Board Game Review: Forbidden Desert

Do you like cooperative games? Are you interested in a game that will appeal to your extended family, your children, and your serious gaming buddies? Do you like dying miserably in a hostile, unforgiving desert? If you said yes to any of these questions, then you might be interested in Forbidden Desert, a cooperative survival game designed by Matt Leacock (of Pandemic and Forbidden Island fame). 

In Forbidden Desert, two-to-five players team up as a group of scientists on a mission to excavate a fabled ancient city that's been lost to the desert sands. When they arrive at the site of the buried city, a powerful storm wrecks their helicopter, stranding them at the mercy of the blazing sun and a raging sand storm. To survive, the group will have to work together to unearth the city in search of ancient technologies and, in the process, rebuild a legendary flying machine before succumbing to dehydration or being swept away by the storm. 

Forbidden Desert is a deceptively simple game -- so simple that kids and non-gaming adults will be able to grasp its mechanisms and quickly contribute to the welfare of the group. Beneath that first layer of sand, however, lies a fiercely difficult game that will challenge even the most veteran of gamers. It's a game that strongly promotes teamwork and careful strategizing, and its theme shines through the gameplay so strongly that you'll feel genuine tension and desperation as you attempt to escape the forbidden desert.

Forbidden Desert's playing field is a 5x5 grid of nice, thick cardboard tiles. On the surface, they all bear the same desert imagery, save for three that indicate the possible presence of an oasis and one that shows the crash site of the helicopter, which serves as your starting location. If a tile's clear of sand, it can be excavated by flipping it over to reveal hidden treasures, such as ancient technologies that let you draw a card from the item deck, tunnel systems that you can use to travel the city more quickly, a possible water supply, or clues directing you to the locations of the flying machine's four components. 

The fully-assembled flying machine.

The blank space in the center of the playing field represents the sand storm. After each player completes their actions, they draw from the red "storm deck" to determine how the storm moves and what effects it will have on the composition of the playing field. When the storm moves, it slides nearby tiles into its previous location and dumps sand tiles on them -- too many sand tiles on one location and it becomes blocked until someone spends actions clearing the sand. The shifting sands will move players along with them, having the potential to bury players under the sand and/or move them further away from their desired locations, possibly placing the storm right between them and an ally carrying crucial water. 

Also included in the storm deck are cards that indicate "the sun beats down," causing everyone exposed to the sun's rays to lose one water from their canteen, marked by a sliding clip on the side of your player card. The only other type of card in the storm deck says that "the storm picks up," meaning the storm track increases by one and, at different thresholds, thus requires the players to draw more storm cards at the end of their turn, reflecting the storm growing more intense as the time goes by. Players lose the game if at any time any one of them runs out of water, if the group runs out of available sand tiles to place (becoming completely buried in the desert), or if the storm reaches critical levels.

The only way to win the game is to locate all of the parts to the ship and return to the launch pad as a full group -- a task that's much easier said than done. Fortunately, players have a few tools to assist them in this process; each of the six player "classes" comes with its own unique ability to aid the group in different ways. The explorer can move and clear tiles diagonally; the climber can climb over terrain that would ordinarily be "blocked" by excessive sand tiles; the meteorologist can look at the storm deck to predict what will happen next and move one card to the bottom of the deck; the water carrier can spend an action to draw two waters from a well and give water to players adjacently. 

Storm cards and item cards. 

Players can also receive items from excavating tiles, which can be traded among and shared between one another as long as players are on the same space. These items include, among others, a solar shield that will protect players on that tile from "the sun beats down" cards for one full "round," a dune blaster that can clear all sand tiles at once from any one tile, and a jetpack that will let you fly to any unblocked location on the map. These items are all single-use and are discarded for the remainder of that game after use, frequently putting you in scenarios where you have to make the tough choice of whether to use your items while you have an apparent use for them, or saving them for later when you might not have any other options. 

