This is quite possibly the greatest board game ever. Really, it’s a work of genius. A genuinely cooperative game. The players must work together to defeat…the board. Your opponent is the selection of randomly drawn Mythos cards at the end of each turn. Over and over again, you watch as all of your cooperative efforts seem to be working, then the Mythos has its turn, foiling all your efforts.

I love this game because the balance is perfect. You are not likely to win this game without teamwork and skillful play. When you do win, it feels like a genuine accomplishment.

There are a lot of elements here that could draw in a lot of different people, even ones who don’t think they like board games. The strategy aspects are nicely done. The best part, though, is the story the game tells while you play. You aren’t just rolling dice and moving pieces. A plot with twists and turns is being revealed. It almost leaves you with the feeling the game knows exactly what it’s doing as your investigators get chased by monsters and sucked into portals to other realms.

The game has the following cons:
-It takes hours to play. Maybe 20 minutes to set up and generally about 4 hours to play, but as many as 8.
-There are a lot of pieces. If small children or clumsy people get hold of this, they may well make it unplayable after losing important tokens and cards.
-You need a BIG table to play. By the time the board and tokens are all laid out on my long dining room table, I sometimes have to get out TV trays for players to put their stuff on.
-As others have said, it takes a while to learn. You’ll probably want to set the game up in advance and sit with the manual and play a practice run through.
-Somewhat expensive. Especially if you obsessively collect all the expansions, this could turn into $100+ boardgame.

Finally able to really get into this about 5 weeks back. Since then we’ve played thee more times and are now very comfortable with the rules so we can really burn right through it without looking through the manual every ten minutes.

I had been wanting to play this game for a long, long time but it’s hard to get together the right people for a decent span of time! I finally got my chance last month when I journeyed to Chicago for, yes, Chicago Game Day! I only got to play with two people – my best buddy from college and his wife (inventor of the Cthulhu-tini) – but it was still fantastic. This game is best played after a run-through of play (or a kind friend with experience) drives home the point that you’re not playing against each other, but against the board! In other words, there’s no way anyone but the Great Old Ones can win if all the players don’t work together, for instance, one person collecting useful artifacts/clue tokens, another focusing on sealing - not just closing, but sealing - gates, another fending off the monsters.

It takes a bit to get the hang and rhythm of this game, but the effort is amply, amply rewarded. There are many expansion sets for this now, including one that is not strictly Lovecraftian but still brilliantly welcome based on The King in Yellow, in which, I gather, performances of a play about this eldritch and archetypal figure are disturbing the residents, raising the terror level and altogether further hindring the investigators. I really want to play that sometime.

My oldest daughter bought me this game for Father’s Day about three years ago, and we have yet to actually play it. I read the rules back then, and have lately read them over again after playing the game at Con of the North last February. I’m not going to mark it as consumed until I’ve played my own copy though. Hopefully we can get to it this next Father’s Day.