Having played Arkham Horror once and found that the real horror of it
was that when they said ninety minutes on the side of the box, what they forgot
to put down there was that that was the set up time for the game, not the
playing time, it was with some trepidation that I took a look at Elder Sign.
Fantasy Flight, so as always, the production values are godlike, all
the counters in the world, full colour, specialist dice, nothing less than what
you’d expect from them. But increasingly I’m asking the question that while
it’s nice to have excellent production values, if the game itself cannot be
played, what’s the point of all the shiny...
So this was to be the test of it...
Set up is easy enough, you set aside a number of missions, choose which
elder god you’re trying to prevent waking up, choose your investigators for the
task, and then start to solve the missions.
Each mission takes three hours on the clock, with other effects taking
place at certain times on the clock.
Solving missions is done by matching the symbols on the missions cards
to the symbols that have been rolled on the dice. With equipment, spells, and unique items that
you start with and can earn from completing missions, you can get extra dice to
help with getting the symbols you need.
It’s not easy...
I’ll make that point as a side thought, because when I say it’s not
easy, I mean to say that it’s very bloody hard.
If you fail at a roll on the things you need for a mission, you make
another roll with one less die, and then one less, till you have no dice left
to roll or you can’t complete the mission.
In this particular game, we were nearly knocked out a number of times on
the first missions that we attempted, and while I’m assured that the missions
that we got were difficult, a check through the deck at the end of the game
suggests otherwise.
Results on the missions can generate monsters that are placed on the
missions to make things more difficult, and there are doom cards that are
played every time the clock goes around once that make things...
You guessed it...Even more difficult.
We managed a few missions before one of us went insane, and then
something happened that put me off the game for good. From the Doom cards, we had one that was
already existent that cost everyone two sanity points, and then a second card
cost everyone else another two sanity points.
Given that most characters start out with five at most and we’d been
playing the game for a full turn of the clock, the sudden and unpreventable
loss of four sanity points from all players on the table represented a total
party kill with nothing that anyone could have done to make any difference.
This for me constitutes a fairly basic breach of game playing
protocol. If you’ve got something that
can wipe out the party in a single hit, you give them plenty of chance to do
something about it, you let them know it’s coming, and you make sure that it
doesn’t just spring on them from the middle of the deck. Any game that has within it the mechanics to
wipe out a party, no matter how large or well equipped, with two random cards,
is not a game that I’ll be playing.
 |
| Sanity and Stamina tokens, in a pile rather than on our characters... |
I understand that the fight against the creatures of the mythos is a
hopeless thing, I get that there’s no way to stop the dark gods, and I
understand the hopelessness of the whole fight against them...
This is not something that any sensible person would want to get
involved in and I understand completely that investigators have a short
lifespan...
However...
This is a game, or at least it’s supposed to be, games are supposed to
have some element of fun to them and spending an hour failing very difficult
tasks, only to be annihilated out of hand by a random card draw, was not fun...
It might be that others have had more success with this, perhaps a
greater number of players would help (we had three), and different combinations
of cards and equipment might have yielded fun for us, but as it is...
There’s easier ways to go insane...
