that will turn people off from Arkham Horror are the length and genre of the game. If these things don't deter you, however, then I would say you should try the game. If you really like the horror genre, I would also recommend Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is semi-cooperative and can be played quite a bit faster.

As a final note, if you like zombies and horror themed games, you might also check out Nightfall, Resident Evil: Deck Building Game, and Zombie Dice.

Betrayal at House on the Hill Review

For the first review from the horror genre, its time for Betrayal at House on the Hill.

In Betrayal, each of the players takes on the role of an explorer that is wandering around an old, creaky, haunted house. While they are wandering around, "scary" and "ominous" things begin occurring. They may run into a room where blood is pouring down the walls, they may encounter a family of skeletons, they may enter a mystic elevator, fall through the floor, find a secret stairway, or many other things. During this time, all of the explorers are on the same side, but because they don't trust each other much, they are trying to improve their character with items and stat bonuses because, eventually, an ominous event will occur drastically altering the rest of the game. (What actually occurs here is that certain rooms have an Omen icon, in which the player will draw an Omen card, and then roll several dice. If the total on the dice is lower than the number of Omen cards in play, then the "Haunt" begins). When the Haunt begins, one of the players will suddenly betray all of the other explorers (or die and take on the roll of the monsters - the determination of who is the traitor depends on which Omen started the Haunt and which room it was found in). The traitor will take the "traitor's tome" instruction manual, and the explorers will take the "survivor's guide" instruction manual, go to different places, and read the scenario from their character's perspective.

This leads directly into the first pro of Betrayal: replayability. There are about 50 different scenarios in the game. In some scenarios the house may be alive, Dracula or Frankenstein's monster may come out, you may be playing chess with Death, ghosts, mummies, vampires, etc. may be involved. For each of these scenarios the explorers and the traitor have their own rules about what they are trying to do in order to defeat the other side, and each has its own win condition.

Thus the second pro of Betrayal: the scenarios are well done. Each one plays very differently, and the concept that one side does not know what the other side is trying to do is an innovation that I had not seen in games other than Betrayal.

Now for the cons: First, since there are so many scenarios, each with different counters (for a total of approximately 8,000,000 counters give or take 7.5+ million), the amount of time spent looking for the correct counters can be somewhat frustrating. Secondly, since each side only knows their own rules, there can be situations in which the players don't necessarily know if certain things are legal - and so it is useful to have someone that is familiar with the game present to mediate these disputes.

Overall, Betrayal at the House on the Hill gets a 9.5/10. It is by far the best game of the horror genre that I have ever played. (Full disclosure - I don't play horror games especially often, and I only tried this one because I found a new copy of it for $3.) I highly recommend this game to anyone who is comfortable playing a game of the horror genre, but if you don't want to read cards that are about blood on walls, skeletons, zombies, etc, please don't bother with the game, because I know that the subject matter of the game can make people uncomfortable.

If Betrayal at House on the Hill sounds interesting, you might also check out Cargo Noir, Glory to Rome, and Battlestar Galactica.