It's usually necessary for cooperative games to be difficult in order for the gameplay to promote teamwork and strategic deliberation between the players, and Forbidden Desert is a quintessential example on how to pull this off well. The game is hard -- so hard you'll probably lose about half of the games you play. I've played two games at the easiest difficulty setting, once with my family and once with my gaming group of friends, and lost both times. The challenge is apparently so genuine that Mensa declared it one of their "mind games" of the year in 2013. As with many cooperative games, there are usually more threats and priorities than there are players, meaning every turn will come with its own consequences as you decide what risks are worth taking and how you're going to attempt to juggle everything.

The game's desert survival theme comes through very strongly because of these mechanisms. Tensions can run high with the constant risk of running out of water, and the longer you survive, the harder the game gets with more storm cards being drawn every turn. No one ever wants to draw from the storm deck, and everyone can be felt holding their breath with each storm card that's drawn, hoping it's not a "sun beats down" card while someone's stranded by their lonesome with no protection from the sun. As you watch your water supplies slowly draining, you also watch the stack of sand tiles slowly deplete and the meter on the storm tracker steadily rising, and you can feel the desperation that sets in when you realize you have to kick things into gear and make a last ditch effort to find the last part and return to the ship before running out of water or sand tiles. 

The theme and mechanics are so effective that I literally felt thirsty playing this game. I drank two bottles of water and still felt thirsty. 

Here's what some of the excavated tiles look like. 

The artwork and physical components do a really good job of selling the theme, too. Everything features a quasi-steampunk vibe from the brown earth tones to the futuristic machinery juxtaposed with whirring mechanical gears. Subtle bits of storytelling decorate the artwork as well, such as how you find the ship's propeller on a windmill-esque tower, and the ship's solar crystal at a mystical obelisk. As pleasant as the artwork is, it's a bit unfortunate, then, that it spends so much of the game face-down or buried under sand tiles. Even when a tile is excavated for the first time and remains clear of sand, your eye is immediately drawn to the symbols in the corner that tell you what's supposed to happen as a result of turning that tile over, and so the great artwork can go largely ignored and unnoticed in ordinary gameplay. 

Gamewright, the publisher, could have easily manufactured everything on cardstock and sold the game in a much smaller, cheaper box, but having those thick cardboard tiles and a fully three-dimensional aircraft, with slots to attach each of the four components, physically assembling it as you progress, goes an incredibly long way in making the game more visually appealing and inviting. Every time I've pulled that ship out of the box, someone has exclaimed "that's cool." The components immediately grab people's attention and make them much more interested in the game, and they make it much easier to feel immersed in the theme. 

Despite the excellent quality of the components, I get the sense that the box didn't need to be the size that is. There's more than enough room as-is to stack the fully-assembled aircraft in the slot that holds the deck of cards, and the colored "meeples" (each player's little scientist dude) and plastic meter-tracking clips can fit into one slot. If you were to compress the space between the sand tiles and the land tiles, and shift the slot with the meeples and clips down next to the deck and above the sand tiles, then the physical footprint of the box could be reduced by as much as 33% (or more), making it easier to carry around and easier to store. 

Look at all that wasted space. 

And yet, the size of the box is yet another factor in its subtle appeal. The game's (relatively) short length and simple ruleset will make it feel more like a "filler" game to serious gamers -- a game meant to kill an hour's worth of time between heavier games or at the end of the night when you don't have time for a 3+ hour game but aren't quite ready to call it quits -- but the size of the box and the quality of its components give the psychological impression that it's a much more substantial game than a basic "filler" time-waster. And in fact, it is a more substantial game than that because of how challenging and engaging it really is. If you're having a shorter game night (two-to-three hours), this could very well be the focal point of the night because it is such a satisfying game. 

Because of its simplicity, the game will appeal to children and non-gamers (ie, the mass market) just as much as it will to serious gamers. The rules are simple enough to grasp that the entire game can be explained in two minutes or less, and people can get right into the gameplay without feeling overwhelmed. At least, until they start running out of water and getting buried in sand, and by that point they've become invested in the game and fully understand what's happening. This game is so family-friendly that I set it up at a family get-together on Easter Sunday and people were instantly interested in playing. Family members who could only generously be labeled "casual gamers" got into the game and were strategizing as deeply as my brother and I, the two "serious" gamers at the table. Even people sitting around not actively playing were watching intently and contributing suggestions to the group.

