But something bad does happen. A new doom card is reviled and usually brings with it some curse that will advance the doom tracker. These are random and can either really hurt you, or sometimes help. Mostly they are used to force you to take actions you would not want to take as they are tougher. The game has a lot of variables in it that can make it really easy or pretty tough. There are a number of investigators that each have a special ability and you can pair these up to be almost unstoppable if you want.
There are also a number of Ancient Ones to choose from to be the final boss. The components are truly top of the line. The die add a lot to this feeling of doom. I believe less is more. With too many players people are just waiting for their turn to roll the die. On a scale of ten I would give it a one or two. It is a little light for those looking for a deeper game to sink their teeth into. Celebration erupts and high-fives all around.
Moments like this make for a great night. It is because we have had a good amount of moments like this Elder Signs is a game that we really enjoy. There is a feeling that we are not going to make it that adds to the theme of the game which is also very enjoyable. While there is not much strategy, it is made up for in fun and entertainment.
I think Elder Sign is a concentration of Arkham Horror, Fantasy Flight has taken the most important aspects of what makes that game unique and created a shorter, lighter and more accessible game. Elder Sign contains the same great theme that is found in Arkham Horror, luck and randomness plays a big part too and a big bad monster is lurking in the darkness waiting to devour the players and maybe the whole universe.
So does Elder Sign replace Arkham Horror? I would say no to that question. I think Elder Sign is a good complement and can be a nice way to introduce new players to the Arkham universe.
Even though the rules and mechanics differ between the two games you still get the same feeling and the objectives are almost identical, the way to get there differ somewhat. As you can see in this short text, the game is very often compared to Arkham Horror, too much so I think.
Elder Sign gets two thumbs up from me. So first off, Elder Sign is very similar to Arkham Horror so people who have played AH should be able to pick up on the end goal of this game fairly quickly. Players fill the roles of different investigators who have been drawn to the museum for some reason. As you explore the museum you encounter different events and possibly other realms as certain events can lead to portals to the other realms to open Abyss, Dreamlands, etc….
Can your investigation uncover enough clues and hidden elder signs to prevent the awakening of the Elder god? If not, can they prevent the elder god from destroying the world? Set up: Set up is not very complicated but it does take some experience to set up quickly. Just like most Fantasy Flight Games, there are a lot of tokens and several different decks but set up is way quicker and way easier than Arkham Horror.
Gameplay: Players take turns exploring different museum locations or investigating different museum attractions then encountering the event that is taking place at that location or attraction.
In order to succeed, a series of tasks must be completed, some cards have 1 or 2 tasks while some others have 3 or 4. Monsters can appear which alter tasks and can even add extra tasks one time we had 6 tasks on one card; 3 from monsters, it was a bad day in the museum.
The player whose turn it is can focus one die, and 1 other person on the same location can focus a second die. Spells can also be used to lock in dice results for future use as well. There are also 2 special dice which can only be used through items but these give players a high chance of success. On top of these mechanics, there is also a clock which represents the 12 hours that the museum is open.
After the clock strikes midnight each night, players are to assume their characters left, that something happens in the museum, and players arrive back at the museum at noon the next day and immediately go to where they left off the night before no one has to move their character its just to explain why the clock only represents 12 hours. Now there is something new to investigate. And the game continues until players either obtain enough elder signs or the ancient one awakens and the final showdown occurs or players are unprepared and just get slaughtered.
Pros I have heard from others: The museum is a great setting for the lore of the game, the expansions are great, it is easy to learn, involves both team strategy and luck. Possible cons: The rulebook is quite long but is easy to understand compared to other books of the same size , the game can be quite difficult depending on the luck of what tasks are required, it is not competitive, and some groups of friends just dont do well in co-op games.
Overall I recommend this game to people who enjoy push your luck dice games and to people who enjoy cooperative games. Also if you like the Lovecraft universe, this is a great game to buy as the artwork is great and the flavor text on the cards is just an added bonus! In this co-op game players take on roles of investigators exploring an old museum filled with ancient artifacts to ward off the awakening of a terrible Elder Evil being.
