There is a whole wide world outside of Arkham

Put simply, Eldritch Horror is Arkham Horror on a global scale. In Arkham Horror, players are concerned with gates to other worlds opening and sinister creatures coming through them. In Eldritch Horror, the gates are just a small part of a much larger problem, as players take on the roles of investigators scouring the globe, desperately trying to stay one step ahead of the Ancient Ones and their unfathomable plans for the world.

It's easy to imagine that at one time Eldritch Horror may have been developed as Arkham Horror 3.0. The themes and game play are very similar, and a lot of the rules feel like attempts to streamline Arkham Horror. This could have been seen as the only option for a game that is slowly collapsing under the weight of all its expansions. Whether that's true or not, the game's designers wisely chose to make Eldritch Horror a separate but closely related game.

Eldritch Horror does an excellent job of being different, yet similar. The game takes a more global view of the Cthulhu mythos, which is more in line with Lovecraft's original "The Call of Cthulhu," a story which spanned locations from Louisiana to New Zealand. The whole scale of the game is larger, with locations representing cities and regions, players using influence to gather assets (rather than buying items with money), and encounters depending on whether a location is a major city, a site of archaeological interest, or an area of significance to the Ancient One (chosen from among four different options at the start of the game).

Each Ancient One's nefarious plans are represented by a series of cards detailing tasks that must be accomplished by the players in order to move the game forward. One down side we've discovered in our (admittedly limited) game play so far is that it is far too easy to get distracted by side quests and just exploring the world. Many of the side quests cause the players to lose if they are not resolved, so they can't just be ignored. The game's Doom track (similar to Arkham Horror and Elder Sign) creates a time limit which does a great job of increasing the dramatic tension, but it also means that spending too much time exploring can cost you the game.

Comparisons to Fortune and Glory, Flying Frog's globe spanning game of 1930s adventure, seem inevitable, and while Eldritch Horror is certainly similar, the grim Lovecraftian tone of it is enough to make it feel like a different gaming experience.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) We're enjoying the game so far, but we've only played it a handful of times and we haven't managed to win yet, so our opinion of the game could change after we spend some more time playing it.

• Eldritch Horror official website
• Eldritch Horror on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 19, 2014

UPDATE June 22, 2015: Another look at Eldritch Horror

You don't always have five hours to play Arkham Horror

Arkham Horror is one of our all time favorite games, but we will be the first to admit that playing it demands something of a commitment. It's a huge game with a ton of components, and it takes a long time to play, especially if you have a lot of players. There are eight expansions for the game, three of which extend the board, and playing with even a few of them adds quite a bit of complexity. I can't imagine trying to play with all of them at the same time.

These things are what make Arkham Horror such an amazing, immersive experience to play, but they can also be very daunting. Sometimes you want a trip into Lovecraft country, but maybe you don't want to stay there all day. For that, there is Elder Sign, a nifty little dice game that plays a lot like a scaled down version of Arkham Horror.

Players take on the roles of familiar Arkham Horror characters combating a selection of otherworldly Ancient Ones, but this time the tentacled monstrosities are menacing a museum rather than an entire town. Six cards are played to the middle of the table, representing different locations within the museum. Each one features a series of tests which must be passed by rolling a handful of dice with different symbols depicting investigation, combat, forbidden lore, and terror. If the dice you roll match the symbols required by the test, you move on to the next one; if you fail, you get to roll again, but you lose one die from your pool for each subsequent attempt.

If you pass all the card's tests, you win whatever reward it indicates. These can be equipment or spell cards, gateways to other worlds, or treasured Elder Sign tokens, which the players as a group need to amass a certain number of in order to win the game. Failure (by running out of dice) can lose your investigator health or sanity, add monster tokens to the table, or add Doom tokens to the Ancient One's card; if the Ancient One amasses a predetermined number of Doom tokens, it awakens and challenges the players to a probably hopeless battle for the fate of the world.

Like any good cooperative game, Elder Sign is difficult, but not impossible. We played two games with Yog-Sothoth as our Ancient One; we lost the first one, but we managed to win our second game, although we went through six characters over the course of the game.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Elder Sign has all the basic elements and theme of its more complex older sibling, but is a lot simpler to play. It will never replace Arkham Horror, but it is an excellent alternative.

• Elder Sign official website
• Elder Sign on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 17, 2014

This dungeon looks familiar

I hate to admit it, but Fantasy Flight Games sort of tricked me into buying DungeonQuest. We're big fans of their Runebound game, and the Fantasy Flight edition has a Runebound logo on the box. I picked up the box at my local game store thinking it might be a new expansion for Runebound, but upon closer inspection, realized that the logo on the cover says "a game set in the Runebound universe." It's actually an entirely different game, and a reprint of an old Games Workshop board game originally published in 1985.

