My first win was againts Azathoth. There were eight of us and it lasted NINE HOURS ! Towards the end we were screeming at every dice roll, where every single roll could make or break our run. It was epic. This is my favorite board game.

30 minutes per player is extremely generous, I'd say. Our games with four investigators typically last at least 4 hours and often much longer.

1. Played Eldritch Horror with Yig as boss. 2. Working on the mission to find the Serpent Crown. 3. Found it in a general store in America. 4. Immediately stolen by some thugs. 5. ????? 6. Found it two turns later in Antarctica. 7. Laughed our asses off trying to explain what happened.

My favorite BG. You have to love the theme otherwise you won't like it. And I'd say it's closer to 45-60 minutes/player. You can remove the hard mythos cards (tentacles) if you really want it to be less devastating. And if Delayed is too harsh you could always House Rule it to instead lose 1 action on your next turn. Or to stick with the theme and make it you lose an action and cannot use the Travel Action next turn. That sounds pretty good to me, actually.

We have never been able to finish eldritch horror in less than 2- 3 hours. I love it, but it steels your day so be prepared.

did he say 30 minutes per player? I've NEVER clocked in that short. I wish I could. :)

Eldritch Horror - bought largely on a combination of a HP Lovecraft compilation and this video, is getting me through the lockdown. I have taken down Azathoth and Yog-soggoth. After work today I'm going to take on the Black Goat, and I've got the Forsaken Lore Expansion en route. Love it.

I definitely recognize those character sheets, tickets, and delay mechanics in Fury of Dracula.

Played this for the first time yesterday with some D&D friends. Other then remembering some of the movement/action rules (particularly for buying/using tickets), I had a lot of fun. We got to the final mystery and we literally lost by ONE roll. We were so goddamn close. Was quite exhilerating! Getting a win next time!

4 years after this review and I got all the expansions. My favorite game.

My group absolutely loves this game, and we plan to get every expansion. If the theme and mechanics speak to you, then it'll be a lot of hours of fun. We have a couple of house rules since some encounters are a bit iffy.

Finally after years of sitting on the shelf, I took this game out and got a few plays in. I think it's great if I just want to have an amusing time where bad (sometimes good) things happen to us. If I want a co-op to take seriously and try earnestly to win with the team, this isn't the game for that. There's just too many things that can randomly smack you down that you could not have been ready for. I've won Eldritch Horror (and Arkhan Horror) a few times, and it's always thanks to an extreme high roll game where we get great items early on and we never had those items taken away from us from random events, so those items allowed us to keep passing dice roll tests over and over. This game plays more like Arabian Nights, where you're just in for the ride and when you probably lose the game, hopefully at least some funny things happened along the way.

I absolutely love this game. Have all but one big box expansion. I agree with your criticism on being delayed though. Our gaming group has opted to play a variant where you can't move, but do get to do a second action. It keeps that thematic feeling of being stuck at a location, but still gives the investigator choices on their turn.

Know what doesn't happen in E.H.? Getting stuck in a location because there's a monster on the street location outside you can't handle. That alone catapulted E.H. past A.H..

The game always stays on theme when you remember you're dealing with more of a Pulp Cthulhu "story" than you are a story of HP Lovecraft's. I would argue no game would ever be a good adaption of HPL's stories...if you want that then your group should just play the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG.

Eldritch is my most favorite game.

You were right with the story. My all time favorite is this one (I palyed with my girlfriend): My girlfriend had a conflict wiht a couple of zombies (she kicked their ass). After that her card was about zombies! In my turn I moved near to Tonguska and boom, the tonguska rumo appeared! What a game!

One thing Quinns gets wrong about the delay mechanic is that it's not horrible. You don't get to take your actions, but you still participate in the encounters. When you get delayed, yeah, it feels bad, because you have only a limited number of turns to complete your objectives, and being stuck in the same location two turns in a row can be detrimental, but if you were planning to stay there anyway, not so bad. When you can choose to become delayed in order to gain some other benefit, it's always a discussion with the group trying to decide if the benefits outweigh the lost turn. I've had games where it was just a given that being delayed was a small price to pay for the reward, and I've had games where the reward would be nice, but we've got four gates open, doom is down to 3, we still need one more thing to complete the mystery, and we've only got two mythos cards left... and we just had to give up whatever potential benefit we could have gotten because we couldn't afford the lost turn. However, if you think being delayed is the worst thing ever, then stay away from the expansions that introduce Lost in Time and Space. That is seriously detrimental.

