Eldritch Horror - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

much as I tried to forget that fateful night of our Arkham Horror of you I've been haunted by terrible vision will be wrong to review it poorly was the creature that attacked me a dream some forgotten figment of reality or something in between after that I couldn't live a normal life I would start for offices my very mind wasting away I set out to find the truth London is an old city and more of it has been forgotten than we shall ever know I spent days poring of her old maps that led me to the National Maritime Museum where I communed with the anchors that have touched the bottom of the ocean I was getting close to something perhaps this was another illusion was i fabricating an answer stitching together scraps of my own madness oh my god you stop it I look stupid Lee at the box still dressed in a Christmas jumper when it was almost February shut up because I was an idiot oh no I don't care who your dad is not something to mention these straddles you can't start out doing internal monologues for people it's really and everything else we're within the wash so Eldrick eldritch horror is a cooperative game where all the players step into the brogues or high heels of an investigator in the 1930s trying to stop the arrival of some imminent unknowable unspeakable unpronounceable evil across the globe portal to other world that opening and monsters are spilling out and to prevent your evil God from awakening you're going to have to seal these portals shut and solve mysteries but that's not going to be easy it's impossible to know an eldritch what's going to happen or where it's going to appear or what to prepare for so I think the world has never been such a pain in the arse if that sounds familiar it's because it was a direct quote from Arkham Horror Review two years ago which held your Chara is a kind of modern up and this is a large bit of economic sleight of hand from publishers fantasy flight because unquestionably this game would pass a paternity test and leave grumpy Arkham Horror paying child support however the games are different enough that positive light can continue selling them side by side now for the duration of this review I'm going to do my best to put aside the continuing corruption of HP Lovecraft fiction which is about disempowerment and the unknowable and these days the same geeks the professor Lovett are turning it into what we got like wiki's that read like a bloody pokedex and then games that are about killing these same monsters with a pistol in each hand it's wrong but these days I guess I have to accept that tentacles are big business if I can't do that I'll go mad for real quickly then for people who haven't played Arkham Horror these games have a very particular appeal which is cool stuff that happens every card token every rule in these games has been painted with as much art and words that the designers can cram into them in the interest of them snapping together in an evocative way for example the combat in these games is in and of itself irredeemably boring you go to a place to the monster you roll some dice to see if you lose a bit parity in this case I lose to society then your arse and I see if you hurt it or it hurts you or something in between and that's it it's over already but it doesn't happen like that rather it works like this on your turn you travel from London to Rome crossing the continent going there to slay the evil ghoul who led that and the hired muscle you travel with you want to help but no you decide to go into the catacombs beneath the city alone with your darling because you can only take one card into a combat encounter and you all the dice I know it's not good you file your will check your going it all mad hunting the Google through the city and you make your combat check and you don't kill the ghoul and you're now paranoid you're paranoid the goal is following you around the world as you leave Rome or spooky anyway the good news is this is out of the gate a better game than Arkham Horror once you sell the board and Victor characters you can explain the game in sixty Seconds which I'll prove now out of executive four mysteries that are unique for your horrible evil god you're going to pick three SS or three of them then you've won the game each of these like a different axe with a different thing that all the players have to do together on your turn you get two actions which can be one of five things you can move one space you can pick up a train or both ticket which let you move further on future turns you can rest you can try and buy something or you can do something unique to your character for example our sexy sexy villager Mark Harrigan here can spend an action to lose the help and force another monster on his face to lose and health because he's crazy then we move on to the encounter phase where everybody has a sexy sexy encounter which might be a 15 count of wilderness encounter or a special encounter if you're on a space with a gate with the active expedition marker or a clue and finally we move on to the mythos phase where we draw a myth off card and everybody gets screwed with that pants on as the fabric of reality turns like a cheap pair of jeans as new side quests show up being more things you have to do or as the entirely hateful ongoing symbol shows up which we'll get to in a bit but elders are continue to impress me after that spell rules explanation probably other thing is complain about Arkham Horror is that its central challenge was something of a crapshoot with players ricocheting around that weirdly rectangular board like pinball sometimes doing well sometimes vanishing down the games and numerable gutters eldridge horror first Bob offers dice roll often before bad things happens are you giving a sense of agency to your misfortune more importantly it plays closer to a lot of modern top board games you have a number of thing you need to solve often one or two more than the number of players you've given information as to the consequences of the failure of each of these and as a result you can actually discuss tactics