So what does "set in the Runebound universe" mean, exactly? Well, in fairness, DungeonQuest does include extra components that allow the use of its six player characters in either Runebound or Descent, which also takes place in Runebound's mythical land of Terrinoth. It also means they can re-use artwork between the three games, as well as in Rune Age and Rune Wars, much as they often draw upon the huge library of artwork from Call of Cthulhu: the Card Game for use in their other Lovecraft themed games.

It is also an excellent example of the value brand recognition. If I had thought it was just another dungeon crawl game, I probably wouldn't have even looked at DungeonQuest. As it is, the Runebound connection intrigued me, and I took a chance on the game.

As it turned out, we really enjoyed the game. DungeonQuest is similar to Runebound in that it is a race to the finish with minimal direct player interaction, so it's not very confrontational. Each player explores on their own, and whoever escapes the dungeon with the most treasure is the winner.

Players start in opposite corners of a blank board, drawing random tiles as they explore, revealing rooms, corridors, and the occasional bottomless pit, cave-in or giant spider-web. Cards are drawn to reveal different types of encounters such as exploring a room, searching the dead body of a previous adventurer, or raiding a tomb. Some tiles or cards reveal stairs to the catacombs, a dark sub-dungeon that is explored via its own deck of cards, with periodic exits that cause the explorer to pop up in a random part of the dungeon.

The goal of the game is to gather treasure, either by finding it along the way, or by making for the dragon's lair in the center of the board. The lair offers up much more valuable treasure, but it also has its own dangers: every turn a player stays to loot the dragon's treasure increases the chance that the dragon will wake up.

It's not all happy-go-lucky exploring though; there is a time limit. Each round, a sun counter advances along a track at the edge of the board. When it gets close to the end, the players have to start rolling a die to see if the dungeon doors slam shut, trapping everyone in with the dragon. This creates a lot of drama towards the end of the game, as players grapple with their own greed while deciding whether to keep looking for treasure or get out while they still can.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) DungeonQuest is a relatively simple game that gives players plenty of decisions to make, but with enough randomness that the game doesn't ever get boring.

• DungeonQuest official website
• DungeonQuest on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 12, 2014

The first 40 games: by the numbers

If you're joining us late: we're a married couple who spend a huge amount of time playing tabletop games. As a result, we have a fairly large collection of games, many of which we never seem to get out and play. So over the Thanksgiving 2013 weekend, we decided that we should make an effort to play every game in our collection. To avoid playing all our favorites first, we decided to play them in alphabetical order, or as close to it as we can, given the player and time requirements of some of the games on the list.

We've played the first 40 games on our list, which puts us one third of the way through...or at least it would, if the list didn't fluctuate from time to time. There were 120 games in our collection when we started, but there are currently 126. There may be a few games that we will quietly get rid of before their turn comes up (in fact, there already have been), and we will certainly get more new ones before we're done, but we're not going to re-name the blog every time we buy a new game.



Out of the 40 games we've played so far, we've given four of them a perfect 5 out of 5 rating. It may or may not be a coincidence that all four of them are published by Fantasy Flight Games.

• Age of Conan
• Arkham Horror
• Battlestar Galactica
• Call of Cthulhu: the Card Game

Thirteen games earned a 4 out of 5 rating, twelve earned a 3, and nine earned a 2. Most of the twos serve as an example of why we're doing this in the first place; some games just aren't as fun as you remember them being.

Only two games have earned a 1 out of 5 rating: The Big Cheese, which is a small enough package to have been overlooked during our occasional game purges, and Doctor Who: the Game of Time and Space, which I keep for entirely sentimental reasons, even though it really is a terrible game. Chrononauts came close to getting a 1 for its sheer wasted potential, but its somewhat interesting solitaire variant saved it.

Seven of the 17 games that received a 4 or 5 rating were board games, and four were collectible card games (five if you count Blue Moon, which, while not collectible, employs a similar theme of each player customizing their own deck from a pool of cards). Only two were stand-alone card games (Bang! and Cold War: CIA vs. KGB).

Two of the three tactical miniatures games we played, Aliens and Dreamblade, got a 4 out of 5. Although I'm not sure Crimson Skies really got a fair shake, since it suffers when compared to other, newer air combat games like Star Wars: X-Wing and Wings of War.

The oldest game we've played so far was 221B Baker Street (our edition is from 1978), and the newest was Castellan (2013).

Our lingering affection for collectible card games is obvious: we've played eight of them so far (nine if we're counting Blue Moon), and only one received a score lower than 3.

• Call of Cthulhu: the Card Game (5 out of 5)
• Aliens Predator Collectible Card Game (4 out of 5)
• Anachronism (4 out of 5)
• Blue Moon (4 out of 5)
• Deadlands: Doomtown Trading Card Game (4 out of 5)
• Conan Collectible Card Game (3 out of 5)
• Doctor Who Collectible Card Game (3 out of 5)
• Dredd: the Card Game (3 out of 5)
• Battlestar Galactica Collectible Card Game (2 out of 5)

It is interesting to note that Call of Cthulhu was the only CCG we gave a perfect score to, and it is also the only one so far that is still in active production. This bears out the idea that a steady flow of new cards is an integral part of this kind of game, and perhaps explains why collectible games tend to disappear from the gaming public's consciousness the minute they go out of production.