First of all, I'm a big fan of this game. We played it for more than 500 hours in our group. And the only reason we are not having a campaign right now is Gloomhaven. So this is going to come with a lot of bias. 1.) The game improves greatly with further expansions. Focus, resources, personal quests, and even campaigns are really good new mechanics. And it's really nice to have a huge pool of cards, so you don't know them by heart on your second playthrough. 2.) It's sometimes easy, sometimes hard and often borderline unfair. Or to put it in another way: It's a challenge. But making good strategic decisions always helps. Sometimes it's not enough. But most often it is, and often it is by a very close margin. And that's awesome for me. 3.) You need to ignore some of the goofy stuff and enjoy those times where (which are not that rare) when random events fit each other and create really cool moments. I understand people who don't like this game. But that's just a matter of opinion. It's just not for everybody. But we love it.

It doesn't happen often, but this is one of the rare occasions where I really disagree with this review. I love playing this game and it is by far my favorite HP Lovecraft themed board game (and in my opinion the only one worth playing). I really think he overstated the effect of being 'delayed'. The only thing it does is make you miss the chance to perform 2 actions, but you still get to have an encounter. I do agree with the wonky system that lets you keep trying to resolve a clue token on the same space. I have been thinking a simple and effective way to house rule an improvement to this rule is to simply remove the clue you failed to get and then flip over another clue and place it in the location specified on the board. I also don't know what other games fit into the niche this one fills, other then perhaps Betrayal at House on The Hill, and between these two games, I'd choose Eldritch. That's my two cents.

"The bad news is that Cthulhu has awoken and bestrides the world like a Colossus. The good news is that..." No. There is not good to news after that. From then on, the only question is who gets eaten first.

This game is great in that it is so incredibly difficult to win. The way it should be when humanity is facing the unknowable of distant eons.

Quinn always looks and acts like he has been up all night playing board games

Yeah, this seems more a "puzzle" game than anything else. We've had more or less the same gaming group for ~25 years now, and I've gotten them to play maybe three times. Basically, if the other players are in the mood to optimize our team's plays, then we can win (or almost win), but if they're there to "have fun" then we lose. And that's what felt worst about the game. The one player who wanted to RP hunting down the Bad Monster cost our team a "beat," and we fell behind and lost. And that's the thing that ended up sucking the most -- you're either playing with a full team of maximizers/optimizers, or else you lose. I still like the game. It just needs all the players to be focused on the team win. So if Dan showed up for Beer and Pretzels, or Ryan wanted a cool story moment, or Adam gets distracted and misses an optimized move that effects the fourth player down the line, its just not gonna work :\

I have some very good memories of this game, but perhaps that skews my opinion on it. It's true that it is a difficult game (especially for new players), but as an avid Lovecraft fan it really FEELS like you are these characters. Once you know what you're doing and kind of settle into your roles, you can become an unstoppable force and it just ends up being a puzzle to be solved as a group. I cannot describe to you the pants-tightening feeling of desperately needing to close a portal or beat a monster before the problem becomes worse and landing that last die roll you need to win. That character who has 1 influence and rolls a measly die to convince the local police to join their cause- That is a real stake and it makes you want to improve your character so that you can beat more skill checks like that. I'm not very interested in role-playing, but some of the scenarios make it hard not to at times. One time I went back in time and was transported to my younger self's bedroom. I hid in the closet when my dad came, but when he found me I had to wrestle a shotgun out of his hands to survive when I myself started the game with a shotgun, making all of us dub it "the family shotgun, passed down from generation to generation". One time the big bad soldier fellow who had tons of badass weapons and was on his way to Europe to kill 3 separate monsters failed a skill check and tripped and fell down some stairs, hurting himself and causing our whole group to erupt in laughter. Not only that, but the absolute difficulty required to beat these gods is exactly what I'd want out of a game where I'm fighting unknowable Lovecraftian deities because you're not fighting the deities directly, you're saving an ignorant and indifferent humanity by stopping the terrible god that's going to murder everybody from waking up. All-in-all, I've had a lot of good times with this game and I'd recommend it to a Lovecraft board game fan, though of course it's worth noting that finding a group of fellow people in that niche can be more difficult than the game itself.

just a small mistake: it's not that you can use only a single card for a combat/check/whatever, it's that you can only use a single greatest card effect that increases the stat you are testing. So that hired muscle and gun situation - you only get the bonus from the gun, but Hired Muscle had another effect that could still be used.

