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Overburdened by the eldritch contortions of its own rules, it still might be a worthwhile attempt to save us from the Great Old Ones.
I've played a lot of Tiny Epic games; the entire series, in fact. I've also played a lot of H.P. Lovecraft/Cthulhu-based games. At present, I have no less than six of them of a variety of types sitting on my shelf. So, when Gamelyn Games announced Tiny Epic Cthulhu as an upcoming project in late 2023, my response was... more muted than you might have expected. As I said, I've played a lot of Cthulhu games and a lot of them are not good. In many cases, it's just been an excuse for a publisher to cloak their underwhelming design with an incredibly popular public domain property (e.g. free to “license” in most cases.) Or it's simply been a way to cash in on the fandom, as Matagot attempted when they announced a “Cthulhu” faction for Kemet: Blood and Sand (which was roundly criticized in a moment of community sanity (ahem.)) As fond as I am of the TE series, the idea of using that somewhat-overused IP didn't thrill me. But, again, I am an HPL fan and I am a TE fan, so it was almost an automatic signing on to their usual Kickstarter campaign.
Part of what attracts me to the TE series is Scott Almes' general elegance of design. One of the most fascinating games in my collection will likely always be Tiny Epic Western, for its odd fusion of worker placement, direct interaction (duels), and poker(!) that all flows together as easy as you like. Tiny Epic Mechs isn't about bashing each other with giant robots. Instead, it's both a planned movement game and a highly-tactical positioning game, which is another combination that's not normally seen because it would normally be very difficult to pull off, but Scott did it. So, my expectations for TE Cthulhu were along those same lines. I wanted to see what approach he could take that would make the game, just like its brethren, a design unto itself, unlike the erroneous assumption that so many make about them as simply “tiny” versions of other notable games. Well, it's safe to say that TEC is not like many other games, despite being largely about set collection, and it's also safe to say that somewhere along the lines, the “elegance” got devoured by a Gug or something like that.
First off, I have to acknowledge that my general feeling about the game is complicated by the outright awfulness of the rulebook. I've seen people complain about Gamelyn's rulebooks on BGG and I've always been baffled by said complaints. If you actually slow down and read all of the words, there's nothing wrong with the vast majority of them. Some of them, like Tiny Epic Dungeons, might be a bit on the onerous side but, again, if you actually read them, everything that should be happening on the board is right there. TEC is, uh, not that way. There are multiple gray areas and seemingly contradictory segments in the rules and they were aware that they had produced a rather complicated beast, given that they included a flowchart of the game's tentacle progression that actually confuses the issue more than helps it. You may have gone too far when your explanatory tool only makes things worse. That “tentacle progression” is the main issue.
As you might expect, given the nature of the Cthulhu mythos and the monsters therein, tentacles are a thing that most readily associate with HPL's tales so Gamelyn dove right in here. There are five different tentacles in the game, three of which (Madness of three types) work in generally the same fashion and two of which (Eldritch and Chaos) both have their own unique execution when drawn from the bag. All tentacles when out of the bag largely accumulate on tracks, both on the player mats and on the town mats showing where you can move on the board, but also on the Shambler mat which holds the monsters that actually hit the streets in this game and on the Discard mat which is the “extra step” between all of the rest and the bag that they're drawn from.
The system is essentially this: You draw tentacles from the bag. Those tentacles go on the various town mats. If one of those tracks has too many to hold (three spaces/tentacles), all of them go to the Shambler mat to wait until something else is triggered to put them to the Discard mat until something else is triggered to put them back in the bag. Why does that sound like at least one step too many? Well, I’m guessing that an earlier design of the game moved too quickly and failed to provide a real sense of tension. If the Madness tentacles from the town spaces just went right back in the bag, you'd be just cycling through them over and over. What happens when they go to the Shambler mat is that they're removed from the cycle, which means that you're more likely to draw Eldritch tentacles which contribute to the strength of the Great Old One that you're trying to seal off from our world. Getting them off the Shambler mat and then on to the Discard mat and then back to the bag is usually a boon for the players, since it not only dilutes the Eldritch tentacles, but also provides the players with more resources by which to enhance their own abilities: Greed tentacles mean you can pick up more tentacles off the street with one action; Fear tentacles mean you can move faster (farther); Rage tentacles mean... you can move more tentacles of the appropriate color from the Shambler mat to the Discard mat when you banish a Shambler…? Remember that thing about ‘elegance’? Yeah. It also doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, no matter how prehensile yours may be.
In some ways, this feels like more game than was really necessary to make the edifice function, similar to Molly House. But if you look at the whole process (which takes a play or two to get right. Hopefully.), you can see that the presence of the Discard mat is probably essential to make the game have more meaningful decisions than it otherwise would. When you’re saving the universe from an ancient demon god, meaningful decisions are important, yo. But when you’re sitting down to play a game that you’d expect to finish in an hour or so…? That’s when you start running into trouble. Just like with Molly House, the path by which the system functions isn’t intuitive because multiple scenarios of tentacle movement are so similar that you’ll be regularly referencing the (awful) rulebook to try to make sure that you’re doing the right thing. This can be complicated by the aforementioned gray areas, such as that involving the fifth kind of tentacles: Chaos.
