Elder Sign

First published in GRIND IV, pages 212–223.

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Fear of the unknown is certainly one of humanity's oldest and most powerful feelings. The unknown, and the uncertainty it breeds, doesn't just frighten us – it fills us with genuine terror and drives us out of our minds. As psychologist Ema Tanovic (from Boston Consulting Group in Philadelphia and a researcher at Yale University) puts it, “uncertainty can intensify the way a threatening situation is perceived”. One study showed that its participants were far more stressed when there was a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock, for example, than in situations where there was 100% certainty they would be electrocuted. Even in everyday life we can feel ourselves sliding gently down the slope of madness when, say, we're waiting for an answer to a job interview, an answer that never arrives. You'd take a straight negative answer a thousand times over rather than endure another minute of that agonising wait.

Like humanity's other more extreme feelings, the fear of the unknown has always been fertile ground for the imagination of many members of our species, whether we're talking painters, filmmakers, playwrights, photographers or writers. And without a doubt one of the greatest writers to work that ground was H.P. Lovecraft: in the mythos he created, perfectly unremarkable people, like you and me, are thrown into the path of cosmic entities from the abyss of long-forgotten ages. Cthulhu, Hastur, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep are so terrifying that the terror they stir in ordinary mortals drives them stark raving mad.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

The clock strikes midnight. The year is 1926, and on the streets of Arkham – an unremarkable provincial town in the US – all you can hear is the odd dog barking in a yard, while a drunk ambles along past a fence, mumbling inaudibly about the racket. The rest of the townsfolk sleep peacefully in their homes, probably dreaming of a better world, unaware of the dangers that have begun to stir out of the darkness that seems to have swallowed everything on this sinister night. For a few weeks now, inexplicable and downright bizarre events have been taking place at the Miskatonic University Museum, and those with eyes to see and ears to hear know that imminent danger is in the air: inside the museum, ever clearer signs are appearing that this may very well be humanity's last night.

Elder Sign (created by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson and published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2011) is a cooperative board game that pits 1-8 players against Lovecraft's cosmic entities in an attempt to save humanity. Every session has an Ancient One that the players must face and lock away in its own world before it wakes and breaks into our Universe, bringing terror and destruction with it. To that end, each of these entities has a set number of Elder Signs, seals the players must collect over the course of the session in order to come out victorious and save the world. If they fail, the end of the world is either instant (as with Azathoth) or arrives after an intense fight with that entity (as with Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth and so on).

Who are you? An investigator who, in an attempt to hold the occult forces in check, has ended up drifting through the museum on that very night. So we have 16 characters, each more colourful than the last, to pick from at the start of the session; characters such as Mandy Thompson – The Researcher, Bob Jenkins – The Salesman, Monterey Jack – The Archaeologist, Norman Withers – The Astronomer, Michael McGlen – The Gangster and plenty more. What matters most about them are the two stats: stamina (physical health) and sanity (mental health), because the dangers you run into will put not only your bodily integrity to the test but your mental integrity too, and the moment either of them hits 0, that character dies and you have to pick a new one.

The Twilight Zone

As its theme suggests, Elder Sign is a merciless game that asks you and your teammates for maximum cooperation, and for you to understand each other at a glance, if you want any chance against the creatures of the dark. And yet, despite that, it's a fairly light board game as far as the mechanics go: not especially complex, suited not only to veterans but to beginners too – especially as the box boasts a running time of 90 minutes per session. As long as a horror film.

And the truth is that for the whole of a session you'll genuinely feel like you're part of the script of one of those films. The events of Elder Sign unfold in an intimate setting: all the action takes place only inside and around the Miskatonic University Museum, where we wander through the various rooms trying to collect as many Elder Signs as possible while defending ourselves from various dangers. In fact this is also the first phase of a player's turn: you take your character (investigator) and visit a room or the museum's surrounds, represented by richly illustrated cards (48 of them in the base game), which always carry a piece of flavour text to lend a hand with immersion in this world. Often portals to another dimension will open too (represented by 8 Other World cards), which, though harder to close, are almost guaranteed to give you (depending on difficulty) one, two or even three Elder Signs.

And setting foot in those places is always a risky business. Even before you enter the room you hear thumps and unnatural sounds. Once you're there, the second phase of a player's turn begins, called the resolution phase; probably the hardest of the lot, because every location you visit has a certain number of tasks that will keep you on edge and throw a spanner in the works, challenges you have to resolve as fast as you can. Each of those tasks is made up of a combination of symbols spread across one, two or three rows. For example, the Mysterious Tome card has 2 rows of tasks with two symbols apiece: in the first we have a symbol with a 3 and a magnifying glass (investigation) and in the second some tentacles (terror), while the second task has two scroll symbols (lore), whereas the Administration Office has two tasks, each with a single symbol: the first task has a scroll, and the second a magnifying glass with the number 9. In practice, during your turn, in the resolution phase, you have to resolve every task on that card so you can pass with flying colours. And you have to resolve them all in the same turn, otherwise you've lost that task and you'll suffer the consequences.

