- Designers: Richard Launius, Kevin Wilson
- Artist: Dallas Mehlhoff
- Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
- Players: 1 – 8
Elder Sign is one of many in Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Horror series, and like all of them, is thematically based on the works of HP Lovecraft.
I have heard Elder Sign described somewhat disparagingly as ‘Cthulhu Yahtzee’. As it happens I rather like Yahtzee, and other games derived from it (like ‘King of Tokyo’), but more to the point I think that description fails to recognise what Elder Sign does so well.
The game essentially consists of taking an investigator (or two) and trying to complete a series of cards by matching their symbols by rolling custom dice. There are costs for failure, and rewards for success (such as gaining items or spells that mitigate the luck that is fundamental to the game). The end goal is to collect a number of Elder Signs to defeat an Elder God before it awakes and destroys the world.
How much you enjoy the game mechanically rests entirely on your appetite for continual dice rolling and that central Yahtzee-like decision space of when and where to allocate those dice. There are lots of other peripheral things happening, including numerous ways of influencing those dice rolls and mitigating their effects, but it is unashamedly a dice game.
As I say I enjoy those mechanics, but where Elder Sign really shines is theme. I think a lot of that immersion is down to the luxuriously large tarot sized cards which showcase the superbly evocative artwork so well. Fantasy Flight always do a phenomenal job with their artwork, and Elder Sign does not disappoint. Mechanically you might be trying to roll a certain combination of dice to complete a card, but in your mind you really are confronting a mass of tentacles bursting through the floorboards, or trying to unlock a heavy wooden door while the sound of something unspeakable approaches from behind.
Expansions like ‘Omens of the Deep’ or ‘Omens of Ice’ add something of a narrative arc to the game, but even without them the impending dread expressed by the accumulation of Doom tokens really add to the Lovecraftian atmosphere, and the final boss battle somehow feels far more climactic and epic than repetitively rolling a bunch of dice has any right to.
The base game is somewhat easy, and ideally it wants one of its many expansions to really shine, but they are all worth tracking down, and if you have all of them then the available combinations of investigators, spells and items is enormous.
So if you enjoy dice games and want to sink into the universe of HP Lovecraft, then I thoroughly recommend Elder Sign.
