Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu Review

Matt: In an exciting and unforeseen turn of events, we have a new author on the site today! Say hello to Robin, but don’t look too closely lest you be driven mad…

Robin: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a game in possession of a good fortune must be in want of Cthulhu.”

I read that somewhere, or something like it. At least it applies in this case: when you’ve designed the most successful co-operative game ever, what could it possibly need to improve it? That’s right, Cthulhu!

Thus we live in a weird world where Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu exists. A game inspired by real science makes its first foray into horror fantasy – is the final result a perfect marriage of the two, or a match made in eldritch hell?

Note: Matt, your usual reliable guide through the perilous woods of game rules and reviews, was too busy wrestling with a dark tentacled mass of eyes to write this. So instead, allow yours truly to take your hand and lead you on this night-time adventure – and don’t mind the hump on my back, the streak of red in my eyes or my generally untrustworthy demeanour.

Post-Note: Because Pandemic is so well known, I won’t bore you by describing all the rules of Reign of Cthulhu. I’ll only mention them when they are different to the original game.

Post-It Note: Ha, I just wanted to make that joke.

 

Players: 2-4

 

Time: 40 mins

 

Ages: 14+

 

 

The most striking feature of Reign of Cthulhu is the first thing you notice when you look at the box: the artwork. Visually it’s simply gorgeous. It’s divided neatly into two themes: the Lovecraftian horrors and the human, worldly elements. The horrors (monster and cultist miniatures, spawn cards and board spaces) have a turquoise colour scheme, while black and sepia are the main tones for the ‘human’ parts (the map, clue cards and character cards). The four areas of the map are colour coded according to the favourite colours of Lovecraft’s fiction (yellow, red, purple and green), a nice touch. The board itself boasts atmospheric artwork and handy spaces for the different card decks – all in an nice matte print so glare doesn’t spoil the very dark art style. It captures the world of Lovecraftian fiction perfectly.

Then there are actual, sculpted miniatures in this game! Personally I always found the plastic cubes of Pandemic to be very boring, and the map design was appropriately clinical but also uninspiring. When they announced Reign of Cthulhu I was nervous that they’d simply slap tweaked rules onto the existing components. But I was wrong: Reign of Cthulhu has been almost completely redesigned from the ground up.

I say almost, because the core rules are the same as the original. You work as a team to collect sets of cards and move around a map to use your character’s unique ability, eradicating a disease before the board makes you lose in one of several ways. Things have new names, of course: instead of disease counters, you have Cultists; instead of an Outbreak, Evil Stirs; instead of curing diseases, you seal inter-dimensional gateways. It is essentially the same game. However, beyond that premise, I found playing Reign of Cthulhu to be a different experience.

For one thing, that great artwork makes it feel very different to play. In a way it’s less intense than the original game because the stakes are lower. In Pandemic, you travel around the world and try to stop entire populations being wiped out by disease. In Reign of Cthulhu, you’re trying to stem the tide of cultists and shoggoths in four of H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional New England towns – Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich and, of course, Arkham. The scale is far less epic. But that adds to the intimacy, and unlike the original game, my friends and I found ourselves actually caring for the towns we’re trying to save. “Oh no, there’s a shoggoth in the theatre!”; “The cultists love the pawn shop, is there something in the cellar?”; “They’re regrouping in Dunwich!”

More importantly, those lovely miniatures made us attach to our characters in a way we never did in Pandemic. Sure, the characters are bog-standard archetypes for a Lovecraft game (you’ll find all these characters in Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness – in fact, the Magician is straight out of the MoM Forbidden Science expansion) but they still work. I also like that the female characters, especially the hunter and the occultist, are refreshingly unsexualised and unstereotyped. Regardless of the sculpts, miniatures just help bring your character to life. In all my games, people were distressed when bad things happened to their character.

Speaking of bad things, this brings me onto the major difference between the original game and Reign of Cthulhu. Every character begins the game with four Sanity Tokens. Over the course of the game, certain actions will force you to roll the Sanity Die (a beautiful custom die that suits the trippy turquoise colour scheme perfectly). If you’re unlucky, this die will make you lose sanity. If you lose all your sanity, you become insane – flip over your character card and immediately play with the new number of actions and special abilities written on it.

In my humble opinion, every game based on Lovecraft’s work requires an insanity mechanism. It’s not Lovecraft if you don’t lose your mind! Reign of Cthulhu has easily the most elegant and efficient insanity mechanism I’ve come across. However, it is also the least meaningful. Typically, going insane reduces the number of actions your character can make by one. They don’t lose their special ability – at worst, they gain a new rule which makes their special ability less effective. But this is counter-acted by the fact that you’re very unlikely to have anyone go insane until the final stages of the game. So far, I’ve yet to be in a situation where a player or several players being insane has actually affected our ability to win the game. I can only see insanity being a disadvantage in games with two players: with the Sanity Die rolls becoming more frequent you’ll probably go insane more quickly; and with fewer other characters to pick up the slack, insanity will hit you harder. However, with three or four players, insanity has never been an issue – just a very fun bit of flavour.

And to an extent, Reign of Cthulhu is all about the flavour. As I said, it’s essentially the same game Matt Leacock designed all those years ago. Yet with this version, we all experienced a greater level of attachment to our characters than I’ve noticed in normal Pandemic. The insanity mechanic exploits that attachment – nobody wants to go insane even though it has no tangible effect on the game. You just want to protect your little avatar. Awwww!

More impactful is the process of Awakening an Old One. During setup you place seven Old One cards across the top of the board, face down. As the game progresses, they will be revealed one by (old) one. Each Old One is named and depicted on the card and each has a special effect on the game that is never good for the players. The seventh Old One is always Cthulhu, and his effect is that you lose. This adds a countdown element to the game and a wonderful sense of theme – it feels personal when that God makes you lose Sanity or discard all your clues. What’s more, you select the first six Old Ones randomly from a deck of 12. Like Mama Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. It keeps the pressure high.

I’ve heard people complain that Reign of Cthulhu is too easy compared to other Pandemic games. I can see where they’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s notably easier. In the grand tradition of Pandemic, you will either luck out and win in 30 to 40 minutes, or get screwed over in the first 10 minutes. I admit I’ve won more than I’ve lost (so far) but I’ve never felt it was easy. Every game has been very tense in the last leg. Very tense. Every. Damn. Game.

I felt a level of emotional investment in Reign of Cthulhu that I never felt in the original game. All the same, it is about the flavour more than the experience. If you like Lovecraft and like Pandemic, you’ll love this. If you love Pandemic and don’t care for Cthulhu, this edition isn’t essential for you. The artwork and the theme are stunning, but the new mechanisms don’t add enough to outshine the original. This is a game made by Lovecraft fans for Lovecraft fans, using Matt Leacock’s tried and tested system. It looks great, it feels great, it plays as you’d expect.

 

Non-Euclidean Rating: A Great Old One

 

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