Board Game: Reign of Cthulhu

It's tentacle time!

The Game: Reign of Cthulhu
The Publisher: Z-Man Games
Time: 30-45 minutes
Players: Me, Michelle, Yannick, Gus

Game Play: Reign of Cthulhu is basically Pandemic except instead of disease ravaging the world, it's Great Old Ones. But the basics of the game are very similar: Everyone has a role, each role has a special ability, and a lot of the abilities are similar in effect to the ones in Pandemic. I played the Hunter, f'rex, who can clear out all the cultists in an area with one action, much as the Medic can in Pandemic. Everyone gets four actions per turn, which they can use to move, clear disease cubes cultists, hand over clues or relics to other players, or seal a gate by discarding five the right kind of clue. So far, so familiar. 

Gus shaking their fist at Great Old Ones

Likewise, the Great Old Ones and their flunkies behave much like the diseases. Everyone turn players draw cards, and if they get an "Evil Stirs" card, they reshuffle the already-played location cards to add more cultists. If you run out of cards to draw or cultists to place, you lose.

Our intrepid band of investigators at the train station

But there's new stuff too! In addition to cultists, we have Shoggoths. They don't get placed as often (only when an Evil Stirs comes up, for the most part), but there's only three and, like cultists, if you can't place one you lose. Plus, if you enter a space with a Shoggoth, you make a sanity roll. The sanity die saps one or two points of sanity, but each investigator only starts with four, and if you go bananas you lose an action every turn and your special ability changes. For instance, when the Hunter goes insane, every time she enters a city with no cultists you roll the sanity die, and any sanity-loss result means you add two cultists. You can cure insanity, but it requires closing a gate, and that's not easy to do quickly.

Shoggoths menacing the investigators!

Also, see those cards up at the top of the board? Those are the Great Old Ones. Under certain conditions, one of them awakens and either has an immediate effect ("add a Shoggoth", maybe) or an ongoing effect ("all gates require one more card to seal"). If you reach the end of that track, Cthulhu joins the party and you lose!

We lost that way

Opinions: It's very easy to take a popular game, change the set dressing and virtually nothing else, and call it "new" - hell, Munchkin has been doing that for years. Pandemic managed to insert the Mythos into the Pandemic format and have the game feel familiar but different enough that it genuinely feels distinct, and the new mechanics work with the existing system rather than making it hard to remember which is which. I think it's a good implementation, and given that a lot of other Mythos-inspired games take hours and hours to play (looking at you, Arkham Horror and Cthulhu Wars), this is a welcome addition to the ol' game closet.

Even if the tentacles did get us

Keep? Yep