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Cthulhu: Death May Die was one of those games that I initially ignored, thinking that it was yet another Cthulhu game. Yet over time, I kept hearing positive things about it. This piqued my interest as I enjoy Lovecraft’s writing, and I’ve played many, many games of both Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror.
One problem I had with those games, and it eventually led to me getting rid of both of them, was the expansions. Fantasy Flight have put out many expansions for Arkham and Eldritch Horror. In general, the expansions were of the type that you had to remove if you wanted to play a different expansion. This meant many hours of looking for tiny symbols in the corner of cards to remove the previous expansion’s content, and then replacing it with the new. In the end, I had severe expansion fatigue and it actually put me off both base games.
If you told me that Cthulhu: Death May Die was a fourth edition of Arkham Horror, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It has a lot of the same DNA: dice rolls for combat, items to power up the huge variety of characters, resting in safe spaces, and that general creepy Lovecraftian atmosphere. It also leads to cinematic moments, such as, a middle-aged lady with an axe sneaking past a gang of cultists while on fire, taking down Cthulhu with her last blow, only just managing to not go insane.
If you don’t like dice chucking as a combat mechanic, this may not be for you. You can mitigate the dice rolls with items, your special powers, and by gaining more stress to reroll dice. Even so, luck can still play a large part in combat resolution. This works both ways, with some terrible rolls that kill you in one round and some barn-storming rolls that slaughter monsters in one blow.
Cthulhu: Death May Die has a reputation as being one of the harder cooperative games. We haven’t found it too bad. I’m not sure whether that’s because we mainly play at 2 players or because we spend a fair amount of our time planning our turns. If you charge in without thinking, doing what you think will be really cool and heroic, this game can punish you. Managing the stress, health and sanity tracks is also key. You may want to power up quickly by taking hits to your sanity—your character gets more powerful the more insane they get—but you’ll soon find that you’ll die quickly from sanity loss, and you won’t get to use those shiny powers many times.
So are the expansions for Cthulhu: Death May Die any easier to implement than the previously mentioned games? Yes, certainly. The game uses a similar system to Final Girl: choose an episode to play through and choose an Elder One, mix the components from the two boxes and you’re ready to go. Tear down is equally quick as the components are clearly labelled, and everything goes back in its own little box.
This also means that the variety is huge. I could play Episode 4 against Cthulhu with Sister Beth and Rasputin as the two characters. Or I could play Episode 4 against Hastur with Borden and Ian. And this is without any expansions that add new characters and new episodes. Some contain new Elder Ones and others can be bought as separate expansions on their own. The replayability is massive.
As someone who enjoys painting miniatures, I consider the Games Workshop models to be the best I’ve had the pleasure of painting. But the minis for Cthulhu: Death May Die are pretty close to that in quality. The edges are crisp and there are lots of fine details. Some of the sculpts are lacking in the posing department and look decidedly stiff, but on the whole, the sculpting is fantastic. There are lots of tentacles and squidgy bits to really go to town on. A joy to paint.
The main problem for me with this game is that you can die early. Then you watch the other players finish off the rest of the game. You can make this slightly better by having the eliminated player roll the dice for the cultists and monsters, but there are no choices to be made. At 2 players, you can always play as two characters each to mitigate disasters. This problem hasn’t been a major issue for my enjoyment of the game but it is there.
Overall, I love Cthulhu: Death May Die. It gives me the same cinematic feel as Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror but without the expansion bloat and rules overhead. It’s just a fun game. Getting more and more powerful as you go through the game—bordering on overpowered—is a massive joy. Slapping Cthulhu about in your final turn is always a pleasure. I enjoy it so much, I would give it a rating of 95%