Forbidden Desert is a classic example of a game that's "easy to learn, difficult to master" -- an accessible game for virtually all audiences. At a price point of $15-20, it's easily affordable, too, and the quality and inventiveness of the components makes it feel much more valuable than a sub-$20 game. The gameplay conveys the theme of desert survival extremely well, and the challenge (combined with all the random variables) will ensure lots of good replay value. I can't recommend this game enough -- if you've never had an interest in board games before, Forbidden Desert is a solid gateway game that can be enjoyed in varied contexts. 

Tearaway: The Vita's Iconic Killer App

If anyone's been waiting for the emergence of a "killer app" to justify buying a PlayStation Vita, then Tearaway is your answer. It took a while -- nearly two full years, practically a lifetime for a fledgling console struggling to find its feet -- but the Vita finally has a game that takes full advantage of its unique hardware and which provides a gaming experience unlike any other on any console. Tearaway is the singular game showcasing what the Vita is capable of, and it's the singular game for which it's worth owning a Vita.

Tearaway is, essentially, a 3D platforming game set in a world made entirely of paper. You take control of an anthropomorphic envelope, known in this world as a "Messenger," on a mission to deliver a message to the mysterious face that's suddenly appeared in the sun -- your face, as captured by the front-facing camera on the Vita. You are technically not the Messenger in this game; you are yourself, a sort of godlike figure peering into its world, literally holding the world in your hands. Using your special godlike powers (ie, your fingers) you're able to physically reach into this world and manipulate it, shaping its appearance and helping the Messenger on his (or her) quest to deliver a message to You.

The concept of being a "god" overseeing a world and altering it to your liking has been done many times before. So has the concept of the player being a real person whose computer screen is actually a portal to another world. Tearaway is not entirely unique in this regard, but I've never played (nor heard of) another game that gets you so personally involved in the experience. You're an on-screen character in this game, and every input has you reaching through the fourth wall to physically touch and interact with the world. It's unique, wonderful, and immensely charming, but what's perhaps more surprising is that it's actually a pretty good platformer, too.

When you start the game for the first time, it bypasses any sort of developer or publisher logos, skips the main menu, and takes you straight to a loading screen. "They've switched it on!" a character says once it's finished loading. Another voice joins in: "Where? I can't see them." Next, you're staring at your own face, in real time, as it appears to the voices in the center of a paper sun. As you make preliminary customizations (selecting your gender, hand size, and skin tone), the two voices talk about you: "Do you think we'll be able to get a good story out of this one?" "Only time will tell, but I think we're all going to have some fun!"

The two voices then use a storybook-esque sequence to introduce you to their world, describing it as a world of stories. They've grown tired of hearing the same stories over and over again and ask you to introduce some new ingredients to tell a new story. The display switches to the camera on the rear side of the Vita, showing you your own world before an envelope rips a hole through the screen: "An invitation from our world to yours." You peer deeper into the tear in the screen and witness as the envelope develops a face, a body, some arms, and some legs. The two voices conspire of ways to spice up the story, and conceive of monsters formed from elements of your own world -- black and white newsprint.

As the "scraps" swarm around your newfound Messenger, the game instructs you to press your fingers to the rear touch pad on the Vita, causing your fingers to rip through the floor of the paper world and thus allowing you to swat the scraps away. Having rescued the Messenger, he or she (depending on what gender you picked for the Messenger) notices your face in the sun and sets out on its mission to deliver its message to you. "Head for the sun!" the voices say, as you gain control of the Messenger and begin the game in proper.

