Call of Cthulhu is a Collectible Card Game made by Fantasy Flight Games and based on the stories of Howard Phillips (HP) Lovecraft. The game is mission based, and unique in the fact that the goal isn't utter decimation of your opponent, but instead completion of a story. Not only does this cause a new and somewhat innovative type of gameplay to evolve, but it absolutely immerses the game in flavor. At the end of any Call of Cthulhu game, you can go over the cards you have played and see how they unfold into a horror story narrative, and I think this is one of the big draws of the game. While the gameplay is solid enough, you won't be playing Call of Cthulhu for the game system or rules, you will be playing because you want to see what sort of unspeakable horrors will unfold on the play mat in front of you.
Before I go any further, let me give you a little back-story about the Cthulhu mythos for fans that are unaware. Cthulhu is an ancient primordial deity of unspeakable horror, and he will return at one point to consume the world and, well you get the rest. The thing is, when dealing with Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian deities, you really only have two options. You can die, which is probably the best you can hope for, or you can go insane, which probably involves a great deal more pain. Please note that a third option of go insane and then die also exists in Lovecraft's stories, but only the truly lucky get to exercise it. There is really no such thing as a “good ending” in a Lovecraft story, so the biggest challenge Fantasy Flight games had was finding a way to allow a player to “win” without breaking the “you are screwed either way” feel that is so unique to Lovecraft. (Remember kids, worshipping Cthulhu won't get you saved when the apocalypse inevitably comes, it will just get you eaten first and relatively painlessly…relatively.)
Fantasy Flight answered this dilemma with the “Story Deck” system. Each time you play a game of Call of Cthulhu you need to bring a “Story Deck” to the table. The Story Decks are a very specific grouping of ten cards, which cannot be changed or altered. Fantasy Flight puts out a new Story Deck once a year, and each Story Deck represents a different set of scenarios in a Lovecraftian tale of horror and insanity.
The story cards within the Story Decks are the victory conditions that players are striving for. Each turn, players try to complete a story card's story by putting tokens on it. 5 tokens wins you a story and 3 story card's wins you the game. The requirements for completing each story are the same, so you will never be put in a bad position by a story card draw, but each story card has effects that happen when they resolve and these can vary greatly. The effects can range from anything from “all players shuffle their discard piles into their decks” to “each player discards their hand” to “each player draws ten cards”. Every story effect is global though and affects both players equally, so there is no sense of imbalance because of this mechanic. There is a tiny bit of luck involved in that certain story card effects can make certain decks better or worse.
For example, a control deck that doesn't run many cards that stick on the field would try to complete “destroy all cards in play” while a slow high cost deck would benefit if a “draw ten cards” story was drawn. While this may seem frustrating for some, it does force the metagame to be altered in a way that no one deck will ever be the best (due to the story card randomness) and I think in this end this actually serves to balance the game, and add another level to deck building.
To complete stories, players have to commit (by turning sideways) characters to them. Each Character card has a rating in four categories (Terror, Combat, Arcane, and Investigation), and a skill level, which effect how the story resolves. Players can also play “support” cards which give characters static bonuses, and events (quick effects) to either buff their characters or alter the way the story resolves. After players are done playing all their effects, the characters involved at each story go through a series of struggles, one for each of the four character ratings. A struggle is won by the player who's committed characters have higher combined totals in the appropriate rating.
The first struggle, the terror struggle, penalizes the loser by making one of his character cards go insane. Insane characters are turned face down, have no stats, and effectively can't do anything until they become sane once more. Players are allowed to “re-sane” one character per turn. The second struggle, the combat struggle, penalizes the loser by wounding one of his characters. A wounded character dies and is discarded (unless it has an ability called “toughness” which allows it to sustain more wounds. In this case wounds are represented with wound counters.) If an insane character is wounded, it dies immediately. The third struggle, the arcane struggle, allows the winner to “refresh” one of his committed characters, so that that character may be used on defense during his opponent's turn. Finally, the winner of the fourth struggle, the investigation struggle gets to put a success token on the story. After all these struggles, the active player compares his skill to the defending player's skill. If his total is higher, he gets a success token, if not, nothing happens. As always 5 success tokens wins a story and makes its effects resolve, and the game basically goes back and forth this way until someone successfully resolves 3 stories.