Dude!! This is one of the most intuitive, inspirational and funny board game review i have ever seen. The way u describe things without influencing the prospective players decision, is just mind blowing. You should be hired by Wizards of the Coast, and i dont say this lightly.......( hint ) i am a D&D 3.5 player....mostly Rogue :) Kudos!!!

It makes me both delighted and sad that this video's intro is the best lovecraft cinema we have. How hard could it be, Hollywood? Goddam

Will we see a review of Arkham horror 3rd edition?

Finally bought it as my friends and I are big Lovecraft fans. We tried the Cthulhu p&p, but unfortunately don't really have the time to prepare those regularely. So my hope is that this can scratch the Cosmic Horror itch we all share. Today me and 4 friends will play our first round against Azathoth (as recommended) and we all are pretty excited about it. Edit: So the game took us about 8 hours to finish (with a few small breaks in between) and it was pretty fun. The first 3 hours were more or less needed to get into the flow of how each phase works. We also realized some flat out mistakes we made and some of the special rules rules we more or less ignored after reading the instructions again, but hey that's what most initial rounds of more complex board games are like, right? Now we are all excited for the second round in which we will hopefully do everything acording to the games instructions.

I got rid of Arkham after playing Eldritch. I like it a lot better and even with all the expansions it doesn't feel bloated like Arkham did.

Wait, on your turn you can move, get a ticket, rest, buy, or use an ability? So it plays like Fury of Cthulhu where no one plays Dracula?

this is one of your best reviews I have ever seen .I love it

Eldritch Horror fired the old Arkham Horror. Streamlined, quick, no abundance of easily missed special rules depending on what obscure event taking place in what expansion. It is true that EH is a very hard game, especially when played with 5+ players. That can be a bit frustrating for some gamers, but not for me. Oh no! My group thrives on ridiculously hard games to win (not hard to play mind you), since after having lost 10 plays in a row, the victory feels a multitude sweeter when it comes. That is why we also play Lord of the Rings LCG on Nightmare Mode. Everything else would feel like hand holding. Now there is a new king in town, Arkham Horror LCG. Which is brilliant. And if we have 4 players, or less, this is the perfect game to play. We are still being beaten, naturally, we live for that shit - but now we have a glorious campaign, we gain XP to evolve our deck / investigator. It is fantastic when players stay in character - nothing in this genre comes close. But hey - I still like Eldritch. I have a completely updated version, One day we will play all of the Old Ones in a long campaign. I am working on it as we speak. It will be glorious! IÄ! IÄ! Cthulhu f'tagn!

This game would be a lot better if it slowed down with the encounters. Usually a single encounter printed on a card is something that could just as easily have unfolded over a few turns or more instead of over a single roll, adding a couple steps to them and each step having a couple options for how to confront it (so that there's some element of the character you choose influencing how things unfold) each leading to a different success or failure. It would give a lot more weight to things and have them seem less inconsequential. And if it still had the same number of encounters, that could truly extend the life of the game, with only a handful really cropping up each game, and having a more significant impact on how things unfold.

Currently ranked #37 on the best board games list on Board Game Geek.

Overall we've enjoyed it a bunch when we've played it, but it clearly does have flaws - I think it depends a great deal on how much your group are into the theme. Totally agree about the hideous delayed mechanic...

You find the old man and he gives you a gift! *pulls card* ...the necronomicon..... BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA cause some random floozy in canada looking for her uncle just has that laying around hahahaha oh I can't wait to play this game

Very enjoyable video :-D Player count is actually 1-8 and I really love how the subtitles translate Arkham Horror into Our Kamora xD

Loved arkham horror even losing (which happend more often then winning) was a fun experience because of all the randomness and it felt like you watched a movie

This review has aged like FINE WINE.