Gameplay takes the form of a linear adventure/platformer, the likes of which has you exploring the world, navigating treacherous terrain, meeting NPCs, and solving minor puzzles along the way. The inventiveness of its world is genuinely interesting, and thankfully there's plenty of variety in Tearaway's scenery, music, and gameplay mechanisms to keep the game from ever feeling stale or repetitive. You start the game with the barest of possible input controls, and as you progress through the game's various locales you unlock new abilities such as jumping, rolling, taking pictures with a camera, and using a squeezebox to blow objects away from you or to suck items towards you.

Each of these new abilities is presented in a creative context within the setting. At one point you discover a black stone platform rumored to be controlled by "the Yous." It's sort of a mythical object about which the locals know rather little. As you approach it, you realize it's the X button on a PlayStation controller -- pressing the X button on the Vita lowers the platform, allowing your Messenger to step onto it, and releasing the button raises him to a new level. You've now learned how to jump.

Earlier in the game, the locals ask for your help in the "drumming ritual" to awaken the orchard and get the record player working again -- they introduce you to certain types of surfaces that allow you to tap on the rear touch pad and bounce your Messenger into the air, like hititing a drum head. The act of using the "drums" to navigate the terrain becomes a crucial part in that level's soundtrack and your ultimate goal of getting the music playing again.

The progression through "levels" is paced such that, just as you become familiar with one of your new abilities or items, another one is introduced. It's fun to feel your Messenger evolving and powering up over the course of the game, but levels also tend to feature their own unique mechanics. One level has you riding a fast, rambunctious pig through an obstacle course; another has you pressing the face buttons on the Vita to depress or protrude platforms from walls; another lets you tilt the Vita to rotate platforms as you jump across them; another introduces glue to surfaces, allowing you to walk along walls. Later parts of the game feature various combinations of these mechanisms working in tandem.

The real flavor in Tearaway, though, is how much influence you have in customizing various aspects of the paper world. One of your first tasks in the game is to make a crown for the king squirrel, which takes you to a cutting board where you can cut and assemble different colored pieces of paper to create new things. When you've made the crown for the king squirrel, you get to place it on his head, and when he shows up later in the game he's still wearing that crown you made for him. Throughout the entire game, you're given opportunities to further customize the appearance of the world: how will you make the snowflakes look like in the snowy mountain? What kind of face will you give a scary monster? Each of your creations becomes an integral part of the world, shaping it based on your own artistic vision and creativity.

As is par for the course with these types of games, there's a ton of hidden discoveries to find and optional challenges to hunt down. Scattered through this world are collectible bits of shredded confetti, often used as a visual guiding system for where to go next, but confetti also doubles as a type of currency. You use confetti to buy new camera lenses and filters, as well as different types of pre-made eyes, mouths, and accessories to customize your Messenger's appearance. In each level you can discover hidden presents, either by exploring obscure places of the map or by solving a character's challenge / request, which grant extra confetti. Finally, you occasionally encounter things in the environment completely devoid of color -- take a picture with them and you'll return them to their full color. Each level has a completion meter that will show how much of everything you earned, possibly enticing you to use the game's free chapter selection to go back and try for 100%.

It should almost go without saying that Tearaway's audiovisual effects are tremendous. This is a vibrant, colorful world brought to life with playful animation and excellent sound effects. Much of the world feels genuinely alive because of how everything reacts to you -- approach some flowers and they'll bloom before your eyes, or watch as mushrooms tilt to reflect your motion on the joysticks. There are some pretty clever water effects going on as well; it's pretty ingenious how the designers created waves of water crashing on the shore of a beach and ripple effects as you walk across a puddle. It looks fairly realistic, which is quite impressive considering it's all paper.

There's quite a lot of interesting scenery in this game with a nice range of locales. The game starts in a series of colorful plains and hills before moving onto an orchard and farm. Next you're ascending a snowy mountain, then you're exploring some crystalline caverns and underground fissures. Next you're on to a coastal city and a highly technological science lab. In the third act, the game goes into a surreal realm "between the pages." It's a delight simply to look at how everything was constructed and to imagine recreating it in real life, and the constant change in landscapes keeps everything fresh and interesting throughout the entire game.