How do you resolve those tasks? With dice. The active player rolls 6 green dice on their turn, each face bearing the same symbols found on the visited location cards: 1 investigation (a magnifying glass with a 1 beside it), 2 investigation, 3 investigation, lore (a scroll), peril (a skull) and terror (some tentacles). The game mechanism is idiotically simple, and anyone who's played Yahtzee at any point in their life will instantly get what the deal is. The moment you've rolled the dice, you check whether you've managed to roll the symbols needed to resolve a task. For the Mysterious Tome room, did you roll two dice with scrolls (lore)? Perfect! If so, you put those two dice on that task and roll the remaining ones until you resolve the other task. If you don't roll the symbols you need first time, you can keep rolling as many times as you like, but each time you have to set one die aside and roll with the rest until you manage to resolve the tasks.

It seems almost insulting that a game of such scope should use a mechanism as old and tired as Yahtzee, and yet it works a treat! Yes, the game has a healthy dose of luck, but that sits perfectly with the game's theme and atmosphere. Because you'll roll the dice the first time, and not a single symbol for any task will come up. “It's fine,” you tell yourself, “I've still got 5 dice to roll for 3 symbols, I've still got a chance.” And you roll again, and again you don't get what you need. You set another die aside, you're left with a fixed number. And now the tension is at its peak. Is there anyone who can help you with anything? You rub the dice between your palms, say a well-placed prayer, and while the dice are still tumbling, your whole life flashes before your eyes.

The idea is that once you've stepped into a room, you have to do its tasks: clear them and you earn some benefits; fail to clear them before your dice run out and you risk losing what's dearest to you — your mental health. So every roll carries the tension, and you find yourself praying for exactly the right result. And the difficulty climbs as you notice that not all rooms are built the same: some make you do the tasks in a strict order, others effectively lock one of your dice (so you're rolling with one fewer, which can have catastrophic consequences), others have tasks that automatically cost you a sanity or a stamina, while on others monsters turn up, which effectively means an extra task lands on that card.

Once you're done with the resolution phase, the clock phase follows, in which you have a big clock on the table and you advance it by three hours (a quarter of the circle). The moment it reaches XII (midnight), the players draw a mythos card that will almost always have dire consequences for them, both immediate and long-term — that is, until it reaches XII again and another mythos card is drawn. After this phase the active player's turn ends and the next player's turn begins.

Holy Water

The fight will be a hard one, and there's always a real chance of being cut down by cosmic entities, but the good part is that Elder Sign gives you a chance. Several chances, in fact. Each investigator has a special ability, and these are often a godsend. Carolyn Fern - The Psychologist can give 1 sanity back to another character. Sister Mary - The Nun has the very useful ability to ignore the long-term effects on mythos cards and can ignore dice locked by certain cards. Mandy Thompson - The Researcher lets a player reroll two dice before deciding whether or not they've cleared a task. All 16 investigators have a unique ability that can save your skin time and again.

On top of that, each of them starts the game with a particular combination of starting items, which can be clues (you can spend a clue to reroll one or more dice at any point), plus game cards standing in for common items, unique items, spells and allies. One of the biggest benefits of common items and unique items is that they can give you a temporary buff in the shape of a yellow or a red die to add to the green ones when you clear certain tasks. Those come rather more favourably weighted: they don't have the terror symbol, for instance. Spells are very powerful, and their gift is that they lock a die after a roll so you can keep it for later tasks. Say you want to clear a task and you've rolled a peril (skull) on one die. Maybe it doesn't help you now, but knowing it'll help next turn, you use a spell to hold on to it. And finally, allies have other abilities along the same lines as the investigators', giving you a welcome helping hand.

The good part is that you can get all these items not only at the start of the game, but also whenever you manage to “resolve” a room, that is, clear every task on it. So the rewards can be anything from clues to common items, unique items, allies and even elder signs. Fail to clear them, on the other hand, and you can lose stamina and/or sanity.

Peering into the abyss

Elder Sign isn't the only board game Fantasy Flight Games has dedicated to Lovecraft's mythos (other titles include the Arkham Horror, Eldritch Horror and Mansions of Madness series), but it's certainly the lightest. Even so, every time I play it I feel like I'm part of that Universe, and the dice and the central Yahtzee mechanic don't just offer a very pleasant tactile sensation (who doesn't like rolling dice?) — they genuinely match the uncertainty, the oppressive atmosphere and the tension that are characteristic of Lovecraft's work.

Of course, there's a constant risk that the game gives you a proper pasting at the end, but the road there… ah, the road! Whatever the outcome, the experience of a session is like nothing else. You'll be on the edge of your seat while your teammates roll the dice trying to snatch one more elder sign before Cthulhu wakes, you'll breathe a sigh of relief when you clear a difficult room, and your heart will stop when you draw a new mythos card that puts considerable obstacles in your way. For anyone who wants to spend some 90 minutes of suspense, agony and ecstasy in a board game of low-to-medium complexity, with a cosmic horror theme from H.P. Lovecraft's mythos, with friends around a table and a beer to hand, it's hard not to recommend Elder Sign. One of the best board games in the category. Alex Doppelgänger www.alexdoppelganger.com A podcast for hardcore gamers, with 9000+ level guests, where we sometimes answer the question “what have we played this past week?”. Warning: sometimes, episodes last 7 hours! G r i n d M a g a z i n e

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