#22/54. A Game with a Horror Theme - Elder Sign

This is probably the only game that I am going to feel like I "cheated" on, but by the rules of this challenge, this is a legitimate play of this game. On January 25, 2016 I played a game of Elder Sign using the Elder Sign Game Application produced by Fantasy Flight Games - the same company that produces the Elder Sign board game. This is a single player game application of the board game.

Elder Sign is a horror themed board game based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. In the regular board game each player plays one or two investigators, each with special abilities or skills, who are investigating strange occurrences happening within the Arkham Museum. Usually, the idea is to stop the disciples of an elder god from Lovecraft lore from calling forth the elder god and thus the end of the world. This was not exactly the case in the scenario I was running the other day.

In this scenario, the group of four investigators is trying to gather enough supplies at the Arkham Museum in order to travel to Alaska to fight an elder god named Ithiqua - a wild and evil being - in order to rescue a colleague who has been looking for evidence of Ithiqua's existence and has apparently been captured. This is a very hard scenario. Once you leave the museum and travel to Alaska, there are a series of challenges to fight through while maintaining your health and sanity levels.

In this particular play-through I managed to get all the way to Ithiqua's cave with three of my four investigators still alive and sane. In the final battle against Ithiqua you have to fight Ithiqua three times without failing in order to defeat him and rescue your colleague. If you fail even once, your colleague goes insane and the character who failed will quite likely die. If he or she does not die, he or she will be very badly wounded. In this case, I was not successful and all four of my investigators died.

This game, and especially this scenario, is a challenge. You roll dice to try to match symbols in order to defeat the challenges. At times you can apply red or yellow dice to give your attempts some extra oomph. At other times the challenges will deprive you of the regular (green) dice you thought you had access to. There is a lot of luck involved in this game and the occult and horror theme makes this game NSFW, but otherwise ok for mixed company.