Grayson on Nostr: And the second game of Sunday was our (not quite) annual costume game of Eldritch ...
And the second game of Sunday was our (not quite) annual costume game of Eldritch Horror (Six players).
A side story; I have a full set with all of the expansions, and then I started acquiring random bits and bobs to upgrade the game (so stuff like wooden heart/brains for the health/sanity tokens). Slowly but surely, it morphed into a set that had custom dice (including color coded normal, blessed, and cursed), 3D resin gate holders, special doom tracker/investigation/etc bits, various bags for the monster cup and stuff, and finally a giant crate to store it all in. I even have five or six hours of ambient music that someone in England composed for Call of Cthulhu that we play in the background.
It's all now heavy enough that it doesn't leave the house if I'm walking/bussing anymore. I'm missing investigator minis (I think I can get some from Etsy), replacement wooden tokens for focus and resources (the later is easier to figure out, the former needs some hunting), and clue bits for each spot. Couple this with the house rules that the lead investigator rotates left each round and you read the encounter card for the person to your right (and thus they can't read ahead to figure out what they should do), and we have ourselves an elaborate boardgame experience that is RPG adjacent.
Typically, we play EH at least a few times each October (which fits the season, and RVA in general really gets into Halloween). A few years ago, we had the demented idea of not only playing EH in October, but also dressing up as the character. We did it once before COVID started, but hadn't since then for various reasons. Last night was our return to that.
Now back to last night and our battle against the King in Yellow;
Everyone showed up around 4pm, and we served chili and salads for a mid-game dinner. I was Leo Anderson (aka "adventuring Bill Belichick") and the guy to my left was George Barnaby.
As for most games of EH where you're not hyper planning each round, things went off the rails quickly and at one point four of the six of us were Lost In Time And Space... Later on, three of us lost our personal quests simultaneously (lol), but the most memorable aspect was where we had 7 gates out, and (because all of my Mythos cards are bundled together and not sorted by expansion) we had a rumor that said we needed to draw two disaster cards cause we obviously didn't manage that crisis well.
I have never drawn a disaster card in >15 games.
I didn't even know what they looked like.
We fumble around in the various expansion rulebooks to find a picture and then dig around in the crate. Sure enough, out pops a small deck of ornate cards. We shuffle them, and draw two. I draw one, and I pass one to the guy to my left. (You see, we distribute the reading load as noted earlier). I read the card and we find out that Sydney has fallen! It is now devastated (queue another 5min hunt for these markers). Someone comes back from the bathroom and we fill them in; "well you see, George was chasing this treasure map and he just left Sydney for the outback and all hell broke loose..." and as we say that, we all turn and look at both the board and the player, realizing that it was super suspect that he was just there... He wanders back into town, gives a rousing speech, and convinces the mob to settle down as only a lawyer could.
As is tradition, we lost. In this case due to gates on the board. We were a turn away from completing the first of Hastur's two missions. Doom was hovering around 5. Good times, good times.
#boardgames
A side story; I have a full set with all of the expansions, and then I started acquiring random bits and bobs to upgrade the game (so stuff like wooden heart/brains for the health/sanity tokens). Slowly but surely, it morphed into a set that had custom dice (including color coded normal, blessed, and cursed), 3D resin gate holders, special doom tracker/investigation/etc bits, various bags for the monster cup and stuff, and finally a giant crate to store it all in. I even have five or six hours of ambient music that someone in England composed for Call of Cthulhu that we play in the background.
It's all now heavy enough that it doesn't leave the house if I'm walking/bussing anymore. I'm missing investigator minis (I think I can get some from Etsy), replacement wooden tokens for focus and resources (the later is easier to figure out, the former needs some hunting), and clue bits for each spot. Couple this with the house rules that the lead investigator rotates left each round and you read the encounter card for the person to your right (and thus they can't read ahead to figure out what they should do), and we have ourselves an elaborate boardgame experience that is RPG adjacent.
Typically, we play EH at least a few times each October (which fits the season, and RVA in general really gets into Halloween). A few years ago, we had the demented idea of not only playing EH in October, but also dressing up as the character. We did it once before COVID started, but hadn't since then for various reasons. Last night was our return to that.
Now back to last night and our battle against the King in Yellow;
Everyone showed up around 4pm, and we served chili and salads for a mid-game dinner. I was Leo Anderson (aka "adventuring Bill Belichick") and the guy to my left was George Barnaby.
As for most games of EH where you're not hyper planning each round, things went off the rails quickly and at one point four of the six of us were Lost In Time And Space... Later on, three of us lost our personal quests simultaneously (lol), but the most memorable aspect was where we had 7 gates out, and (because all of my Mythos cards are bundled together and not sorted by expansion) we had a rumor that said we needed to draw two disaster cards cause we obviously didn't manage that crisis well.
I have never drawn a disaster card in >15 games.
I didn't even know what they looked like.
We fumble around in the various expansion rulebooks to find a picture and then dig around in the crate. Sure enough, out pops a small deck of ornate cards. We shuffle them, and draw two. I draw one, and I pass one to the guy to my left. (You see, we distribute the reading load as noted earlier). I read the card and we find out that Sydney has fallen! It is now devastated (queue another 5min hunt for these markers). Someone comes back from the bathroom and we fill them in; "well you see, George was chasing this treasure map and he just left Sydney for the outback and all hell broke loose..." and as we say that, we all turn and look at both the board and the player, realizing that it was super suspect that he was just there... He wanders back into town, gives a rousing speech, and convinces the mob to settle down as only a lawyer could.
As is tradition, we lost. In this case due to gates on the board. We were a turn away from completing the first of Hastur's two missions. Doom was hovering around 5. Good times, good times.
#boardgames