G A M E S.
I'm still in a game playing mood from a few days ago I guess so even before I left work- no- even before lunchtime I was texting M to see if he wanted to play something. When I'm in a serious I'm-willing-to-abandon-all-other-plans-and-responsibilities game playing mood, chances are I'm gonna want to play Eldritch Horror.
Eldritch Horror is a pretty complex cooperative H.P. Lovecraft inspired board game. You choose characters and battle monsters and subsequent other-worldly events while completing various set task... hopefully without going crazy, getting killed, or running out of time before the Ancient One comes for you...
In the base game, there are 12 investigators to choose from, 250 tokens, and more than 300 cards of various purpose- this is no quick game as it takes as long to set up as others take to actually play. M being a big fan of the game and a completionist, has all currently available expansions as well (there are 8). We played with the Mountains of Madness side-board this session.
I'm gonna be honest with you, I'm not sure if I would ever have attempted to play this game if it weren't for M. My patience for instruction reading is pretty low and there's quite a bit to read so it's helpful that I was taught this by someone who had already mastered it and could fill me in as we play. Don't let that discourage you though- its a fantastically involved game, interesting and different no matter how many times you play it, and I like the (admittedly somewhat gruesome at times) game art a lot which, though it doesn't necessarily affect the game play, always improves the experience for me.
Oh it is frustrating at times too, I have to say- we'll occasionally quit a game if we're getting beaten so badly we're absolutely positive we won't win because at that point it's like you're playing Monopoly when you don't get any of the properties you wanted so you'd just go around the board basically giving all your money to the other players (man, I hate Monopoly). Regardless, I'd 100% say it's still a super good go-to if you want to dive into one big, long, glorious game session.
Oh and another thing- if you don't have a decent sized table, this game will be a serious hassle to play. We have to put 2 extra leaves into our dining table to accommodate the whole game. To the right in the above picture is an extra side-board you play with one of the expansions as mentioned above so I guess you could save space by not doing that but it's still a table-filler for sure.
That's a little bit closer up picture of the main board. You travel the world in the course of the game, hopefully picking up new spells, items, or skills on your way to kill monsters and close gates to more gruesome dimensions.
We ended our first game early (we were goners for sure) but started right back up with a new monster and new characters. We're currently in the process of playing this game actually, my dining table is still off limits, and this is my character sheet: I'm Kate Winthrop, scientist.
Another detail shot- lots of tokens! Also, that paper is our current monster to be defeated, Antediluvium. I think I can conservatively say we're doing alright... though it's still early yet.
Oh and see that sweet Cthulhu dice tower there? If you're not familiar with dice towers, you drop the dice in the top and they come out between his tentacles because rolling dice with your hand like normal is not good enough for us. I had my brother in law 3D print it and I painted it for M for Christmas this past year. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out!
Creepy right? I love how the grey-green skin came out especially. M also has a ton of models for all the monsters in the game and I've been meaning to paint them but it seems like kind of an overwhelming task. Painting this guy confirmed that it would be quite the undertaking but also proved I would enjoy it, it's all a matter of getting started. Someday M, someday.
Well M should be home soon and hopefully we'll finish our game tonight (even though the weather is no longer gloomy and horror-game ideal). We've both hit a bit of a stressful time at work, M especially, and as anxious people its good to have something that can take our mind off things and allow us to relax a little.
Happy gaming everyone!
PS- I always accept any fun game recommendations ;)
Ah! This is the smaller version of the game L and I play, Arkham Horror. Yes, it's BIGGER. There's one main game board (about the same size as yours), plus THREE expansions that we always play (Dunwich, Kingsport and Innsmouth). We also have jars of tokens (sanity/stamina, clues, money, doom tokens), and 16 stacks of encounter cards. Plus the Mythos cards, and Other World encounter cards. L and I have played it well over 500 times, and keep stats. It's a game that we only win 25% of the time, but with so many games under our belts, we're now about 40% win rate. We're both really good at it, so it's been easy to invite other couples over (not so much since COVID) and then just let them roleplay and have fun, while we keep an eye on the game.
ReplyDeleteI've played Kate Winthrop (Scientist!) many times. She's the one with the Flux Capacitor or something? It prevents gates from appearing at her location (in our game). We have actually made additional characters for the game:
-Me, L, and 3 couples/6 of our friends are characters;
-Buffy the Vampire Slayer: characters, Big Bads, Allies and Institutions;
-Angel: same, characters, etc.
-iZombie (only the first 2 seasons): characters and Big Bads
-Big Trouble in Little China: characters and Big Bads
We mix them in with the "OG" characters. Arkham Horror is out of print, but it's an awesomely fun game. Our games usually take 2-3 hours, so we try to get 2 in each night on the weekends. It's been wonderful to play during COVID - a great distraction.
By the way, we actually bought a long low coffee table to exactly fit Arkham Horror! And we still need to use 3 small tables on the sides/ends for the extra cards/tokens!
ReplyDeleteOh awesome! Yeah, Arkham Horror definitely seems like it has all the same elements, just slightly different mechanics. We also have Mansions of Madness which again, is basically the same thing but you follow along on the computer (pretty much just makes it so you don't have 10,000 piles of cards everywhere haha) and it has you "build" the board as you go- there's a ton of cool place tiles and that's where we got all the monster miniatures from that I have yet to paint. We keep stats of Eldritch too, on a community google docs spreadsheet, its pretty epic.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I'm still getting the hang of the game to be honest but since it's co-op it's not so bad. I still have occasional "ok so, uhhhhhh, what do we do next again?" moments lol, but I've been getting much better at making my own decisions so every time we play the game gets even more fun for me.
In our game, Kate has that special gate closing ability and monster dispensing action, she's pretty great. She also comes with "Interdimentional study" unique asset which helps with gates too. She really came in handy, this past game she basically solved all 3 mysteries and won the game for us (much to M's chagrin haha). I LOVE that you guys made your own characters. Do you change up who you play a lot or stick to a few favorites? Since M has all the expansions he has so many characters, I haven't really gotten tired of choosing yet and I try to mix up who I play but when that day comes, I'm totally making my own too.
We average about 3 hours per game I'd say but we sometimes (pre covid of course) play this with friends and it quickly becomes an all night affair with all our overthinkers haha. This, Scythe, and Terra Mystic are some of our longest games and they're getting a good bit of action at the moment.
We're going to start looking for a house next year after we get married and one of the requirements is a place with a big enough dining table to fit both games and friends for sure. ;)