The visual style comes complete with a wealth of paper sound effects -- any time anything moves, you hear the sound of paper crinkling and rustling, and that adds a great feeling of authenticity to the experience. The music, meanwhile, is a real pleasure to listen to -- I've listened to the soundtrack on repeat all while writing this review and there's not a single track that I don't like. The soundtrack is often infused with an organic folk-like feel in terms of instrumentation. Parts of it sound comical and whimsical, while others set a very bleak, foreboding tone. I've embedded some of my favorite tracks below, but others worth sampling include The Orchard, The Barn, Lament and Hornpipe, Elevate This, and Desert Pig Ride.

Pilgrimage

Renaissance Hop

The Traveler

As I've already mentioned, you play a very prominent role in this story. The goal of the game is not to collect items or to rescue the princess -- it's to unite your playable character with yourself. The playable protagonist's motivation for everything he or she does is to reach you. The story in Tearaway feels so personal because of the way it incorporates you into its world and the quasi augmented-reality moments when you get to take pictures of things in your environment to see them imposed on surfaces of the game world. It's a journey that you and your Messenger share along the way, with touches of your own personality here and there, and the ending has to rank among the most touching game endings I've ever seen.

Reading the Message, once it's delivered, is a story of everything the Messenger went through to reach you. The end-game synopsis evokes feelings of nostalgia from events that transpired mere hours ago as you get to look back at the influence you had on creating and designing the look of this world, while seeing into the thoughts and feelings of the Messenger for the first time. The Message concludes by saying "You've seen my world, but I've only imagined yours," followed by a request for you to create the Messenger in your own world, thanks to an online service that lets you print out paper-craft blueprints for all the blank objects you photographed. The ending brings the theme of uniting the two worlds full circle, and having the opportunity to bring the game into your own world makes the ending resonate like few other game endings ever have. 

But, despite all of Tearaway's immense charm, no game is perfect, and it therefore fails to escape the wrath of my critique.

First on my list of complaints is that the whole game feels way too easy. Perhaps that's not a valid criticism, considering this game was designed with kids in mind, but there are literally no consequences for dying. There are "checkpoints" placed every five feet, so if you fall off a ledge during a platforming section, you'll be placed five feet away from where you fell. There are very few sequences that require you to perform a series of actions in a row, so failure only requires you to retry a single action at a time, nullifying any sense of satisfaction that comes from struggling with a tough scenario and finally besting it. You have no "lives" and lose no resources when you "die," and there are times when you can miss a jump and actually respawn ahead of the jump because you got just close enough to the ledge to trigger the next "checkpoint," completely removing any challenge from the jump itself.

Combat feels like an obligatory afterthought and doesn't contribute a whole lot to the gameplay. There's enough variety to keep it from feeling repetitive, but it's not very satisfying, either. Further compounding the easy difficulty, if you get hit too many times in a fight and "die," your progress in the fight persists even after you respawn; dispatched foes remain dispatched when you come back to life at full health, so once again there are no consequences for failure. Combat isn't very challenging in the first place, but it becomes even easier when you get the squeezebox and can suck up scraps and blast them at enemies without even having to wait to dodge their attacks.

The game has a pleasant, steady progression as you unlock new abilities and encounter new mechanics in the environment -- nothing outstays its welcome or gets to feel repetitive -- but the full game is pretty short in length. I think I beat the whole game (at 91% completion) in about six hours, and it felt like the game ended just as it reached its stride. As much as I appreciate games not being bloated with repetitive filler content, it would seem like there was still room for more content and story to be told in Tearaway, and I felt a little disappointed when I realized it was over so quickly. Maybe it's a sign of how good the game really is, that I wanted to see more of it.

Linearity has gained a negative connotation in video game criticism, and Tearaway is yet another case of a linear game that would've benefited tremendously from a little less linearity. The game is at its best when it gives you open spaces to explore, like the area surrounding the barn, or the vast desert, because it gives you a better sense of place and agency within the game. When you're stuck following linear paths with fixed camera angles, it takes a bit away from the immersion. If the game had featured a few bigger environments, or perhaps a hub system that let you go off in different directions, I think it would've been a much more engrossing experience.