Drawing a Chaos tentacle is almost always a positive thing in the first phase of the game. Not only can they be spent to take extra actions (you’re normally limited to three on your turn) but they can also be used as wild cards when spending tentacles to translate pages of the Necronomicon, which is the purpose of Phase 1 of the game. Achieving that will bring you into Phase 2, which is to seal the gates by which the Great Old One is attempting to invade our reality. Translating the Necronomicon (Klaatu… varada… N-ghmfrrm!) will also dump a ton of Chaos tentacles into the system, where they’re normally the rarest of finds. But every time one of your tracks on your player mat is Accursed (too many tentacles to fit on the track (only 2 spaces on the player mats)), you discard your tentacles (to the Shambler mat!) and your Delirium rises, which means you’re going insane. Akin to Cthulhu: Death May Die, going insane has benefits in that it gives you more rerolls on the dice (used to banish Shamblers and seal gates) but if it happens too many times, you’re eliminated from the game and the players lose. But your Chaos tentacle track getting Accursed doesn't actually drive you mad.
On p. 12, the rulebook explains that when one of your Temperament tracks (Greed, Fear, Rage) becomes accursed, you move your brain token up, signifying your increasing mental instability. But there are four tracks on the player mats, one of them being Chaos, and on the back of the rules in its attempt at a condensed turn guide, it lists Chaos as one of the “Temperament tracks.” But on p. 11, it says that the “consequence” of the Chaos track becoming Accursed is merely to discard your Chaos tentacles as “punishment enough”, unlike the others which activate the GOOs ability or boost its strength. That implies that you don’t advance your brain token for Chaos tentacles. This is important because after translating the Necronomicon, there are more Chaos tentacles in the game than any of the Madness types (17 to 15), which means it would be extremely easy to draw multiples in Phase 2 and lose the game instantly when someone goes insane. In fact, it happened to us… before we discovered the casual quote on p. 11 that implies that you’re not supposed to do that. So, yeah, if you really want to go insane, try reading this rulebook three or four times.
Needless to say (because, well, I’m saying it), I didn’t come away from my first couple plays feeling positive about this game. In fact, it was about thisclose to going on the trade block like so many Lovecraft/Arkham/Cthulhu games before it. But, in the interest of giving it (and Scott) one more chance, I played again and, somehow, it clicked. The progression of tentacles to Shambler mat and then Discard mat still feels clunky, but at least it finally felt far more like the flowchart in the rulebook implies. It still feels more like exercising the gameplay process than playing in the world(s) of HP Lovecraft, but at least the gameplay felt more sound. One of the most prominent aspects of the seeming lack of theme in the play is the process of banishing Shamblers. You’re doing so to prevent their tracks on each town from becoming Accursed (again, three spaces like the tentacles) as, each time that happens, another Eldritch tentacle goes from the town to the Discard mat and later, of course, into the bag to be drawn. But banishing a Shambler just returns them to the Shambler mat... where tentacles of the appropriate color are pushed from the Shambler mat to the Discard mat. Since you’ve just seemingly destroyed a rather exotic-looking monster, it’s hard not to feel a bit underwhelmed by the results of (presumably) risking life and limb to save your fellow townsfolk from the creatures menacing their streets. In the context of general game types. it's way more "Euro" than "Ameritrash" which isn't really the perspective that most would have about Cthulhu-style games.
As you might expect from a game like this, there’s a selection of Investigators with different abilities and a selection of GOOs with likewise. There’s the Doctor and the Astronomer, who both help with tentacle draw or collection and there’s the Historian and the Detective, who make it easier to translate pages and so on. The GOOs range from the obvious (Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep) to the less well-known (Yig, Atlach-Nacha) to the downright obscure (Basatan, Mormo.) Plus, the five town mats are double-sided. The same location is on each side, but there’s a different ability that you can exercise on each one. This is standard TE replayability in action. The visual design is solid and about as standard Lovecraft as you’re going to get (shadows, eerie lights, strange symbols.) The main highlight in that respect is, of course, the spinner. The spinner is just what it sounds like: something you flick with your finger to find out what broad effect the game begins each player turn with and where the next Shambler is going to appear in town. The absolute wailing furor when this was announced was something to behold, as so many were convinced that it simply wouldn’t function properly (like Parker Brothers games of yore) and how it would impede gameplay and how it might be “imbalanced” (In a cooperative game…) Regardless, it works fine, even if it’s a little awkward to use when reaching across a large table and the base has a nice rubber pad on the bottom so that when you flick the spinner, it doesn’t go across said table. They took a production risk and it worked, which is a Gamelyn standard going back many years.
So where am I on this game? Well, for the moment, I’m holding on to it. Now that we’re to the point where we’re (relatively) certain that we have the procedure in hand, I’d like to try a few more of the GOOs and alternate town abilities and so on. It doesn’t quite have the Cthulhuian shine that would endear it to me in the way Lovecraft Letter has or Arkham Horror once did, mostly because it’s dragged down by the very mechanical process that is the game itself. But there’s enough tension and interesting choices present that I’m willing to delve its mysteries for a bit longer. I’m not sure how many others were as patient as I was with it. To his credit, the staffer responsible for the rulebook construction has been on the BGG fora talking about additional player aids that they have in mind to make the learning process easier, as well as noting the object lesson of just how difficult it is to write a rulebook that everyone will understand. Sounds like a translation issue…
