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Elder Sign
The theme is elaborate, but the game is pretty simple: You’re playing Yahtzee! with different dice, and you can use various cards and investigator skills to alter the dice to try to get the specific rolls you need. Every room card has one or more tasks that you must complete by achieving specific rolls on the set of six green dice. You may need to use multiple dice to complete a task, but you can only complete one task per roll – if your roll completes several, you complete one, removing those dice, then roll the remainder to try to complete another task. Once you’ve completed all of the tasks on a card, you get the rewards shown on the room card, from extra item cards to the elder sign points that you use to defeat the Ancient One. If you fail to complete any task on a roll, you must give up one die to reroll and often pay a “terror” penalty as well. If you fail to complete all of the tasks on a card you’ve begun, you pay a penalty that usually costs you one or more Stamina or Sanity points – and if you run out of either, your investigator is out of the game.
The game includes a clock that advances fifteen minutes after each player’s turn. When the clock reaches midnight, something bad happens: A monster appears and is added to a room with an open slot, or a doom token is added to the Ancient One’s doom track, which, when filled, means the big guy wakes up (and he is pissed). There can be additional effects at midnight based on what room cards are on the table and what Ancient One is in play, but the bottom line is that none of these things are good.
Each investigator has a special skill, from the ability to reroll some or all dice to the ability to complete multiple tasks on one dice roll, the most useful one I’ve found in the game. Investigators can also acquire different item cards – Common Items, most of which allow the player to add a special yellow die to the green ones; Special Items, most of which give you a red die to roll; Spells, most of which allow you to store one or two of your rolled dice to retain a specific result for the next roll; Clues, which allow you to reroll any or all of your dice without having to surrender one first; and Allies, helpful assistants that might give you an extra skill or roll. Other cards may allow you to defeat a monster without a roll, regain a Stamina or Sanity point, or open up special rooms from the Other world, which tend to offer better rewards and smaller penalties.
Investigators work as a team to accumulate the number of Elder Signs required to defeat the Ancient One, but there’s very little in-game collaboration. The bulk of the teamwork involves figuring out which investigator is best equipped to tackle each room – the investigator who’s immune to Sanity and Stamina penalties within tasks is the ideal candidate to go after a room with several of those required to finish it, for example. Using Amanda Sharpe, the investigator who can complete two or more tasks on one roll, might be a waste on a card with only one task.
The other key decision is which rooms to try to solve before the next time the clock strikes midnight. Rooms that return one or more Elder Signs are always valuable, but a few room cards allow the investigator to remove a Doom token from the Doom track if they’re completed. Some rooms have negative effects at midnight, like adding more doom tokens or deducting one Sanity point from every investigator, so taking them out quickly is key to extending your time to complete the game. Other rooms and monsters “lock” dice so they’re unusuable until the room is completed or the monster is slain. (If you kill a monster but then don’t complete the room in which he was hanging out, the monster is still dead and you still get the benefits of dispatching him.)
I’ve found value in tackling rooms that open Other rooms when solved, because of the latter category’s more favorable risk/reward ratio. The game also includes the Entrance, a sort of shop where players can return Trophy points, acquired by completing rooms or defeating monsters, for additional clues, cards, or even Elder Signs, although I’ve found I only make use of the Entrance to return Trophies for healing or to buy Elder Signs.
Ultimately, however, this is a luck-based game where you are working to manage your luck by mitigating its effects. A basic understanding of probability helps, of course, but in general it’s best to throw everything you’ve got into each room’s set of tasks because of the high cost of failure and the fact that every item or trick you use for rolls reduces your dependence on random chance. It’s the kind of game that can have you muttering that the dice are loaded after ten straight dice don’t give you the one skull (“peril” … seriously, the terminology here is stupid) image you needed, so accepting that you’ll have outlier rolls that make your can’t-miss strategy miss is part of the fun. It’s a solid mid-weight game, good as a cooperative game that has more individual decision-making than Pandemic, but you have to be able to live with Elder Sign’s heavy reliance on dice to like it.
There is a modified app version of Elder Sign sold as Elder Sign: Omens for the iPad and iPhone. I played at least a dozen games without a single crash, and the graphics are very strong and clear, drawn directly from the physical game. The interface is clumsy, unfortunately, and I had a few instances where I clicked on something, expecting more information, only to find I’d made an irrevocable choice – a dialog making sure that I wanted to give up on a room before finishing would be a good addition. It’s also too many clicks to get information on rooms or what each investigator is holding, and even if you disable the videos there’s too much nonsense in between each investigator’s turn for my tastes. The app differs in a few small ways from the board game – I don’t think there are Ally cards at all, and once the big foozle wakes up the game is over. The base app costs $6.99 and includes four Ancient Ones to fight; three more are available as in-app purchases for $2.99 each, each of which also adds some investigator options. It’s worth the seven bucks to try it out before buying the physical game, although compared to other boardgame apps in the $6-10 price range you get less bang for your buck.