Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com —and let us know what you think.

Have we reached "peak Cthulhu"?

The Etsy crafting marketplace's 5,381 Cthulhu-themed items suggest that we have. (If you don't believe me, consider this "May Cthulhu devour this house last" bit of framed embroidery.) Even if we confine ourselves to the narrower world of board games, we can choose from titles like:

Cthulhu Wars

Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game

Munchkin Cthulhu

Cthulhu Realms

Cthulhu Gloom

Cthulhu Dice

Eldritch Horror

Cthulhu Rising

Cthulhu Fluxx

Don't Mess With Cthulhu

Chez Cthulhu

Wake Up, Cthulhu!

The Vampire, the Elf, & Cthulhu

...and one hundred others. Affection for his Highness, the Tentacled Green One who sleeps in R'lyeh, has grown so ubiquitous that the 2013 Smash Up expansion bearing his likeness was called "The Obligatory Cthulhu Set."

So do we really need another Cthulhu-themed game featuring Old Ones, shoggoths, cultists, and a "sanity die?" Probably not, be we've got one anyway. Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu replaces Pandemic's scientists out to cure the whole world of Terminal Cube Syndrome with supernatural investigators trying to seal mystic gates in 1920s New England. Somewhat surprisingly, given its increasingly tired theme, Reign of Cthulhu is actually a good game!

From Dunwich to Kingsport

Reign of Cthulhu narrows its focus from the entire world to four interconnected locales—Dunwich, Innsmouth, Arkham, and Kingsport—where a "cultist problem" has broken out. These hooded mystics are attempting to summon Old Ones—and eventually Cthulhu himself—into the world through the use of four magical gates. Sounds creepy! But it gets worse, because hideous creatures called shoggoths are also shambling through the shadows.

Game details Designer: Chuck Yager/Matt Leacock

Publisher: Z-Man Games

Players: 2-4

Age: 14+

Playing time: 45-60 minutes

Price: $35 ( Chuck Yager/Matt LeacockZ-Man Games2-414+45-60 minutes: $35 ( from Amazon ) / ~£40 in the UK

Players cooperatively control a team of investigators that has just arrived at the Arkham train station. Each investigator gets four actions per turn, which they can use to move around the board, wipe out cultists or shoggoths, exchange relic and clue cards with other characters, or seal gates. (Sealing gates requires the collection of same-colored "clue cards" depicting locations on the map.) Each character has a unique role and power—the doctor has five actions per turn, while the driver can move two spaces instead of one. After each turn, players draw new clue cards and the cultists then spread further around the map. If too many cultists congregate in one spot, they may successfully summon another Old One into the world.

Closing all four gates before Cthulhu appears wins your team the game. Losses occur if Cthulhu wakes, if the board is overrun with too many cultists/shoggoths, or if your whole team goes insane.

Insane? Yep. Much of the description above may sound like a re-themed version of base Pandemic, but the existence of the Old Ones and the insanity they can engender mark a departure. Reign of Cthulhu comes with a sanity die that has to be rolled whenever a character encounters a shoggoth or when a new Old One wakes. The die can remove "sanity tokens" from the player in question; lose too many and that character goes insane, which reduces their actions per turn and alters their special ability. (This is all nicely summarized on the "insane" side of each character card.)

The Old Ones, too, add a new twist to the game by providing permanent or instantaneous effects that alter game rules or make life more difficult for the investigators. And, unlike cultists (and diseases in base Pandemic), the shoggoths mix things up by moving toward the nearest gate, making the game more dynamic.

Reign of Cthulthu is clearly built upon Pandemic, and players who know the base game will pick this up quickly. But the alterations make it more than a simple re-skin. Reign of Cthulhu feels intimate and personal in a way that Pandemic, with its world-spanning map and abstract cubes/pawns, never did. The map is tight and tense and dark, while each of the four locales has unique buildings and locations. The player characters, cultists, and shoggoths are all represented by miniatures, not by cubes. And the Old Ones are all named and given suitably creepy portraits. The net effect is well-themed and creepy, like malevolent entities are haunting your town instead of the abstract and uncaring diseases of Pandemic.

The additional need to manage one's sanity also creates some exciting new decisions about when to travel through a gate or confront a shoggoth, and the Old Ones are a welcome addition. The art is also—as befits a Cthulhu game—dark and intense. I would certainly hesitate to pull this out with my kids; the imagery on the Old Ones cards is up there with the Bloodborne card game on the "nightmare inducement scale."

What Reign of Cthulhu doesn't address is the "alpha gamer" problem endemic to full co-ops, in which one forceful personality steamrolls everyone else into doing what he thinks is best. My best advice is simply not to play with such people. If your group can't treat Reign of Cthulhu like a truly co-operative puzzle to solve together, it probably isn't the right title for your family or game group. And, if you don't like Pandemic, the tweaks here are unlikely to change your mind.



Bottom line: thanks to the moving shoggoths, sanity, the tighter map, and the "personal" touches to characters, enemies, and locations, this is a worthy pickup if you:

Enjoy the base Pandemic system Would like a few more options/effects/resources to consider, and Are the kind of person who owns "Miskatonic University" T-shirts.

If you agree with 1 and 2 but not 3, you might consider the new Pandemic: Iberia variant, which features valiant medical personnel battling the flu in Spain.