Finally, as great as it is that the game incorporates your real environment into the game, that's also a bit of a downside. When I started playing, I was lying in bed in a pitch black room, so when the game went to show my face in the sun, all I saw was a black circle. I had to deduce through the characters' dialogue that they were supposed to be looking at me and not a black circle. There are times when the game asks you to use the microphone to "speak" to NPCs -- one prompts you to emit a terrifying roar, which then gets used in the game -- which I couldn't do because I was sharing a hotel room with other, sleeping people and didn't want to wake them. It also felt a bit awkward taking pictures of my surroundings in public, so I often settled for taking the most boring, discreet pictures of the floor or what happened to be right in front of me, instead of what would've been the most interesting.

Playing Tearaway was a tremendous experience for me, and these criticisms can, for the most part, be regarded as minor nitpicks. In terms of pure 3D adventure platforming gameplay, I don't think Tearaway quite reaches the heights of Super Mario 64, since it could stand to have a little more content, more reward for hunting down hidden secrets, and any semblance of challenge. The way Tearaway uses the Vita's hardware to augment the gameplay with your own reality, though, is truly unique and special, and that puts it right back up there in contention with Super Mario 64. It's easy to recommend if you own a Vita, and if you don't have a Vita, this might be the game that finally makes it worth owning one.

It's just a shame that the game was actually good; had it been a disappointment, then I could have made a clever quip about its world being paper thin and my enjoyment falling flat, or that "Its premise sounds good on paper, but..." Instead I'm left with something a little less witty in closing with "Tearaway is one for the books."

Board Game Review: Eldritch Horror

For the second time ever, I'd like to talk about something other than video games. The last time I diverged from the chosen topic of this blog was to complain about that one really disappointing Batman movie; this time I'll at least be sticking to the general topic of gaming while I review my recent purchase of the narrative-driven, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Eldritch Horror board game by Fantasy Flight Games.

My friends and I all enjoy playing video games, and whenever we get together there's a strong tendency for us to setup a multiplayer game to pass a couple of hours. After a few years of playing the same games over and over again, I was getting a little tired of it and made the radical suggestion that we try playing a board game instead. Being completely unfamiliar with board games, the difficult part of that suggestion was narrowing such a wide selection of interesting games down to one. After reading through lists of popular games, I decided to go with Eldritch Horror because of its Lovecraftian subject matter and its blend of strategy and role-playing elements.

In Eldritch Horror, players assume the roles of up to eight investigators as they attempt to solve mysteries across the globe in order to prevent one of four "ancient ones" from awakening and ravaging the earth. Each investigator has their own unique stats and abilities; during encounters, investigators draw a random card from the deck, which describes each scenario as the story progresses, and resolve skill checks by rolling dice. As they travel the globe, investigators acquire arcane spells and artifacts, battle other-worldly monsters, close gates to other dimensions, and deal with horrifying supernatural encounters.

Each round of gameplay occurs across three phases: the action phase, the encounter phase, and the mythos phase. During the action phase, investigators can complete up to two actions. These actions consist of traveling one space across the game board, purchasing a boat or train ticket to travel two spaces during the next turn, resting to recuperate lost health and sanity, acquiring weapons and items, trading with another investigator on the same space, using their special abilities, or using spells and items. After each investigator has had a chance to perform their actions, the encounter phase begins, wherein each investigator resolves a random encounter specific to their location.

A sample of various types of encounter cards (click to enlarge)

If an investigator is in San Francisco, he draws from the randomized encounter deck and reads the entry marked for San Francisco. If he's on a space containing a dimensional gate, he draws from the "other worlds" deck and has a chance to close the gate. If he's on a space containing a clue, he draws from the "research" deck (specific for each ancient one) and has a chance to gain the clue. If he's on the space of the active expedition, he draws from the "expedition" deck and has a chance to gain powerful artifacts and retreat doom. Each of the major locations has a tendency of yielding specific effects, indicated on the space, like permanently boosting your stats, spawning clues on the board, or letting you acquire spells, should you succeed in the skill tests during the encounter.