So that's the first 40. We can't wait to see what the next 40 look like!

Why wouldn't there be a Judge Dredd card game?

The late 1990s and early 2000s really were an interesting time for gaming. Magic: the Gathering had taken the games industry by storm, and as a result, the market was flooded with dozens of collectible card games. You would have been hard pressed to find an active science fiction or fantasy intellectual property that hadn't been made into a CCG, so with its distinctive setting and cast of characters developed over 20 years (and in spite of the terrible 1995 film), Judge Dredd must have seemed like a natural to get the CCG treatment.

Detailed in the pages of Britain's 2000 AD Weekly, the world of Judge Dredd is one where humanity lives in giant mega-cities and the law is in the hands of the Judges, who dispense swift justice by acting as on-the-spot judge, jury and executioner. In Dredd: the Card Game, each player controls a team of five Judges; crime cards are "reported" to the center of the table from each player's hand, and then assigned to each player's team. Players then take turns adding locations and criminals from the Dredd universe to each crime. When a crime has both a location and a "perp," it can be investigated by the assigned player.

In true Judge Dredd fashion, players first attempt to intimidate the perp into coming along quietly, and if that doesn't work they enter into combat. Occasionally a game effect will remove the location from the crime, thus leading to a "chase" while the player waits for a new location to be played on the crime.

The criminal characters have signature crimes which make them more difficult to defeat when they are attached to certain types of crimes, so much of the game's strategy lies in sticking your opponent with the right combination of crime, location and perp so as to make it difficult for him to solve and score points, while at the same time clearing your own case load as quickly as possible.

The game is true to its source material in that it is definitely a game about catching and punishing criminals, and the artwork and lore on the cards definitely bring the Dredd comics to mind. Players can choose to focus their decks on street judges or psychics, but other than that there is little variety in deck-building or game strategy, so it tends to feel like the same game over and over again.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Not a bad game, especially if you're a fan of Judge Dredd, but not one with a great deal of variety to it.

• Dredd: the Card Game on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 11, 2014

The spice must flow

Avalon Hill's Dune board game, based on Frank Herbert's science fiction masterpiece and published in 1979, has achieved a kind of cult status among gamers. The game has been out of print since 1984, which adds considerably to its mystique, with copies selling online for $100 or more when they can be found at all. Fantasy Flight Games tried unsuccessfully to reprint the game in 2012: they were able to obtain the rights to the game from its original designers, but were unable to acquire a license for the Dune content from Frank Herbert's estate. They instead set it in their Twilight Imperium universe and published a revised version of the game as Rex: Final Days of an Empire.

The game play is relatively simple: each player controls one of six interplanetary factions from the novel, and attempts to take control of three or more of the five stronghold areas on the board, which represents a map of the planet Dune. Players control areas by shipping army units into play, and if two players have armies in the same area they fight it out.

The combat system is one of the many unique things about they game. When a battle breaks out, each player secretly bids a number of the units they have available in the contested area. The player who bid the most units wins the battle and wipes out all of the opposing units, but the winner still loses all the units he bid as well. So a player can't bid all of his units if he wants to stay in control of the area after the battle is over. Players on either side can use a leader to add to their total in the battle, as well as weapons to try to take out their opponent's leader and defenses to protect their own leader. Players also have access to treachery cards which can affect the results of battle, and at the start of the game each player randomly chooses one opposing leader as their traitor; if your opponent reveals your traitor as their leader, you automatically win the battle.

In addition to fighting over territory, players can collect spice from randomly determined areas of the board, which gives them the resources they need to pay for more troops. Even that isn't as easy as it sounds, as there is a roving sandstorm that moves around the board and wipes out everything in its path unless it's protected by rocky terrain or a stronghold.

At certain points during the game, the legendary sandworm appears, and players have the opportunity to form alliances. Players in an alliance share victory, although their victory conditions are a bit harder. More importantly, allied players can help each other out. They can't combine their armies, but they can pay for each other's army shipping, make use of each other's traitors, and they can use their faction's special ability to help all the other players in their alliance. For example, the Spacing Guild gets to ship armies to Dune for half price, the Atreides get to peek at Treachery cards as they are being distributed, and the Harkonnens start with four traitors rather than one.

Each time a new sandworm appears, players get the chance to withdraw from alliances and enter into new ones. For most of the game's hardcore enthusiasts, this wheeling and dealing is the real point of the game, and what sets it apart from other, similar empire building games.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) An intriguing and compelling game, but it really needs a full table of six players to get the most out of it.

• Dune on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 4, 2014