efficiency such as what to do with your turns how to cooperate that here's the bond over game trying last night's would be end welcome to my world it's not really a good world very don't come here if you can help it we're trying to run your life with your applause some kind of sorcerer regard and you can tell from the doing track that he's about to arrive he's going to arrive because you've got portals and what if there is Rome London San Francisco Tokyo we need to close them but to actually win we need to defeat them Dunwich horror a woman gave birth to that that's happening more portals there are zombies in San Francisco that are about to become a zombie hordes they're going to open more portals and weirdest of all there are people traveling around all the exhibition spaces going through time and space in raising all clues of yog supposed existence so I'm going to go there and stop them or we'll lose the game we've got one character here he's really good in the wilderness one character here he's really good at being stopped up and one character here who's really good at buying things can you see this is a puzzle what do you think you would do to get out of it think how to think have a think have a think it's trick question we'd already lost like two turns ago there was nothing we could do to win but we had a really good time figuring out and arguably best of all you can see the world devoured in eldritch horror still have room for a nice post match hustle and a cup of tea but in this game lasts a very reasonable 30 minutes per player which in to say it's polite delightfully most of elgyn sort of innovation to come from ways to do miss players in imaginative way remember that ongoing sim book whether you have a debt it's a bill attacking illness a monster is having some wicked plot or a dozen other things when you draw an ongoing symbol it happens all of it and you're able to finally flip those conditions and see what's on the other side as your past catches up with you more so than with Arkham Horror this game is generous with the content and ideas that power and those unique mystery cars you're solving to each other god they can't be understated they make it so much easier to buy into the world into the theme they make one of these Lovecraft games make except when they don't which is all the time let me explain what I mean okay broadly I like this game and that's not something I could say about our Kimora it is a game of some great moments when when you as an expedition leader venture into the heart of Africa taking other players with you and you pull out some Sounion statues in the ground that's the last piece of the puzzle and you solve it and you win the game when you're putting down riots in one of ares with kerosene when we're the actress in your party pretends to be a great sorceress and in doing so turn off the turn eventually becomes yog-sothoth favorite servant that's fantastic but just as often are moments when in trying to turn Lovecraft up to 11 the writers almost undermined the entire theme by trying to cram nonsense into the cards which are barely 30 words of storytelling okay I'm leaving the expedition in the Himalayas guys ducked into a cave to find shelter from a deadly snowstorm inside I find a human brain inside a cylinder me oh I'm just in Canada you help a young woman search the countryside for her trunk all to perfection if you pass you from the eccentric old man and he gives you a guess the Necronomicon okay guys the bad news is that Cthulhu has risen and strides the oceans of the world like a colossus the good news is I've been spending the whole game in Sydney so I'm really buff and can kill them myself if we can afford the double-barrel shotgun no maybe are you not even with the bank loan okay then we've lost the world is devoured and the same as this unreliable storytelling is the actual challenge most of the time it's okay sometimes it's great sometimes it's abysmal it's easy enough to explain the game just has a ton of moving parts gears that are meant to turn in sequence but often the teeth just collide and don't quite turn correctly a really good example of this is if there's a clue pokin out in the ocean and you go off on a boat to find it and you have your adventure and it's a volcano and you screw it up then probably the most sensible thing to do when your is to wait they're not do anything and try again next time when the volcano has now become a thunderstorm then the next term if you fail again that the volcano has become sons moments become things landing on the deck of your ship as you're struggling to pick up this closed circuit as if it was a card and you just cut your nails and oh my god I'm a subject to the top not working correctly I cannot believe they kept in all the mess of turn mechanics which are the worst thing about our Kimura so he's the terminology you become delayed and sometimes is even a punishment sometimes you're given the opportunity to get a weapon or spawn two blue tokens if you become delayed and your friends are going to be looking at you saying I'm scared we should we should do that and you say okay and then you can't play anymore it's all for all of the improvements of eldritch horror our fundamental criticism is the same it's an engine for random horrible surprises sometimes funny sometimes dramatic sometimes annoying sometimes unfair and probably I'd rather spend my money on a game where the fun is down to me and my friends so should you buy LG Toro well obviously it's a hell of a thing it's sprawling yet then it's gorgeous yet awkward so whether you need it is more so than usual down to you whether you will notice or care about its flaws are accepted into your home as an unsmiling wretched cardboard baby what do you think eldritch or a box your makeup a theme do you have any soy milk ah we might do actually let me check

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 220,617

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Shut Up Show, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, Eldritch Horror

Id: wUXqRTC8G3U

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2017