Once each investigator has completed their encounter, the game moves into the mythos phase, wherein the lead investigator draws a card from the mythos deck (built randomly each time, with different configurations for each ancient one) and reads its effects. The mythos cards are the primary method of advancing the story, and they have the most critical effect on the game. Mythos cards can spawn more dimensional gates on the board, spawn more monsters, spawn clues, advance the doom track (the countdown before the ancient one awakens), or trigger reckoning events in addition to the special event.

During encounters and mythos events, investigators sometimes suffer conditions like leg injuries, internal injuries, amnesia, dementia, or paranoia (among others) -- these effects typically remain dormant and are only triggered when a mythos card causes a reckoning, in which case investigators flip the condition card over and suffer the consequences. Like everything else in the game, you never know what to expect, so there's a minor sense of dread and tension as you try to resolve everything before something bad happens. In most cases, there are ways to cure yourself (based on skill checks and dice rolls) during the action phase, but this comes at the expense of using your turn to work on various other (perhaps more important) goals like closing a gate or solving a mystery.

What it looks like with (almost) everything set up. 

Investigators win the game by solving three overarching mysteries specific to each ancient one. Mysteries are complex tasks that happen over multiple rounds, typically requiring players to collect a certain number of clues and use them in a certain way, to close dimensional gates under certain conditions, to defeat epic monsters, or to resolve special encounters. Mysteries are a challenge to solve because you often have to collect the requisite amount of resources first, but also because there are frequently more-pressing issues that threaten your survival, and that's where the strategy element comes into play.

You're essentially under a time limit to beat the game, with each round having a chance to reduce the time remaining on the doom track. At virtually any stage of the game, you'll have multiple threats to your survival on the board, and so you'll have to make tough decisions about what your priorities should be and what risks you're willing to take. Active gates can spawn monsters and cause doom to count down, so it's in your best interests to close them as quickly as you can, but at the same time you might have a cursed condition or a back injury that could trigger at any moment during a mythos phase, so maybe you should rest and try to get rid of those conditions, but at the same time there might be an ongoing rumor that threatens to remove all of the clues from the board plus those in your possession, which you need to solve the active mystery, so maybe you should focus on that instead.

When an investigator is defeated, either by running out of health or losing all of their sanity, doom advances by one and the player chooses a new investigator, placing them on the board in their starting location. Defeated investigators remain on the board so that other investigators can collect their possessions and resolve a test to possibly retreat doom by one. Players lose the game if all twelve investigators become defeated, or if they ever run out of mythos cards.

Front and backsides of two investigators (click to enlarge)

If investigators haven't solved three mysteries by the time the doom track reaches zero, then the ancient one awakens. In the case of Azathoth, that constitutes a game over, but for the other three ancient ones, play continues after they've awakened, allowing investigators a last-ditch effort against increased odds to solve mysteries and defeat the ancient one in combat. Cthulhu, for instance, causes all investigators to lose sanity during reckoning events while he's active, and the longer he's on the board the more sanity investigators will lose. While it's still possible to win the game after the ancient one has been awakened, it becomes substantially more difficult, especially since players become eliminated from the game if their investigator is defeated during the final phase.

Accomplishing all of your goals requires careful teamwork and strategy; sometimes it's best for investigators to divide and conquer, other times it's necessary for investigators to team up on the same space to face an epic monster or to trade items with one another. In my group's first play session, we spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out the most efficient options available to us, coming up with a strategy for who should go where and what order we should tackle obstacles. This is a game that can really get your brain working in problem-solving mode.

The real fun, though, is its unpredictability, in terms of randomized decks and dice rolling. Even when you're laying ingenious plans, there's always the possibility that something bad will happen or that your spell will actually backfire on you, thus causing you to reevaluate your plans and come up with a new strategy. Everything is a gamble, and although some bets are safer than others, this game is not afraid to make life hellishly difficult for you. It feels vaguely similar to Dark Souls in that regard. I had to laugh in dark appreciation when a random effect of the setup process triggered a curse on me -- we hadn't even started playing and I was already suffering one of the most debilitating conditions in the game.