Being delayed is an opportunity to enjoy your friends turns.

i ve never played a game of arkah horor where we didnt miss some rule :P eldritch is so much better in this regard, but I dont like the world map, it is too generic in my opinion. Other than that it is a great game, and yes it is long, but it is ok with 4 players. And to be fair, most modern games allow up to four. Increasing the player count past 4 in any game like this will increase the time it needs. regarding delayed, we hate it too, house rule delayed either you lose 1 action or you keep 2 actions but cannot travel, or lose 1 action and cannot travel, depending on the mood :P house rule focus tokens if you dont own the relevant expansions too, trust me :D Talking about expansions, in true ff fashion, this game lacks basic cards for mysteries and location encounters and really it should have come with the forsaken lore expansion, which offers just additional cards. Without it the replayability is very low. Although missing a portal/focus encounter and being 'forced' to do nothing until the next encounter phase is indeed annoying, i believe the game rewards you with moments where you have solved yout 3rd mystery, but the world is in a state of chaos with doom on 1 and if the mythos drawn has a red symbol you lose. Randomizing all the moving parts does that, some are good, some are bad, but i feel the good outweigh the bad here

30 MIN??? I’ve never finished a game in under 3 hours

The things he praise in this game are in Arkham Horror. Dice rolls to avoid dangers, strategizing with other players, number of options, etc. The complaint about randomness can also be praise for variety and replayability.

Have you guys played mansions of madness? Do you think mansions is a meaningful experience for a fan of eldritch and comprared to it? Do you think it makes sense to have both?

We just spend one action as part of house rules to become undelayed instead of losing the entire turn

To let you know they have this for play store on phone

I would describe this game as delightfully ridiculous.

Finish a game in 30 mins? You have lost sanity.

Did I hear him right? Did he say each game lasts 30 minutes? I think the shortest game that I've played to completion was an hour and a half. Granted, sometimes we have given up after 30 minutes.

Okokok. This video is old. There is already AH 3ed with two expansions but hey I want to ask this anyway. 1) Why is Eldritch Horror better then Arkham Horror 2ed (or 3ed if you want). 2) How temathic is this? 3) Will you raccomend to buy this and some expansions even now in 2020/21? Thank you.

My review for the first games was a 9/10. Hard, but very embeded into it's mythos. Now, after playing for over 30 games, I'd say it's a 5/10. Once you get used to its aesthetic and are more into the gameplay, you realise the game is VERY predictable, at least in a 2 character game. By turn three you can glance over the board and predcit if the game is going to be a loss.

Great balance in this review. 👍

30 minutes!? This game takes hours and hours to play. Which I find to be a good thing. We tend to play with 4-5 people though.

For a moment, I thought the nose of the iceberg was it's mouth and now I can't unsee it.

This video is giving me eldritch horror style deja vu. As if I've seen it all before or something...

This is clearly going to be an unpopular opinion - but we tried to like this and Mansions of Madness - but in both cases, there were simply too many dice rolls and card draws to feel like we had any real control of the game. Felt too much like a roller coaster where we were told to keep our hands inside the vehicle at all times, look at all the pretty sights and BOOM! Oh sorry, the roller coaster crashed and it was through no real fault of our own, simply RNG.

its 1926 actually :/

I liked it, we couldn't find hte rules about the main city effects in hte book so we just decided to activate them by using hte rest action. We were not very adept with the rules and made things up as we went that kinda made sense.

These videos are so great lol. Where's the original Arkham Horror review? I can't find it!

ordered this game at the weekend to be delivered Saturday hope we will like it having a game day of tales of Arabian nights, Sherlock Holmes consulting detective and Eldritch horror

Why would you want to CLOSE the gates???

isn't it for 1-8 players?

One thing this review didn't really answer for me: If you love Arkham Horror, should you get this instead?

I wonder if Cthulhu is vegan? Or perhaps he/she/it is just lactose intolerant.

