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Eldritch Horror: The Game That Changed A Genre Forever
- SuperflyPete
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I’m going to start out by stating that I, personally, am a huge H.P. Lovecraft fan. No, not the shit games about Lovecraft stories, I mean that I’m a huge fan of his writing. Because of that, I’ve sought out games that would recreate the existential dread that you imagine the characters in his stories felt, and to date, only Arkham Horror has come close, but even it missed the mark substantially. What I really feel when playing Arkham is disgust and pain because it’s such a pain in the ass to set up and play. You have to remember so damned much when you play it, and if you don’t have a super-experienced person “running” the game, things will absolutely go sideways in a hurry. It’s too complex, arguably for complexity’s sake, and subsequently has too much garbage going on to allow some players to really appreciate the story that’s being told by the game. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the fact that with 4 players, it can be a long, long, long game. Like Risk, the reward isn’t proportionate to the amount of effort required. I want to love it, but I just can’t. Thus, for years I prayed that a game would come out that would capture some of what I felt while reading the stories, but to no avail.
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Lost in Time and Space. Miss-a-turn mechanic in 2014, really.
Eldritch Horror is the epitome of the Derlethian Mythos "Indiana Jones with Tentacles" genre that you're claiming it isn't. There is almost no existential Lovecraftian Horror in this game. There are space-boggans you shoot with shotguns while jumping through a portal to another world.
Oh and hey, you can only take a train after walking, never before. What?
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I own way too much Arkham stuff to even want to try Eldritch.
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That being said, I think FFG has the market cornered since each of their big Lovecraft games all offer something different. Mansions is the intimate, spooky, investigation of a single location. Arkham Horror is tentacled madness run amok in a small town. Then Eldritch is the big globe trotting conspiracy of the grandest scale.
I think the main big thing is that most people that love these games will admit that they ALL need an expansion to fix something with the base game. Most people don't want to play AH without the injury and madness cards from the Dunwich expansion. EH needs more cards at all of the locations and as Pete suggests...Forsaken Lore is a must. Mansions has the Call of the Wild expansion which is like MoM 2.0. Then you get more combat cards in Forbidden Alchemy. Regardless you'll need at least one expansions for more scenarios/replaybility.
Eldritch Horror is FFG at their best in game design though. It's big, rich, meaty gameplay that isn't bogged down with little hidden rules or fiddly bullshit. It's like a well oiled machine that grooves along without any noticeable hitches. They run the risk of ruining that with expansions, so I hope they're careful in that aspect. EH is off to a terrific start though.
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- SuperflyPete
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JEM wrote: There's nothing clever about picking a new character. As a story driven game focused on characters, telling the player that your previous disposable pawn is now replaced with an equally disposable pawn works against any sense of narrative or investment in the character. It's not so bad in Elder Sign because that game doesn't ask you to invest in a story about your character, being a lighter dice-chucker.
Lost in Time and Space. Miss-a-turn mechanic in 2014, really.
Eldritch Horror is the epitome of the Derlethian Mythos "Indiana Jones with Tentacles" genre that you're claiming it isn't. There is almost no existential Lovecraftian Horror in this game. There are space-boggans you shoot with shotguns while jumping through a portal to another world.
Oh and hey, you can only take a train after walking, never before. What?
Apparently reading isn't working out for you. Try this:
text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/
It’s got to be hard to make an interesting game that has no real direct conflict, and that is more about trying to get the hell away from the realization that there’s something malignant in the universe and that it has a name. So, what we’re left with is a bunch of wankers trying to kill or banish something more infinitely powerful and eternal than the human mind can truly comprehend. I think one could certainly make a “Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective” type game that gets the theme truly right, but most people never read Lovecraft and think that “Mi-Go” is some reference to turn order. So, this myth that Lovecraft is about heroes beating up an Elder God seems to persist in the minds of players, and much to my dismay, with designers. But perhaps this is an argument for another day, so, I’m going to shut up now and get back to the review.
THIS. This is the point - you can't easily make a game about being scared of something that's out there, but you don't really know what it is. So, this takes the theme and makes an interesting, exciting, tense game. It does the only thing I think you can do with it - it takes the "mythos" part and creates a narrative with it that "feels" as close to Lovecraft as you're going to.
You WALK to the train station, don't you? Get out of you car, walk to the station, buy a ticket, then ride the train? Unless, of course, you happen to own a car on the train where you can both run a boat right up the ramp onto the rail car, or drive your car up on a rail car...SOLVED.
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In addition, any game in which you can kill a shoggoth with a shotgun is a perversion of Lovecraft's stories. Yes, a Lovecraft game should play more like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, but they're more Indiana Jones than they rightly should be.
Honestly, a game like this, I'd rather play Pandemic. At least the expansions change the game significantly. One turns the game from cooperative to competitve as one player acts as a bio-terrorist. Another adds a separate game developing a cure from samples taken from the field. I'd be very surprised if FFG changes the formula as radically as that.
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SuperflyTNT wrote: THIS. This is the point - you can't easily make a game about being scared of something that's out there, but you don't really know what it is. So, this takes the theme and makes an interesting, exciting, tense game. It does the only thing I think you can do with it - it takes the "mythos" part and creates a narrative with it that "feels" as close to Lovecraft as you're going to.
You WALK to the train station, don't you? Get out of you car, walk to the station, buy a ticket, then ride the train? Unless, of course, you happen to own a car on the train where you can both run a boat right up the ramp onto the rail car, or drive your car up on a rail car...SOLVED.
I read perfectly well, I just disagree with you. Lovecraftian Horror? No. It's Indiana Jones with tentacles, shotguns, bags full of elder signs. It's Pandemic with monsters on the map instead of cubes, gates instead of outbreaks and some rote text on cards and dice to chuck. Maybe that is all a board game can do, but I hope not.
On the second point, you also walk from the station. And that ticket you bought three turns ago has nothing to do with it.
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