The main game mechanic is rolling custom dice with the purpose of obtaining a series of specific combinations. Different in-game abilities allow you to modify rolls, save rolls for later, add dice and avoid obstacles.
The theme and the art are fantastic and immersive. The mechanic is good at supporting the theme — on one hand the die rolling makes it seem too luck-based, yet — all of your successes seem improbable and exciting when they do occur. The difficulty can vary quite a bit with some games resulting in cakewalks and others where you get demolished. The game claims to accommodate players but I find anything over 4 to result in down time that leads to disengagement.
Works great solo though. With players the game is usually done within an hour — the pace is quite brisk. The dice mechanic can be very appealing to some but offputting to others. I personally enjoy it immensely and would suggest it.
This is a horrible being or god that is currently resting beyond the deep ocean. But when it returns, it will create chaos and the most horrid nightmares come true for all mankind, enslaving us all. It all comes down to a museum, where ancient and occult artifacts have been collected for a long time. These artifacts have become too close to one another, causing instability to another world. Gateways are starting to open, and the world beyond is complete terror.
It is up to you to stop it. So how do you complete such a feat? You will have to use your abilities as an i nvestigator, and approach dangerous and horrific areas. And your tools: dice! But Elder Sign is set up to be played a whole lot quicker, and is far more easier to learn.
Time is against you and your companions. If the creature wins over you, the entire world will be enslaved. Gameplay: On your turn you may choose between at least 6 different areas of the museum. Each area comes with their own challenge, and a reward and punishment, depending on the outcome. A challenge is divided into one or more tasks. To complete a task you need to collect the correct set of symbols on the dice, matching those of the task.
This has to be done after a single throw of the dice. The dice consist of these symbols: 3 Magnifying glass of values 1, 2 and 3, 1 Terror symbol, 1 Scroll and 1 Skull.
If you complete a task, you may select another task, or complete the challenge if that was the last task avaliable. However, if you fail the task, you are able to make another attempt. But at a price. You must remove one of your dice, giving you less to roll later.
Luckily, you may keep one of the dice from the previous result, in the hopes of getting use of it later that challenge. After each player is done, time moves forward. Whenever it strikes midnight, something horrible may happen. Monsters can appear in the rooms, and the main creature will come ever closer.
The problems with monsters is that they add tasks to already difficult challenges. Some challenges require 6 dice to be completed, and if you add a monster, that monster may add additional 2 symbols.
The theme: The theme of the game falls kind of flat. And being a cooperative game, you either all win, or none of you will win. Conclusive thoughts: Being cooperative, I feel that this game removes the alpha leader role a bit, which is very fortunate.
Luck is a great factor in this game. I enjoy this game, but not if I play it alone. The one that comes in the box will fill you with questions and feel very incomplete. The new rules are very well done and come with a lot of examples. Pros : — Easy to learn — Relatively fast to play — Great artwork and illustrations — Good quality components. Elder Sign is the newest in the Call of Cthulhu Mythos series of games Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness , and while it keeps some of the same ideas and goals as the other two, it dumps the heavy, time-intensive style for something that is entirely simple and fun: dice rolling.
Like Arkham Horror, your team is attempting to keep one of the Elder Gods from waking up by finding enough Elder Signs to keep them out of the world. You do this by investigating locations, which also gives you perks like finding Common and Unique Items, Spells, or Allies. It is the goal of your team to use abilities to their fullest potential and to help each other to beat these locations. The mechanic at your disposal is a pool of dice.
In order to beat a location, you must roll a certain number of specific faces of the dice. For instance, each dice has a single black skull on it. Some locations may require two black skulls to complete, along with a terror, a scroll and three clues.
If you can roll all of these, you investigate successfully and take the rewards. If you fail, all of the dice are removed and given to the next player, who must then start fresh. Items allow you to access extra dice with slightly different faces. Elder Sign is easily accessible because the mechanic is so simple. I felt bad for people demoing this game, because it was just so easy for people to pick up. New players can easily start making strategic decisions as early as their second turn.
And yet, to say this game is just a mashup of Zombie Dice and Arkham Horror is unfair. While this game is simple and seemingly easy to win! There is some dice manipulation involved, and certain characters can make your chances much more successful. It is often more helpful to gain items and allies than to just try for an Elder Sign every turn.
