Within the museum are various events with certain challenges that the investigators must face, such as traversing other dimensions or deciphering lost tomes. Also, dying horribly or descending into madness is a key feature in Lovecraft's stories, so it feels appropriate here, too. Normally I don't like games that force eliminated people to sit and wait until the game ends, but in Elder Sign there's nothing preventing you from continuing to contribute by advising your friends after you've been booted from the game. In Elder Sign, the rest of your team continues playing after you've died or gone insane. In most cooperative titles, players cannot be eliminated without everyone losing.
If the long-contained enemy is successful, you all lose together and the game, quite glibly, says, "You have been devoured."ĭespite your winning and losing as a team, Elder Sign is not strictly speaking what most board gamers would consider cooperative. The monstrous horror is unleashed when it gathers the requisite number of opposing Doom tokens, which it receives during game events and when you fail certain challenges.
You and your compatriots must collaborate to overcome your opponent by gathering a certain number of Elder Sign tokens. In Elder Sign: Omens, you and up to three other players play four investigators in a museum, working to stop an ancient, probably tentacle-laden menace from being unleashed on the world. Elder Sign: Omens offers the core game along with expansions (like those of the physical version) available via in-app payments. Fantasy Flight has built up an impressive roster of board and card games based around this dark, weird-fiction setting, in which players invariably face off against sundry horrors and elder gods such as Hastur, Cthulhu, and the like. The Game, In BriefĮlder Sign: Omens is part of same universe as the notoriously long and difficult board game Arkham Horror, which in turn is based closely on the writings of H.P. Definitely consider bringing this app to your next board game night or Walpurgisnacht. When I teamed up with a fellow board game nerd, however, I was pleasantly surprised that the game not only played well, but was fun in a uniquely different way. It almost seems as if the publisher, Fantasy Flight Games, has accidentally created a first-rate solitaire version of its game-so much so that I was skeptical that a multi-person game would be worth playing. When playing San Juan ($3.99 at ), for example, I spent more than an hour waiting for opponents and found nary a soul.įor most of my testing, I played the game alone and was pleasantly surprised with the experience. Pass-and-play is actually my preference, since many top-notch games struggle to support an adequately sized community for online pick-up games. Considering that the game is cooperative and requires four players, I don't think it would do well online. This is a bit unusual, but I don't hold it against Elder Sign. The app only offers pass-and-play-type interaction, with no option for online multiplayer. That makes navigating a crowded, but not cramped, user interface much easier. Although the app warned me that it might run slowly on my iPhone 6 ( at Amazon), I am impressed with how snappy and responsive it feels.
Still, even at $5.99 this title is a horrifically good bargain.
That increase in price feels unnecessary, especially considering that the Android version played fine on both a small screen and the larger Pixel C ($239.00 at Amazon) I used in testing. The game is available on the iTunes App Store and the Google Play store for $3.99. And so I entered the forbidden runes into my iPhone and, after waking from fevered dreams in which the pitch-black stars hung in a dead sky over a decayed city, I discovered I had spent an entire week playing the excellent Lovecraftian mobile board game Elder Sign: Omens. It called for failure, a world gone mad, and, of course, tentacles. I knew that this particular moment in history called for forgotten evils cast down in antiquity to rise again as a consequence of humanity's weakness and hubris. I recently found myself in a spooky mood and began seeking out iPhone apps that reflected that sensibility.
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