Pyramid Review
Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game
Published by Fantasy Flight Games
Designed by Eric M. Lang, Christian T. Petersen, Kevin Wilson, & Darrell Hardy
Art & Graphics by Darrell Hardy & Scott Nicely
Edited by Christian T. Petersen, Pat Harrigan, Greg Benage, & Kevin Wilson
Arkham Edition Starter (Mythos or Investigators): full color, 60 cards, $9.99; boosters, 11 cards, $2.99; requires several tokens (not included)
You may recall an unsuccessful attempt at a collectible card game based on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos from 1997 called, simply, Mythos. The prolific folks at Fantasy Flight Games are responsible for the new iteration, Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game, a far more cogent entry into the unpredictable collectibles market.
The object of the game is to be the first player to succeed at three story cards. Each player starts with a deck. The first releases are the Investigators and Mythos decks, slanted slightly toward heroic humans and the monsters respectively. Individual cards come from one of seven different factions, though (like Miskatonic University, the Syndicate, Hastur, and Cthulhu), so even with the game's first release there's plenty to build your deck strategy around.
You have three domain cards, under which you place resources. Any card can become a resource, but it stays that way the whole game. Exhausting a domain with, say, four resources stuffed under it allows you to bring out a game card costing four or fewer. The resource icons on the edge . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 3, 2004
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