Front and back of various conditions (click to enlarge)

Eldritch Horror supports up to eight players, but it can also be played solo with a single player controlling one or multiple investigators. The box says a typical game lasts 2-4 hours, which is probably true for a mid-sized group once they become familiar with the mechanics. It took my group of four players 4-5 hours for a single game, which included time spent setting up the board, reading character cards and selecting investigators, and explaining the rules. Perhaps the next time we play it will go faster since everyone will already be familiar with the investigators and the mechanics, but setup and cleanup remains a bit of a time-consuming hassle regardless, because of how many pieces you have to sort and shuffle.

Adding up the "game contents" table on the box indicates there are a whopping 583 pieces in the game box, including 319 different cards and 245 different tokens. When you setup the game board, you have to separate the decks between North/South America encounters, Europe/Africa encounters, Asia/Australia encounters, generic encounters, other world encounters, expedition encounters, research encounters, special encounters, asset cards, artifact cards, spell cards, condition cards, mystery cards, and mythos cards, and then shuffle each one. Then you have to separate, shuffle, and arrange health and sanity tokens, monster tokens, clue tokens, improvement tokens, travel ticket tokens, eldritch tokens, gate tokens, and rumor tokens. Then when the game is concluded, you have to repackage all of these items in an organized system so that they can be setup easily the next time you play.

That's an awful lot of stuff to handle, and it takes up a whole lot of table space, too. The game board measures 33x22", and you need a minimum of six extra inches around the entire game board for the plethora of cards and tokens, more still to leave room for players' character cards, possessions, and condition cards. I've played this game on two different mid-sized dining tables and was pressed for space each time, so if you're playing in a small apartment or dormitory then you might simply lack the physical space to play this game comfortably.

Two sample spells and four sample items (click to enlarge)

The game strives to instill a level of narrative immersion in its descriptive encounters and events; these descriptions, combined with all of the great illustrations, offer a great variety of narrative reasons for the events that transpire and make it feel like you're really involved in the story, even though you're really just moving cardboard pieces across a board. The overarching story suffers quite a bit, though, because of its desire for randomization -- the story ultimately feels like a patchwork of random events, and it's difficult to draw any storylines connecting everything together.

The game's overall tone is sufficiently dark and foreboding, thanks to the descriptions and the illustrations, but also because of the mechanics. There's a genuine sense of dread whenever you're suffering from a condition because you never know when it might trigger or what the consequences might be, and there's the constant tension of trying to resolve multiple goals and threats while the doom track steadily counts down. Meanwhile, the game's subject matter frequently has you dealing with arcane magic and horrifying other-worldly monsters while your characters descend into madness or suffer crippling defeat. It's exactly what you'd expect for something inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, and it's handled with care and respect (for the most part).

Finally, Eldritch Horror boasts an awful lot of replay value because it's a new game every time you play. There are 319 different cards, but you'll only see a fraction of those in a single game session because a lot of them are specific to the four ancient ones. Upon playing the game a second time, you can pick a different ancient one which will come with its own unique mysteries, research cards, special encounter cards, and conditions for victory, you can pick a different investigator who will have different stats and special skills affecting how you play the game, and the randomized nature of the decks and dice rolling offers a lot of unpredictable variety in the content you experience each game.

Even if you were just to play each ancient one once and then never play the game again, you'd get about 12 hours of play time out of it, so there's enough value in the game to justify a purchase especially considering you could play each ancient one multiple times and get a new experience each time. There's also an expansion called Forsaken Lore set to release sometime in May which will add further replay value to the game. My friends and I thoroughly enjoyed Eldritch Horror and look forward to playing it more in the future, so it's easy for me to recommend if you like strategy/role-playing games, and especially if you enjoy Lovecraftian horror.