Overview & How to Play

Play as investigators, traveling all across the globe to research clues, solve mysteries, close gateways to other worlds, and ultimately defeat a world-ending Ancient One, e.g. Cthulhu himself.

Eldritch Horror doesn’t have the most complex mechanics: rather its an incredibly thematic experience that utilizes the core gameplay as its primary narrative method. So, the core gameplay just has players moving around the world, and performing actions before being confronted with an encounter: a narrative scenario in which they must roll a skill check with a D6 to see what happens.

Actions can be things like buying items, acquiring tickets, or moving across the globe. Encounters are also filled with additional action opportunities, like to close gates around the globe, or to slay monsters with weapons. But watch out! There’s also a Mythos card every round, which progresses the world states, often triggering something bad like advancing the doom tracker--which is a countdown towards the Ancient One awakening… the utter insanity of an eldritch world just manifests everywhere.

Pros

Sure, this game’s parchment-looking map of the world looks great and immediately captured our imaginations, but actually, the flavor text on the encounters/Investigators/Ancient Ones is what sealed the deal for us. It’s just so fun to read them aloud.

This continues with playing each of the 8 characters. You can really feel like you’re playing a certain person in the 1920s: like a rich, balding politican called Charlie Kane, who has solid political connections and charisma to buy the investigators necessary items throughout the game. Maybe one of the people he’s funding is a shirtless aussie, called Silas Marsh, who yearns for the sea and wouldn’t get delayed by anything on those salty waters (good against Cthulhu)

Really, love for Eldritch Horror comes from reveling in the globe-trotting experience. We appreciate how we can see the entire world slowly falling apart at the seams of reality as you fly and sail to every corner of the globe, witnessing otherworldly occurrences no matter where you are.

The feeling of uncertainty comes from randomness everywhere: the Mythos deck, buying items, fighting, and encounter checks. This makes the game harder to game, and thus will more readily get you into the theme. That’s crucial: Lovecraft should not be a rigid puzzle, but rather should strap you in for an ominous ride, where you never quite feel safe in between the mysteries, rumors, gates, and Mythos phases.

Eldritch Horror’s theme and presentation to be at the forefront of the show. The stage is set up to allow great scenarios for you to imagine the world and its occurrences, and your investigator’s place within it, especially if you’re into the lore. It just hits your brain in all the right places—what other board game can you explore the world with your friends, fighting otherworldly horrors and epic monsters while laughing about having paranoia and hallucinations?

Cons & Nitpicks

Some things do feel quite off though, and not in a good way. The core of the Eldritch experience relies heavily on how well the narrative of the game delivers the Lovecraftian theme, and some stuff gets in the way of this.

Like, Mysteries, the main objective of the game, need to feel more connected to Ancient Ones in terms of gameplay. Or how Encounters, where you flip a card at the end of every round, sometimes zero sense whatsoever with the main story. Or the Mythos deck doesn’t feel specific enough to the Ancient One, which could take people mentally out of the game. Even monsters spawning have zero correlation to the current story!

Other things are less concerning, like Charlie Kane the investigator is too strong, some useless turns, or player count being unplayable at odd numbers (but you can easily control multiple investigators to play around that). Ultimately, the game’s theme isn’t as strongly presented as it could’ve been, and is bloated with a bunch of different cards to keep track of. At the same time, we wish the game went even harder on going super big and having tons of depth: more nuanced items, larger decks, more diversified monsters, etc. etc.

An Easy Fix

Which gets us to: you should 100% buy the Forsaken Lore expansion alongside the base game. It just straight up adds more of everything, which will improve even your first playthrough.

Other than that, just grab whatever expansions look cool to you, we haven’t tried all of them, but they all have more mysteries and research encounters at a minimum, which is relieving.

The 6/10 comes from us just evaluating the out of box experience, and we highly recommend the extended Eldritch Horror experience to anyone into Lovecraft, and willing to get into the mood for cosmic horror.