RogerBW's Blog

Halloween 2015 Eldritch Horror 08 November 2015

For Halloween properly this time, Eldritch Horror again. All images are cc-by-sa.

The scenario was Syzygy, from the Strange Remnants expansion. This is rather more conventional in form than the King in Yellow we played last time, with gates and monsters.

Last time I found I was mostly in a support role, so this time I went for a more active character: the Astronomer. He immediately started boosting his Lore, and picked up a highly useful Ally (not to mention a cute one).

We had a lot of ups and downs (particularly when we all got Cursed), but ended up holding the game to a draw: we solved the final mystery, but the Doom track ran off the end on the same turn.

It's not a game I'd bounce up and down demanding to play, but it's still good fun. (I think Firefly occupies the "huge over-complex long game" slot in my life.)

A prototype next, a sort of multi-player Sudoku. This suffered slightly from poor visibility of numbers on the laser-etched pieces but definitely looked promising.

Red 7, naturally; it's the one I'm currently carrying to any event where games are likely to happen. It's still difficult to explain but we got the hang of it quickly enough.

Finally Thunderbirds which felt… very like a Matt Leacock game. In fact, specifically, very like Pandemic, including the sense of "if we had exactly one more action we could survive this". That's not a terrible thing: lots of people love Pandemic, even if I've sold my copy because I felt I'd played it to death.

It does suffer from a mismatch of theme to action: why should "scanning" move disasters back down the Track of Doom, and why should it matter whether there's a space along the Track for them to move into?

Definitely not one I'll be going to buy, but I wouldn't mind trying it again.

[Buy Eldritch Horror at Amazon] [Buy Strange Remnants at Amazon] [Buy Red7 at Amazon] [Buy Thunderbirds at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

See also:
Boardgaming at home, August 2015

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