LogFAQs > #976994168

Slow at work today, so here's one more.

40. Eldritch Horror
Expansions Played: Forsaken Lore, Mountains of Madness, Strange Remnants, Under the Pyramids
We've had a One vs All game, a semi-cooperative game, and now a fully cooperative game already - noticing a pattern yet?

We're still in the realm of games I never want to play again, but I will at least give Eldritch Horror credit for producing the odd enjoyable session out of the relatively many that we played once upon a time. You and up to seven other people play as, uh... Researchers? Investigators? People? People. People from wildly different places and backgrounds, trotting around the globe trying to stop a Lovecraftian evil from obliterating the world. There's a ton going on here, decks upon decks upon decks of cards, flavor text for days, tons of different characters all with varied upgradable attributes and unique abilities, and at the center of it all is an Ancient Monster that also comes with its own abilities and card decks.

Despite all that, the win condition for the players is always effectively the same: complete a number of tasks determined by player count before enough time passes and things happen for the horror to enter the world. Fight monsters, find clues, close otherworldly gates - it's a regular ol' supernatural adventure with twists and turns aplenty. In the end, though, success or failure will all come down to the whims of a bunch of D6s. Run afoul of a local crime syndicate in Europe? Roll a die to see if they break your leg and impair your movement for the next round. Looking for a clue in Africa? Roll a die to see if you actually find it or become afflicted with a horrible disease. Travel through a gate? Roll a die to see if you go insane on the way back. In combat with a Cultist? You guessed it - roll some dice. Generally speaking, you succeed on your current mission if you roll a 5 or 6. Anything else is a failure.

This is meant to be a tough, punishing game, so it feels a little wrong to complain about the amount of times things don't go your way. But man, too often, this game just feels like it's repeatedly kicking you in the crotch. Every action matters here - you've got a supremely limited amount of time to accomplish everything you need to do to win while putting out little fires all over the place, and failure on one turn is often completely crippling because problems will snowball out of control very quickly. With the odds being so against you on nearly every roll, it just creates a feeling of hopelessness for the majority of time spent playing. Thematic? Sure. Fun? Not usually. And with the need to be so efficient and coordinated, you're often going to be forced to quarterback at least some of the time if you want to have any shot at winning at all.

The bottom line is that most of our sessions with this game didn't exactly come down to the wire. Either we officially lost relatively early, or we knew we were going to but felt obligated to see things through anyway. Why would we do that? Sunk cost, mostly. This game's setup time alone is obscene with the amount of decks that need to be separated and shuffled, and (stop me if you've heard this before) it takes forever to actually play, too. I feel the need to clarify that I don't mind long board games - in fact, I tend to prefer them. But they have to be interesting all the way through, not just for portions. And "challenging" for a co-op game becomes a problem when it crosses over into "unbalanced." Forget the random nature of the dice; there are basically no controls in place for what kind of Encounter cards you might draw at the end of each turn. Some of them will include negative effects even for successes, some of them will target attributes for your character that make things impossible even when that sort of thing is supposed to be somewhat mitigable, etc. Even drawing monsters is completely random more often than not - it's like a really bad Dungeon Master using random.org to determine encounters and sending a giant pack of wyverns at a Level 1 party with no additional thought.

In short, there have been way too many attempts at this game that seemed to just descend into an unwinnable state early on, and rarely did it feel like we had anything to do with that when it happened. Even some things that are determined by player count feel wonky - setup and victory conditions are the same for 4 players as 3, for example, or for 6 as 5, and that extra player who is or isn't there makes an enormous difference.

I think I can sum up the problem with Eldritch Horror by telling you about our most successful playthrough, which came when I, through a combo of lucky rolls and draws, quickly amassed a large arsenal of weapons (and other helpful things, but mostly weapons) early on that allowed me to pretty much steamroll every instance of combat for the rest of the game. We won fairly handily, but while it was fun in the moment (especially as I was annoying my friends by repeating the "Anyway, I start blasting" meme every time I fought something), it doesn't feel that satisfying on reflection. I don't even remember what Ancient One we were facing or what character I played or any other details from the session beyond the fact that I had guns. Another time, victory or defeat came down to one dice roll, for which my best friend's wife confidently stepped in and said, "I got this," only to roll a 1 and seal our loss - again, one memorable moment at the end of a very long session that we can recall no other details of.

I WANT to like this game badly, but it just rarely hits its sweet spot, and even when it does, it doesn't make for an experience that's all that satisfying. Having so much luck inherent to every part of the adventure means that not only do you feel cheated when things go completely off the rails, but you also don't feel particularly accomplished. You just happened to roll better that time. I've got no problem with luck-based games in and of themselves, but when one lasts for 3 or 4 hours and I spend the whole time fairly convinced that any decisions I'm making are secondary to the dice, it's asking a lot.

Maybe it would help a little if I had more attachment to Lovecraft and the flavor text didn't wear thin so quickly. I'll at least give it credit for being written much better than something like Dead of Winter. But again, if we're two hours in and I've just been Cursed for the third time and my sanity both in and out of the game is rapidly depleting, I just don't want to hear it. I want to accelerate the inevitable loss so we can do something else.

I just eventually hit a point with Eldritch Horror where I don't know what I'm supposed to get out of it. "Fun" feels like it was a tertiary or quarternary concern here.