There is one more important game mechanic in Call of Cthulhu that should be noted and that is the domain system. As is the case in most CCGs, to play cards you need to spend resources and the resources in Call of Cthulhu come from your domains of which each player has three. You can exhaust a domain to use its resources to pay for any card in the game, but you cannot use more than one domain to pay for one card. To make up for this restriction, Call of Cthulhu allows you to “make your own domain” so to speak. Once a turn you can attach any card in your hand to a domain upside down. Doing so makes that domain produce one resource of that card's “faction” (certain cards have a faction requirement). If more than one resource is attached to a domain, then the domain produces more resources when it is exhausted, so the game becomes a constant balance between building up one domain so you can get expensive cards out early, or multiple domains so that you can play more than one card a turn. The resource a card provides when used as a domain attachment, and the amount it provides are printed on the bottom of every card upside down, so a player can easily situate them under their domains so that only the resource is shown for easy readability.
The overall gameplay of Call of Cthulhu is interesting. One thing I noticed is that there was an absence of that “my deck runs like a well oiled machine” feeling you may get from other CCGs. Instead, Call of Cthulhu is very swingy, and since some story effects even make you shuffle your completed stories back into the story deck, it always feels like the underdog can come back for a win. Overall, I would say the gameplay was enjoyable, but I did have a few gripes about the rules. There were a couple obscure rules facts like, “characters with a terror icon cannot go insane” that were a little counter intuitive (especially because characters with a combat icon can still be wounded, and so forth). It's not enough to ruin your enjoyment of the game, not in the least, but it does somewhat make you wish they streamlined the whole system it a little more.
Changing gears a bit, let's talk about the story and flavor of Call of Cthulhu. First of all if you are a Lovecraft fan you will love this game (pun not intended.) The faces and names are all recognizable (or sufficiently unrecognizable in the case of the unspeakable horrors from beyond time and space.) You'll actually feel like you are inside a H.P. Lovecraft horror story as you play the game, which is something of note because it's hard enough to feel like you are in a H.P. Lovecraft horror story when you are reading an H.P Lovecraft horror story.
For people who aren't fans of Lovecraft, the game is a bit of a hit or miss affair. I can honestly say everyone I showcased the game to enjoyed it, but the ones who had not heard of Lovecraft before had their game sessions littered with “what's that” and “who's this” and “what's that mean” and other similar questions. It's not that the game is hard to understand, it's that the medium it is based off of, that being the Cthulhu Mythos, is purposefully written to be hard to understand. Call of Cthulhu is enough to make Lovecraft fans out of newcomers to the genre, but not without a lot of questioning and a little bit of personal research. Lovecraft makes for a fine generic horror game setting, and in that aspect it translates over to a CCG just fine, but make no mistake you will WANT to know more about his stories after you play this game, and really getting intimate with Cthulhu takes a bit of effort, and a fondness for tentacles.
Finally, let me talk about the Call of Cthulhu community. The best way I can describe it is small, but very close. There have not been many expansions released for Call of Cthulhu, and the events/meetups you will find for this game are slim to none. However, if you do manage to find a good playgroup, and/or make one of your own out of newcomers, they will be so addicted to the game you will find yourself coming back to it for months and years without tiring of it. In addition, all the existing Call of Cthulhu players are really nice and are quickly to introduce you to their little world of death and insanity with very little judgment or pretention. This isn't the sort of game you will find 10,000 dollar tournaments for, but it is the kind of card game you will find a room dedicated to at a convention.
Overall I would have to say my experience playing the Call of Cthulhu collectible card game was a positive one. The game was fun, the flavor was amazing, and the whole thing felt like something new rather than just another trading card game retread. I had a couple gripes and the game isn't perfect but then again what is. If you are a fan of H.P. Lovecraft or a devout follower of Cthulhu, I say check this game out, you won't be disappointed. For everyone else, well first of all you are making a mistake by not being a devout follower of Cthulhu, but second of all I would say you'll probably have some fun. It may not be your main game, but it will keep you amused all the same. Besides, it's something to do to pass the time between now and the day when the great old ones rise to consume all existence as we know it. Ia Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn.
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Presentation Rating = 8.5
Everything about this game is flavor, and that flavor is insanely (pun intended) delicious. As a Cthulhu based TCG, this game definitely hits it big with Lovecraft fans.
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Gameplay Rating = 7.5
If there is anything this game is, it's fun. The story system, the domain system, and heck even the struggle system are all a lot of fun and if the rules were just streamlined a bit more it would be one of the better systems I have played in a while.
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Support Rating = 6.5
Currently, expansions are rarely released, events are rarely run, and overall, as a CCG Call of Cthulhu could have had more support. This is going to change very shortly however when Call of Cthulhu becomes one of Fantasy Flights new “Living card Games” and that I am incredibly excited about.
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Innovation Rating = 7.5
Call of Cthulhu makes it's mark by introducing many systems that set it apart from other CCGs. The game plays enough like other CCGs to be easy to learn, but its different enough to allow you to feel that difference. Overall Call of Cthulhu is a CCG with a twist, a slimy tentacled monstrous twist.
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