Eldritch Horror
Some blessed person in FFG's otherwordly cult decided that the city of Arkham wasn't enough for their Lovecraftian adventure games, and as a result, they released Eldritch Horror in 2017. Instead of surveying the dank streets of Arkham, Eldritch Horror takes you to the entire world in an Indiana Jones-esque quest to stop those pesky unknowable entities from beyond space and time from using your reality as a fleshlight. Eldritch Horror uses a lot of the same mechanics of Arkham Horror, only the scope is much, much larger. Gates encompass entire cities, a productive turn of moving around can take you from Cape Town to Mexico City and, as always, the game will heap atrocious amounts of hate on you.
It's not quite as difficult as Arkham Horror but it is in many ways better than its cousin game - It plays faster, is less fiddly and has even more flavor than Arkham Horror. The mileage-may-vary issue is that the game is fucking stupid, like a Lovecraft-inspired B-film. Your characters may kill mobs of Zombies, two Deep Ones and a Baykhee with a single stick of Dynamite, the encounters are entirely random and makes it sound like the evil cults are on literally every street corner, and best of all, you characters gets so fucking mangled, indebted, tortured and generally ruined that losing them feels like a mercy. On the other hand, some lucky card draws can make the game much easier and make you feel like Sly Marbo outfitted with the Necronomicon, a .44 Winchester, several packages of Whiskey and a raging hard-on for the destruction of the abominations beyond space and time.
This section was borrowed from the wiki page on Arkham Horror. It's an apt summary, but why not give it its own page?
Indeed, imagine a game where you're basically playing a Scooby Doo Gang of random 1920s archetypes, trying to prevent motherfucking Cthulhu from trying to bust in and wreck Earth. If you're lucky you'll end up with a gang consisting of an almighty wizard, a mystery solving clue-sniffer akin to Sherlock Holmes and a blood-drenched murdur-hobo who'd make even Ash from Evil Dead blush. Of course, if you're unlucky the player characters will constantly be at deaths door, on the run from evil cultists (Not the fun kind) and cthonic horrors trying to destroy the world.
In fact, don't imagine it - because that's what this game is about. And lets face it, you likely being a fine and well-cultured Intelligen/tg/entleman, the idea of playing a dapper 1920s Indiana Jones kind of guy, armed with a whip and a .45, going up against demons for great justice should be all you need to hear. I mean, who wouldn't want to do that?
Welcome to Eldritch Horror, where good characters go to die screaming as tentacle horrors from the great beyond eat their bodies and minds.
Basic Info
So ya, as you might have figured from the above, then the game is basically a more advanced version of Arkham Horror, another game by Fantasy Flights Games. It has a buttload of tokens and a total of eight expansions, easily requiring several pack mules to haul everything around. That said, the insane amount of content in the game makes for near infinite replayability, as the different old one boss monsters, wide array of assets you can acquire and fearsome array of demons and cultists you can fight will mean that you'll never play the same session twice.
You play the game via a whirlwind of globe-trotting, mystery-solving, gate-closing and monster slaying, all the while trying to make your character stay alive and at least mildly not-too-insane.
Setting
Ever heard of H.P. Lovecraft? If you have, then you'll fit right in. If not, consider polishing up your lore of the Cthulhu Mythos. Ancient 'Old Ones', dark gods and strange cosmic creatures from a bygone age are returning to Earth, cultists everywhere are welcoming them with open arms and bloody sacrificial daggers, and you gotta stop them. With the game set vaguely in some pre-ww2, post ww1 time period, you can have encounters in Rome where you have to flee from fascists or attend a show by Houdini in Buenos Aires to learn how to perform real magic. The game contains quite a lot of period-accurate references to people who lived in that period, so you can attend a lecture by physisist Enrico Fermi so confusing you get sanity loss, or dick around Arkham to engage in fisticufs with Deep Ones around Innsmouth.
Mechanics
You play a character, that character has stats. Combat with monsters and encounters revolve around stat-tests where you roll a number of D6s for how large the relevant stat is. For most tests, a single success will suffice no matter how many dice you roll, and a 5 or 6 is a success, unless you have a Blessed condition, then its 4 to 6 - or if you're Cursed, then its only a 6. If you have an encounter that says test Lore -1, and you have a lore stat of 3, then you roll 2 D6 and hope for the best. You can never have a stat roll reduced to less than one d6.
Equipment and other buffs your character can get can allow for a near endless mix of rerolls, adding +1 to a dice result, having 6s count as two successes and so on. You want these.
Your character has a limited number of health points and sanity points. Your characer dies or goes nuts if these hit zero - and it can happen fast. Luckily its possible to get spells that allow for casters to undo limited health and sanity loss, or boost recovery, or do pretty much anything else. Spells generally serve a supporting role in the game, allowing for casters to conjure up clue ressources for to player characters, teleport people around the game board, buff stats and generally help out. Rolling badly when casting a spell is roughly as bad as crit failing casting a spell in FATAL, at least for your character, and can be just as messy. Protip: Equip your casters well for lore rolls.
Gameplay
The game is setup with the large game board and picking an Old One as the big bad of the game. You can draft it or pick a specific one. Some are vastly more difficult than others, which can be seen by how many Mysteries you need to solve to win the game. Easy ones require 4 mysteries, average difficulty is 3 mysteries, the really nasty ones require only two - and do not make the mistake of thinking that the 2 mystery ones are quick and easy. Hastur, for example, has mysteries that requires the player characters to catastrophically debuff themselves with multiple madness conditions before it can be solved.
