First Impressions of Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu

If you’d prefer to read a full review, we now have one up on the site here! It’s by a different author though, so if you read this article too, you’ll get double the perspectives!

The stories of H.P. Lovecraft have been used and abused for so long now that you would have thought I’d be hardened to it. Those stories are not about beating up monsters, they are about the existential terror at discovering how unimportant humanity and our petty squabbles are in the face of a vast, unknowable, indescribable cosmos. Please, point me to a board game that captures that feel, because Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu doesn’t.

It’s a race to prevent Cthulhu from being awakened, which will happen once the last of the Elder Gods cards running across the top of the board are flipped over. These cards add effects that make your life slightly harder, and are thematically associated with any number of monsters and Old Ones from the mythos. Shoggoths (the unstoppable terror at the heart of the Mountains of Madness…) occasionally pop up to wander about, and a multitude of cultists will spread across the towns of Lovecraft’s New England like a rash. You’ll be running around bopping them on the head.

Ok. I don’t like the theming, but that’s because I’m being a Lovecraft snob. If you aren’t, you can definitely have a lot of fun with this game from the mechanics alone. Of course, they are based heavily on Pandemic (as you’d expect) but there are more than enough differences to give the game its own feel and challenge. The random Elder Gods cards mix things up as I mentioned, you need to manage your sanity and, rather than separate diseases, you are trying to seal gates in each sector of the map so you can never “eradicate” the cultists… but sealing those gates makes travel harder.

The Shoggoths that appear in response to “epidemic” cards become a moving threat that needs to be dealt with before they pass through a gate. Yet being near them risks driving you insane. You start with a certain reserve of sanity that you can gamble with; approaching a Shoggoth to kill it, using a gate or a relic (“Event” card), all require you to roll the sanity dice that rarely does anything other than bad stuff. The punishment for going insane? The permanent loss of one of your actions, not nice in a Matt Leacock co-op!

The game is still obviously Pandemic, and it won’t do anything to appeal to you if you didn’t like the original Pandemic. There is still the same potential problem with alpha gamers, and it adds a theme that will be a big hit with geeky gamers, but a massive dud with their families, most likely. It is a beautiful game though, with some neat miniatures and lovely artwork. It does capture its theme (in the modern sense of the Lovecraft theme… grumble, grumble).

After just one play, I don’t want to make full recommendations but if you like the idea of Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, you’ll probably like the game. And if you aren’t offended by the theme but like Pandemic, definitely give it a try! It does offer some nice twists, but it is still Pandemic under its gribbly veneer.