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Beings of ancient evil, known as Old Ones, are threatening to break out of their cosmic prison and awake into the world. Everything you know and love could be destroyed by chaos and madness. Can you and your fellow investigators manage to find and seal every portal in time? Hurry before you lose yourself to insanity.
airjudden
Like [thing=260428][/thing], it uses some of the basic mechanics of Pandemic and improves on it by adding new mechanics and creating a stronger thematic connection. Major differences are that your hero cards have an insane (nerfed) side. There is an insanity die you roll in certain situations. The "infection track" also involves a group of ancient ones, revealed one at a time (Cthulhu is the final one and is one of the ways you can lose). Along with cultists, you have Sheggoths who are tougher to kill and cause insanity checks and revealed ancient ones. In other words, it does a good job of fitting the Cthulhu mythos with some of the familiar mechanics of Pandemic, just as [thing=65532][/thing] and [thing=260428][/thing] do, but there are enough differences to make it not feel like a theme pasted on to a mechanic. The differences are the best parts. This game isn't going to retire [thing=15987][/thing] or [thing=253344][/thing], but if you only have an hour and you are jonesing for a Lovecraft fix, this is for you.
ajewo
Pandemic variant with Cthulhu theme where players play investigators and try to fight cultists and seal all 4 gates before Cthulhu awakens. The main difference is that players can get insane resolved by die rolls. + Great artwork + Thematic (Cthulhu, seal portals and shut down cults) + Components (minis, custom dice) + Only 4 types of clue cards relating to one of each town + 12 'Old Ones' cards and 6 of them are used in each game (variability) + 7 Characters with special abilities + Well written rules + Player aids # Die rolls used for insanity checks can create tension, uncertainty, but also swingyness - Deterministic Pandemic fans may not love the die rolls for insanity checks Comparison to regular Pandemic: # Altered board with only 24 locations, no quick "teleportation" movement # Nearly the same loosing conditions # Players can remove a cultist from a location with one action and defeat a Shoggoth with 3 actions # Sealing a gate takes still takes 5 cards to Seal a Gate # No outbreak track from regular Pandemic is replaced by 'Old Ones' track Similar games: * Pandemic: Fall of Rome (fight against Barbarians, dice combat) * Defenders of the Realm (castle defend, dice rolling, combat) * The Captain Is Dead (cooperative, Sci-Fi game, similar gameplay, thematic, all about planning ahead and activating stations for certain effects) * Horrified (cooperative horror game with a Pandemic-like action point system and colored cards needed to fight unique monsters)
agentpatman
I think the beginner level is too easy relative to the other pandemics with the exception of base pandemic. I have owned and played them all now and the theme is fun on this one but it does lack the spark the others have. I think removing the outbreaks and cultists make it a bit more predictable. The slaggoths move in a predictable way as well. The only unknown factors are dice rolls and which order the old ones will come out in. It feels like the cultist deck doesn’t have a lot of duplicates so there is always just 1 cultist in each spot. It just feels off because you are just concerned with the overall amount left and not them actually summoning anything. I think we had a bad dice roll once that added some and one old one but it rarely happened. It did get more intense towards the end so maybe we had a good string of relics, dice rolls, and order of the old ones but it just didn’t feel the same towards the end. I definitely enjoyed it though and I’ll play it again on max difficulty but the other newer pandemics were hard at the easy level and had more intense moments. Still going to have a place in my pandemic collection but it’s the first one that left me doing some research if we played it right.