Games
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Getting past my general reluctance about dice games, this turned out about as well as well as could be imagined, as long as you're cool with occasional disaster.
I don't like dice games, per se. This is, of course, coming from a formerly dedicated player of almost every minis game that Games Workshop ever produced. But there's a difference between "dice games" and "games that use a lot of dice." The former are those that use the dice (usually special ones) as the central pillar of what the game is about. The latter are those that use the dice as the enabler for all of the other mechanisms that make up the game. Talisman is a roll-and-move (enabler) but no one would describe Talisman as a "dice game." In contrast, King of Tokyo is a "dice game" because the central activity of playing the game is rolling dice to see what your monster can do/achieve/destroy/consume. As tempted as I have been by King of Tokyo over the years (I'm a born sucker for "variable player powers" as it's titled on BGG; please don't get me started on the overuse of "asymmetric", as I might hurt someone), I've never pulled the trigger because I never really liked the idea of depending on the chaos cubes to be able to do anything in the game. It just doesn't strike me as fun. As willing as I was to spend untold thousands on fancy models and the paints for them, there are so many other factors that go into being a successful GW game player that the dice really didn't concern me. The best 40K players in the world aren't that because they're the luckiest people on Earth. They just know how to limit the influence of the dice on what they're trying to do in the game. It never seemed like that was really possible in games like King of Tokyo, so I avoided them.
But Elder Sign was another one that kind of tugged at my heartstrings. I'm an H.P. Lovecraft fan beyond any doubt and have many games based on his writings sitting on the shelf. Recently, I was presented with an offer to pick up the whole package of Elder Sign in one fell swoop; the base game, Unseen Forces, Gates of Arkham, Grave Consequences, Omens of Ice, Omens of the Deep, and Omens of the Pharaoh. So, I took it. Since then, I've been playing a lot of it, as you might expect and have developed some thoughts, as you also might expect from me. So, I figured I might write up some of those thoughts about the game as a whole and why it has struck me differently than many other dice games that I've tried (including KoT) and what that means, if anything.
First off, let's get one thing straight: Most dice games involve d6s, as they're known to the D&D-aware. Those are six-sided dice and each of those sides have something different on them, in most cases. In the case of Elder Sign, those six sides are: Investigation results, signified by the magnifying glass, of levels 1, 2 or 3; Lore results, signified by the scroll; Peril results, signified by the skull; and Terror results, signified by the pile of tentacles. Those are the green dice which are the basis that will always be used in a game of Elder Sign. There are six of them and that number will not increase. It may, however, decrease and there are two other dice (red and yellow) in the base game that you often add to your rolls. But the real thing to notice there is that each side is different, just like a regular 6-sided die that you'd find at a craps table. You know why I don't play craps? Because the odds suck. If you need one result on that die, it's a 1 in 6 chance. In other words, about 17% of the time you'll get the roll that you want. That's bad. And it doesn't quite double with two of them, as the math says it'll get to about 30% to get that one result you need. That's still bad. With three dice, your chance increases to a whole 50%. A coin flip. That's still bad.
Now, recognizing that Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson are both experienced designers, they understood that math, which is why half of the faces of the green dice are Investigation results which are usually positive for the players and only one of them is a Terror, which is generally negative (until you really need it-!) But the complicating factor for those Investigation results is that you usually need several multiples of them to get what you want, so you're still often banking on specific results (the 3 Investigation face, for example.) But that's called risk, which creates tension, which for many people that don't enjoy Agricola, means fun and, in the end, I think Elder Sign became a coherent enough design that led to fun. Another thing that put me off it for so long was also that it's a cooperative game, like so many in the Cthulhu/Lovecraft genre. I'm not a regular fan of those (even if I am willing to write thousands of words about another Cthulhu co-op that I am quite the fan of) so the bar is generally set higher. That reluctance probably explains my unwillingness to engage with Elder Sign until 2025 when the game stopped being published in 2018. But I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong and this was, indeed, one of those times.
