A Beginner’s Guide to Cthulhu Wars

Wade: I remember the first time I saw Cthulhu Wars....

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Great article! Cthulhu Wars is a fantastic game and is one of my group's biggest hits. It helps that one of the people in my group is a completionist who has spent entirely too much money on it.

Black Goat and Ithaqua forever.

Not needed. Correct answer is: "All of them."

Seriously, though. We're tinkering around with a follow-up piece that goes into more detail on the expansion factions, although the upshot is basically the same: put Ancients and Tcho-Tcho somewhere near the back of the queue.

Excellent work y’all.
My buyers guide would be the original onslaught 1 factions, high priests, and Yuggoth. A 5-6 player map if you need it. Toss the rest. All of the neutral stuff seems awesome but it’s just clutter and if you have Azathoth you get some of it anyway.

Great writeup guys.

Michael Barnes wrote: Excellent work y’all.
My buyers guide would be the original onslaught 1 factions, high priests, and Yuggoth. A 5-6 player map if you need it. Toss the rest. All of the neutral stuff seems awesome but it’s just clutter and if you have Azathoth you get some of it anyway.

I'm surprised you changed your mind on this. You had previously mentioned that you thought the game was kicked up a hell of a notch all of the neutral options as it became more crazy and Cosmic Encounter-ish.

I'm kind of in between that thought and your current disposition. We like using neutrals or a new map every other play or so.

@Charlie

You know what, when I had access to like, everything it felt that way at first. We played a few games with mix and match stuff and it did seem to have that kind of systemic volatility like Cosmic.

However, I noticed that playing with more stuff caused interest to wane...because the mix would start to show some of the seams of the design, or it would insert a new learning curve. Games would have those moments where nobody noticed some combination or it would just slow things down.

There’s already quite a lot to keep track of and manage, and the addition of the neutral stuff just sort of junks up an otherwise clean and focused design. The neutral expansions don’t add depth or narrative...they are just kind of more for more’s sake.

But I still do like the Azathoth set for when I do want those neutral elements. It keeps the concept focused and feels like part of the original design, not something tacked on to it.

Sadly, I think they really jumped the shark with the expansions- which I don’t think would have happened outside of a Kickstarter setting. Instead of meaningful, impactful, and incremental expansions the game for saddled with a lot of filler. OS3 was almost laughable. When it got to those survivor characters and the Ancients or whatever, I had no interest.

High Priests is still a good one and it DOES add some depth. And there again, it feels more integral to the core design.

The few times we added Neutral GOOs, I can tell you it never made the game more fun.

That’s really the heart of it. Once the frisson of having a new element wears off, you realize that the game wasn’t made better...it was just more for more’s sake.

I mean; this IS a KS game after all...

That's kind of been my feeling, even not having played the neutral stuff. I look at what some of them do and it sounds cool... and then I remember that most of the spellbook progressions are so tightly designed that taking a round to bring in a different GOO really takes away from the course that each faction is really trying to stick to. It doesn't mean that you have to play the same way each time you play Yellow Sign, but it is a huge step outside of what you'd normally do to take a round to summon Yig, for example, and I'm wondering if the return is worth that risk.

I think the creatures/horrors that are summoned by paying with Doom points may be an acceptable risk, but that's something I'd have to know by actually trying it. High Priests are something that should have been part of the base game, IMO. I always teach it with them added in, because the flexibility that they give even brand new players is something that I think actually eases new people into the game, rather than functioning as something else to remember.

I will argue for the Ancients, however. They're very cool. They just function totally differently from the other eight factions, but they are still a player faction with the same rules and requirements, and I think that makes them worthwhile.

We like the Ancients too, much more interesting than Tcho-Tcho.

I don't completely agree on the negativity concerning neutrals. They certainly add a learning curve which is a pain, but we've had several games where they actually opened up new strategies for factions which was very interesting.

Last game we had Nodens form a sort of Stronghold, beefing up Crawling Chaos' defenses and allowing them to hold 3 gates when near the lead. It forced us to look to a different attack route and form a temporary alliance.

I do agree though that they're the last thing I'd add.

As mundane as it sounds, I would love to sit down and watch a game with Charlie's group, just to see how it differs with the groups I have played with. I think it would be super interesting.

I love having full articles to reference when I look into getting into big system games, this article is great. Otherwise, I usually have to do a lot of forum search mojo.