Forbidden Stars is the Warhammer 40,000 board game of area control, asymmetric factions and grudge matches that ate an entire evening. One of its designers is now doing something similar with the Cthulhu Mythos, and that is a combination worth clearing a Saturday for.
Looking for board gamers near you? Browse local communities and find your next game night.
Find events near youChaosium's board games team has announced Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins, designed by Samuel Bailey, one of the designers behind Forbidden Stars. The setup reaches back further than any Call of Cthulhu scenario you have played. Ancient powers rise and rival factions go to war over who gets to own the Earth, and they started long before there were any humans on it to own. Chaosium is promising deep strategy and asymmetric gameplay, which in this designer's hands should mean every faction wants something different and none of them are nice about it.
Details are deliberately thin. There is no release date and no price, and Chaosium says it cannot reveal everything yet. ICv2 reports it is built for two to four players, aged 14 and up, and runs 120 to 140 minutes, so this is a full evening game rather than a filler.
Run game nights? Backseat Gamer handles RSVPs, waitlists, date polling, and game voting so you can focus on playing.
Start organising for freeMore is coming at Gen Con, which runs from 30 July to 2 August. The game is on the Gen Con BoardGameGeek preview list, and Bailey will be at the Chaosium booth, number 511, to talk about it.
Most licensed Cthulhu games hand you investigators and a slowly rising sanity problem. Playing the other side of that equation, as the ancient powers themselves, is a far more interesting proposition. Gen Con should tell us whether there is a game under the pitch.