First off, for anyone that played the vast majority of Fantasy Flight Games' Cthulhu/Lovecraft output, this game is fully within that domain. It uses/recycles most of the Investigators from games like Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror, so anyone who enjoyed playing "Ashcan" Pete and Jenny Barnes in those games can do so here. (It, uh, also recycles the art assets for all of them, too, so ease of recognition-! I really hope their royalty system was worthwhile...) Likewise, if you liked squaring off against the usual crowd of things like Azathoth, Hastur, and Yig, all of them are here, too, with the same artwork denoting their presence. Having sold my full copy of 2nd Edition AH years ago, this was a trip down memory lane for me to some degree. But, like most of FFG's productions, all of said Investigators and Great Old Ones also have different abilities ("variable player powers!") that impact the game in a variety of ways, so the replayability angle is in full force. However, in the base game, all of the action is taking place at the Miskatonic University Museum, so those hoping to hang out at places like Hibb's Roadhouse and Ye Olde Magick Shoppe might be a little disappointed. (That comes later. Expansion!) Indeed, having discovered that everything we were doing was contained in just one building in Arkham gave me not-especially-great-Ben-Stiller-movie vibes. But, whatever. That's something that you'll generally forget about as soon as you start running into location/exhibit cards.
As with most FFG productions, the variety of those exhibit cards are one of the key factors in turning the game from an exercise in odds to a story, which is the root of not only games based on the stories written by Lovecraft, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and others but the "Ameritrash" genre, in general. A lot of people shy away from games in that overbroad and outdated category because they're "too random" but, again, the risk created by things like dice is what gives them their tension and, thus, the fun for many gamers. Also, see note above about learning to hedge the odds. If you go in depending on 6, 7, or 8 dice to hit 3 symbols, those odds aren't especially great but they're not awful, either. The ability to use spells and items, as well as Focusing a die (reserving a desired roll for a subsequent attempt at a task) tends to shore up those tough areas and make them achievable. And that's where the game ran into some trouble, according to most fans.
See, a lot of people shy away from dice games for the same reason I do, which is that it's less fun just rolling dice without some kind of other meat to the game process. But a lot of people also shy away from them because they're either not conscious of the odds of dice or they feel like dice games are "too random" and, thus, too hard. Among the 48 exhibit cards in the base game, there aren't a tremendous number of difficult ones. Indeed, in our first three or four games, where we played just the base set and Unseen Forces, we not only didn't lose a game but didn't even come close to losing. And this was regardless of which GOO we played against, from those suggested as Easy like Azathoth and Hastur to those listed as Hard like Ithaqua and, of course, Big Man Himself, Cthulhu. So, I think that Wilson and Launius might have undertuned the game a bit in anticipation of that perception of the randomness of dice making things "too hard." And, in all honesty, only 48 main location/exhibit cards isn't a huge amount to keep people playing, either.
But one thing that does help the replayability angle of the game is that factor that tends to identify most "Ameritrash" games in the first place: the ability to tell a story. Elder Sign uses a turning clock and Mythos cards to continue to apply different forces to the general conditions of the game; many of them being negative. The more players you have and, thus, the more abilities and items and chances to succeed that you have, the faster that clock is going to turn and the more Mythos cards will be revealed. That alone can end up telling the story of the game, no matter which GOO you might be facing and how many times you might have gone to The Security Office or found that Something Has Broken Free or discovered The Key to Beyond. Again, in the same way that rolling dice creates tension, the constant tick-tocking of the clock also provides some tension, as many cards are tied to the clock striking midnight in true Cinderella fashion.
So, I'm going to explore a bit more in the next couple parts. In part II, we'll talk about Unseen Forces, which was mostly a content expansion, but also introduced a new mechanism in the Blessed/Cursed dice, and Grave Consequences, which was kind of a minor expac that changed the results of being killed or going insane to something less terminal and more flavorful. We'll finish with the expansion that changed the game, Gates of Arkham. To many players, the latter made the game what it was supposed to be. In part III, I'll cover the three Omens expansions, that range from the Arctic wastes to the south Pacific to the Egyptian desert.