I know that you will never read me Shut Up & Sit Down crew, because the internet is big and the video is not recent, but listen to me: Do yourself a favor, buy and play A Touch of Evil + Something Wicked expansion. No more, no less, just those 2 things combined. And play it with the Coop rules from the manual. Oh, ok, these are 3 things, not 2. Well, do all of those 3. You will experience a thematic coop adventure game that is AWESOME compared to Arkham or Eldritch. It's awesome. It's full of cards, equip, story, action, combat....and it just flows so well! Really guys, base game+something wicked, played coop. Listen to me, a random stranger from the internet. You will thank me and maybe also review it! NOT KIDDING

I thought that was I am alexx on the thumbnail

I love this game, but I've never played it in 30 minutes. Every time we've played it's! taken a minimum of 3 hours! It's very long.

Awesome review for a fantastic game.

I wish I had seen this before I bought it.

You have error. It’s 1 to 8 players.

Don't understand the complaint about this game not being faithful to Lovecraft, of cause it's not ,nobody would make a boardgame about lonely wandering antiquarians would they ? This is the pulp fiction genre in the chulhu mythos universe which is why it so appealing. Also this game takes forever to set up, the core game of Arkham take 5 minutes . Put the board down, lay the decks down choose the investigators. While we're on the subject of comparison Arkham has about 12 locations with guaranteed abilities which you can choose over just pulling a card, unlike EH. In AH if you move onto location with a clue you get that clue unlike EH.there strategies and combos , card play and tons of choice and cooperative play. SUSD don't like AH but for newcomers it's certainly worth a try..

666 likes. Coincidence?

House rules rules

30 minutes per player? lmao ok

30 minutes?! What, are y'all smokin' meth?! Crack!? Dosing PCP and losing all concept of time?!

9:32 - so true, but it's even worse than that: even the Mystery cards are not consistent, and there are only 4 of them for each Ancient One. I had a game, where the first Mystery led me to the place where a comet-impact took place and after solving it, the next Mystery took place before the impact and the comet was still in the sky. Did we time travel? I like the game anyway... but I actually like Arkham Horror more. It's fiddly and random, but every time totally different and just a great experience. Maybe more an experience than a game, but that's ok with me. :-)

30 minutes per play? Hah. I generally find you go over that estimate...

Eldritch horror vs. Dead of winter?

This guy definitely wasn't playing it right.

30 mins gameplay? how?!?!

Pale British man: Saving the world has never been such a pain in the ass. Shepard: Hold my beer. Will Smith: Mine, too. Brad Pitt: Ditto. Tom Cruise: Make room. I got like a six pack.

I almost got it, but glad I went for Betrayal at House on the hill instead.

Funny, I thought H.P. Lovecraft's fiction was about xenophobia and fear of people who aren't white.

If you like games like this - go buy Arkham Horror! It's like Eldritch's older, bigger brother. Darker, harder, longer and more challenging. And to be honest: If you play more demanding games than Monopoly, you will get around with These rules, too. It's one of the favorite games of my gaming groups. Eldritch feels like they ripped the heart out of a mentally challenging and tense game to make it more... Mainstream. When the ancient evil - a bloody god - awakes in Arkham, the world is screwed, time stands still and you stand a final fight with low winrate-probability - you feel the end is near and you failed your Mission in the last 2-4 hours. When the ancient evil awakes in Eldritch - you put a token on the map. A god of pure evil - killing mankind just through it's presence. Represented by a token. Made out of paper. For a god... Arkham is one of These games where every turn tells a Story: You start at an abandoned Wood-house in the forrest. You walk in, search for clues in the attic - suddenly the roof collabses and you run for your life. You get injured. The next turn you try to make your way through the night - towards a helping Player or the Hospital. Zombies are terrorizing the streets and you barely escape them into a shop. You Need to wait for the Zombies to pass by. Meanwhile you find an old magician, hiding in a darker area of the store. You convince him to follow you together you get back on the streets. Suddenly you both get attacked by a flying demon piercing down from the sky. The magician sacrifices his life in order to kill the demon and give you time to flee. Around the Corner, you find a motorcycle and you escape into the night. You hurry down the roads towards the Hospital. You fall through the door and meet some nurses. They lay you down upon a bed and give you some painkillers. You see the doctor entering the room. You notice an his coat is full of blood - and the very moment your consciousness fades away, you realize that something went terribly wrong... And that's just the summ of 3-5 turns for only one investigator/character/Player. Shut up & go buy arkham Horror!

My thoughts exactly about this game. I think that I just found it more boring.

No need to be pretentious about a bigot.

thanks for the review. game looks as fun as playing with poop