Hiew's Boardgame Blog: Cthulhu Wars session report

A guest post from my long-time gaming kaki Han who now lives in Johor.

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5-players Cthulhu Wars session over Chinese New Year

Factions in play:

Great Cthulhu
Crawling Chaos
Yellow Signs
Opener of the Way
Sleeper (me)

Everyone started at the designated place, Opener choose East Africa as their opening area.

All have played before but it has been some time ago, none are expert.

Most factions started expectedly by opening gates; usual opening moves are 3-4 gates before things get interesting. The arms race was started earlier, so most faction had 3 gates initially. No one tried to steal early gates as we were still trying to familiarise with the game. Yellow Sign (YS) player opted for 2 gates and summoned King in Yellow to begin their great journey early.

Crawling Chaos (CC) being a combat orientated faction, started building their armies and getting crucial spell books easily. They had early skirmishes with Cthulhu, with [Invisibility] and [Abduct] negating Cthulhu’s defences. They quickly had a 6 gates advantage, and jumped ahead in Doom points but this also painted a huge red mark on themselves. Everyone started targeting CC and later on, they were reduced to 2 gates and lost most of their cultists although their army was still sizeable.

I think for this game, Nyarlathotep only managed to use Harbinger twice, once bringing down Cthulhu and one time killing Yog-Sothoth (when it sacrificed itself by entering Nyarlathotep’s space to fulfil Opener’s last spell book requirement) ; more combat should be better for CC. [Madness] is always a good ability to disrupt enemies pieces and place them in awkward positions. [Thousand forms] was only used once, the CC player forgot to use it in later rounds, and these are the problems with playing this game infrequently, you tend to forget the abilities you actually possess.

I think Cthulhu itself also did not do combat enough, Submerge is like a tactical nuclear war head that can target anywhere, the threat of it is tangible, everyone stays out of water; only CC built 2 gates in both North and South Poles.

High priest expansion was used in this game, only Sleeper / Cthulhu used them, (which is odd, as High Priests are considered essential, I guess the game was so tight, none could spare the power to summon one. Cthulhu used its High Priest on the last turn effectively, prolonging the threat of the submerged Cthulhu, waiting for everyone to run out of power, eventually Cthulhu High Priest was sacrificed for a Dream ability to grab a gate.

Opener dispersed its forces widely but played 1 crucial rule wrong, he thought Pained unit could not upgrade (Million Favored Ones). He did use his Dragon Ascend/ Descend nicely getting him 15 powers and 8 Doom points. Opener tried several gate kidnap tactic [The Beyond One faction ability] but the first was thwarted by Sleeper’s [Cursed Slumber] ability. [Channel Power] (reroll failed rolls) was not used, [Dread Curse] (the only ranged attack in the game) was used late in the game, it’s good at killing things but unfortunately killing things itself is not going to earn Doom points. Opener was hampered by low power generation the whole game.

Sleeper did not do much other than turtling for the most early part. It is difficult to get spell books as Sleeper. Tsathoggua came out in 4 rounds, did not managed to build a good army, was killed twice (killed by Cthulhu & Hastur) and re-awakended using Serpent men’s ability to copy Cthulhu’s power (reawakened with 4 power and 1 elder sign). I let Tsathoggua die to get elder signs because there is no other way for Sleeper to get elder signs. Otherwise, Tsathoggua with his buddy wizard using [Energy Nexus] can always escape as long as he has at least 1 power. I never had enough power to properly start a cycle of Energy Nexus/ Capture Monster combo (good at capturing lightly defended gates). I completely forgot to use Lethargy ability of Tsathoggua (Action cost 0, does nothing), it will be very useful to act only when everyone is out of power.

YS player managed to stay under the radar and later snatched away victory by getting a lot of elder signs. 2 Great Old One will get 2 Elder Signs when performing ritual.

Late game, all factions managed to unlock their 6 speed books. With unlimited battle, the tempo of game changed, it should have more battles during this stage but everyone was busy performing rituals, the power level was very low, in the end most GOO was left unawakened (no power to resummon them after their demise) and not many battles were fought.

YS won. All hail the King and He who is not to be named.

This game session took 4 hours, including half an hour of setting up, refreshing the rules, scrambling for components (because I left another box containing tokens, spell books and markers)

This game has so many extra factions, different map expansion, different neutral monster/ Terror/ Great Old One …. definitely rewards repeated play.