With the expansions, some bosses introduce extra game boards such as the Mountains of Madness in Antarctica, the Eqypt board where you can enjoy tea time with mummies and dark egyptians horrors, or the Dreamlands board where you can truly learn how stretchy your mind and body is as you journey to Unknown Kadath.
A turn of the game has three primary phases, where the players take turn doing their thing for one phase, then everyone moves to the next phase and so on.
- Action phase
Each character can perform two actions per turn. This can be move one space, prepare for travel by buying a ticket which can extend a travel action, buy new stuff, rest to recover health, sanity and heal injuries or madness conditions. You can do any given action only ONCE per turn, unless the character has special abilities that allow for something else.
- Encounter Phase
Here the characters will battle monsters, and if there's no monsters left on their space - or none to begin with - then they have an encounter based on their location. Different major cities and other key location tend to have encounters that, if you pass the skill checks, reward you with specific stat buffs or types of loot. Rome for example is a good place to go for Blessed conditions, while Buenos Aires is the place for Ritual type spells, including the ever-useful teleportation spell which can make or break a game.
Monsters are fought by first rolling your Will stat against the monster's horror rating. If you have successes equal to or larger than than the rating, you lose no sanity. Then its your strength stat against the monster's damage rating, if you beat you take no damage. If you get enough strength successes to match the monster's toughness rating, it's defeated. Epic monsters will have absurdly high horror and damage ratings, but certain types of gear can lower these. Epic monster toughness ratings usually read as "Player count + 2", so their difficulty scales with the number of players. Plan your combat encounters accordingly.
Weapons and gear can boost both your combat strength and will stats quite a lot. It's not uncommon to have enough strength buffs on a combat-focused character to roll 10 or more D6s on a strength roll. It should be noted that a character cannot get a stat buff from two of the same thing for the same stat. If you have two Weapon type assets that give buffs to strength, then only the biggest buff apply. Same applies for will and other states. However, you might also have buffs from an Ally type asset, a Trinket, a Tome, a glamour spell and so on. They're fine as long as there's not two of the same type of item giving a buff to the same thing with the same wording. An item saying "You can roll one more D6 for strength tests in combat" is not the same as an item giving just flat +1 strength.
It can get messy to track all the buffs and whether the items that only give you one reroll per round have been used or not. Try to keep your character sheets and inventory well organized, it'll make for a smoother gameplay experience.
- Mythos phase
This is the phase where all the characters and the players bend over, drop their pants, and recieve the tender love of the Old Ones as they get their turn. The composition of the mythos deck of cards are unique to each Old One, and with enough expansions you'll never run into the same build of mythos deck ever. Some Mythos cards are marked with a white icon denoting it as an easy card that might actually see the players buffed or rewarded, while cards with crimson tentacles will easily molest your characters to the point that even Slaneesh would be like "Dude, chill" by introducing some decidedly Dward Fortress flavors of fun.
The game rules explicitly state that a way to control the difficulty level of the game is to chose whether or not you have any tentacle-level mythos cards in your game. These things can end a game in an instant. Enjoy.
So... why the fuck would I want to play this?
Come on, the prospect of being wrung inside out ass-first by a young and curious chtonian sounds fun, doesn't it? And afterwards you can take your turn jamming six sticks up dynamite up one of its sixteen buttholes and blow it up! It's all in the give and take. Good team strategizing is key, and doing so well can make the game a rollercoaster of awesome, as you make nail-bitting dice-rolls for the fate of humanity. The amazing flavor text in the encounters can pull you into the game as if playing D&D with a god-tier GM. Complex encounters with branching paths can lead to ruins or riches, and you won't known until you roll the dice. I hope you've save up with some focus tokens for extra re-rolls.
With all eight expansions you'll have access to over fifty characters, each allowing for wildly different stats and play-styles, and with clever planning you can combo the abilities for hilarious near game-breaking exploits. But don't be fooled: Outside of outright cheating while playing the game, then everything is fair in the fight against the Old Ones. I don't care how many times you make the hobo chug that can of 'dubiously recycled' holy water you keep making him dig out of the trash, you will need it for that Blessed condition you keep losing every mythos phase.
Also, for the love of all that is holy, NEVER TAKE A DARK PACT. This means you Jon, you unholy fucktard.
| Board Games | |
|---|---|
| Classics: | Backgammon - Chess - Go - Tafl - Tic-Tac-Toe |
| Ameritrash: | Arkham Horror - Axis & Allies - Battleship - Betrayal at House on the Hill - Car Wars Clue/Cluedo - Cosmic Encounter - Descent: Journeys in the Dark - Dungeon! Firefly: The Game - HeroQuest - Monopoly - Mousetrap - Snakes and Ladders - Risk Talisman - Trivial Pursuit |
| Eurogames: | Agricola - Carcassonne - The Duke - Settlers of Catan - Small World - Stratego - Ticket to Ride |
| Pure Evil: | Diplomacy - Dune (aka Rex: Final Days of an Empire) - Monopoly - The Duke |
| Others: | Icehouse - Shadow Hunters - Twilight Imperium - Wingspan |