Cool Mini or Not | Cthulhu: Death May Die Season 2 | Board Game | 1-5 Players | Ages 14+ | 90-120 Minute Playing Time

Product Information

Inside the chunky season 2 expansion box is a wealth of new components and missions. 10 new hero characters each with their individually sculpted mini can be played with missions from both season 1 and season 2. As with season 1, each hero also has their own unique ability. Lovecraftian horror is undeniably one of my favourite genres of board game, game, book and sandwich fillings. It’s everything you want from the psychological horror, as it’s not what you can always see that you should fear. Nowadays we’ve become so desensitised to everything that film makers have to resort to full blown gore and disembowelment to get an audience to flinch. In one game, one player’s ability was to keep a mythos card and replay it when they went mad, which helped at some points and was unhelpful at others. As best we could, we ensured they triggered their insanity at a particular point or in a particular place, ensuring minimal threat to other players. Other afflictions were a lot less helpful and impractical. Kleptomania was the bane of my first win, as I constantly increased stress whenever I couldn’t steal from another player. Our game plan wasn’t to stay together, and it impacted my progress negatively. There were situations where we thought we could use it advantageously, but you can’t always manipulate a dice roll. By triggering it early I nearly lost us the game, so it’s very double-edged in its function. Aesthetically Horrifying In Cthulhu: Death May Die, inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, you and your fellow players represent investigators in the 1920s who instead of trying to stop the coming of Elder Gods, want to summon those otherworldly beings so that you can put a stop to them permanently. You start the game insane, and while your long-term goal is to shoot Cthulhu in the face, so to speak, at some point during the game you'll probably fail to mitigate your dice rolls properly and your insanity will cause you to do something terrible — or maybe advantageous. Hard to know for sure. Season two is a superb expansion. It builds and develops what was already a great game without trashing what made it excellent in the first place. Lang and Daviau use their combined experience to design a play experience that is thematically engrossing and massively enjoyable even when you go down vainly firing off rounds in a swarm of flailing tentacles and gaping maws.

The Season 2 expansion contains some very fun missions, including the very first one – Strange Bedfellows – which introduces the player(s) to a host of Chicago mobsters. In this mission, the players must disrupt the ritual by collecting loot, paying off gangsters to join them and then breaking into the bank vault where the cultists are holed up. It’s a fun, thematic story, and when you meet a gangster and can’t pay them, you’ll instead become “marked” which has negative consequences when certain cards are drawn. The other five scenarios are just as interesting, and as always the new monster miniatures are huge, amazingly sculpted and often terrifying!

Expansions

Similarly to the Unspeakable Box, the Comic Book Extras and Julia Investigator are no longer available at retail and I can’t add much detail because I don’t have either. The Comic Book box seems to contain around six investigators who all look quite cool, but more interestingly it includes a graphic novel which I would love to read to expand my immersion into the Cthulhu: Death May Die universe. Julia is similar really, in that she is an extra investigator who has some nice new moves, but I haven’t used her in my games and therefore can’t speak specifically about her.

Avoiding spoilers, the episodes of season 2 feel more distinct from each other than those of the base game. Each has its own distinct mechanisms that impact how you play and feel easier or harder with different combinations of characters and Elder One’s. This range of play style also carries through into stronger theme and setting for each episode. Something that is massively helped by the new floor tiles included in the expansion that combine with the base game components to bring the scenarios to life on the table. With Yog-Sothoth also comes Wilbur Whateley – a terrifying minion who uses Yog Gates (a special and unusual spawn point) to pop up in the places where you least expect him. Annoyingly, regular enemies can also appear from these gates as well, so the net result is that Yog-Sothoth will spawn gates and enemies, often right in the active player’s space – and that’s never a good thing. Both the Yog and Wilbur miniatures are large and very well detailed, with Yog himself a particularly large, terrifying beasty. Wilbur is tough and relentless – hunting the players mercilessly – whilst Yog focusses as much on dealing insanity as he does actual damage. The models are designed with horror in mind and look incredible, and they’re of brilliant quality too! If you’re a fan of painting miniatures, you’ll appreciate the quality of these and enjoy making them look more grotesque. The investigators too look awesome. Each one looks like they’re straight out of the 1920s and fit well into the themed tiles of the maps. The artwork across the cards is awesome as always with CMON games, and are of a lovely quality. Being a poor quality painter myself, I would have appreciated having the miniatures pre-painted, however this isn’t something that will keep me up at night. What does keep me up at night is how incredibly designed the inserts of the game are. User functionality is at the heart of this design, and it may seem minor, but it makes a difference! Final ThoughtsPreviously on Cthulhu: Death May Die: 10 disparate heroes battled their way through 6 R’lyeh-raising episodes of pure pandemonium. Traversing the USA battling deep ones and fire vampires and the big guy himself, Cthulhu. Cultists were cut down. Cthonians curtailed. Season one of Eric M. Lang and Rob Daviau’s co-operative dice and slice through the Cthulhu universe was as fun as it was big and brash, but how does season 2 compare to the original? Cthu’s Who Having said all this, I still haven’t covered the main hook in Cthulhu: Death May Die– which is that as players roll dice to deal (or receive) wounds, they also roll insanity. Insanity is good and bad, because as players gain it, they also gain new powers and abilities… However, if any characters reach maximum insanity, they will die and be eliminated from the game – if this happens before the ritual is completed, then all players lose – but if it happens afterwards (with the Elder One on the board) then the other players can keep fighting to try and defeat their greatest foe.