As has been well described elsewhere, Elder Sign is basically a cooperative dice rolling game where you and your friends play a team of investigators trying to prevent an eldritch horror from beyond the stars from manifesting in an old museum and wreaking havoc with the world and possibly ending it.
Set-up and tear-down times for the game can be fairly lengthy due to the large number of cards and tokens that are used, but all the components look absolutely fantastic and you end up with a nice looking tableau set up on the table.
The flavour of the game is built with lovely artwork and flavour text on many of the cards, though that text is often ignored. I think, however, the real atmosphere comes from the players having some understanding of the Cthulhu mythos not necessary at all for play, though and the building tension as we get closer to our doom and begin taking ever more risky actions.
Being a dice game there is a lot of luck involved, but you can plan to an extent and much of the fun of the game is in prioritising adventures and picking the best combinations of characters and equipment to send against them. I love this game, especially playing with other fans of the Mythos. It can give a great feeling of peril and doom, while still being simple and relatively quick to play.
The focus of so many exotic curios and occult artefacts at the museum is the cause of a new threat to Arkham. They weaken the barriers to the beyond, letting Gates open and monsters in, and laying a path for an Ancient One to make its way to Earth and lay waste to mankind. Only a number of dedicated investigators have the knowledge and will, and perhaps the allies and the tools, if not necessarily the time, to locate a sufficient number of Elder Signs that will seal the portals and prevent the arrival of the Ancient One.
This is the set up for Elder Sign , the latest board game from the designers of Arkham Horror that uses the same art work and trade dress as seen in both Arkham Horror and the recently released Mansions of Madness. The co-operative element means that the opponents faced by players are not each other, but by the game itself and its mechanics. In order to counter the effects of these events, and eventually, the arrival of the Ancient One, the Investigators will explore the Museum and have Adventures within its confines, the aim being to marshal the resources necessary to save the world.
Elder Sign is comprised of several sets of large and small cards, various tokens and counters, a card clock, and a set of customised dice. The large cards are divided between decks of Investigators, Adventures, and Ancient Ones, whilst the small cards are divided between decks of Common and Unique items, Spells, and Allies — all beneficial to the Investigators, whilst Mythos cards describe the events and effects that occur every time that the clock strikes Midnight and linger until the clock strikes Midnight again.
There are sixteen individual Investigators to choose from. Each one gives an Investigator his maximum Sanity and Stamina, his Starting Items, and a special ability.
For example, Dexter Drake is a magician who whenever he gains a Spell card during play, he always gains an extra one, whilst Gloria Goldberg is an author whose Psychic Sensitivity grants her extra dice to roll when visiting Other World Adventure Cards.
During a game, the Investigators will face one of eight Ancient Ones. Each one gives the number of Elder Signs needed to prevent it from being awoken, which occurs when the Doom Track on the card is filled; a special ability that applies throughout a game; a means of Attack once it is awoken; and a Combat Task that must be completed by the Investigators to weaken and eventually banish it from the Earth. Thirteen Elder Signs are needed to banish this Ancient One, but it only needs eleven tokens for the Doom Track to be filled and Cthulhu to be woken up.
The latter is a problem because in order to defeat an awoken Ancient One, the Investigators have to remove all of the tokens from the Doom Track. To remove a Token, an Investigator has to roll the given Combat Task. Each Adventure Card has a title, a Trophy value, some flavour text, a set of Tasks that need to be completed if an Investigator is to succeed at the Adventure itself, and a set of Penalties for if an Investigator fails to complete the Adventure and a set of Rewards if he does.
Not all of the Rewards are good — sometimes they are mix of the good and the bad. They add extra dice to a Task attempt or alter dice rolls; enable an Investigator to restore Sanity or Stamina; or in the case of some Spells, let an Investigator store dice results between attempts at a Task.
Each Mythos card has two effects. The first occurs as soon as it is drawn, whilst the second lasts until the next Mythos card is drawn. There are also Monster Markers, little card strips that when summoned can replace Tasks on an Adventure Card to make them more difficult to complete.
Each Monster Marker has a piece of flavour text on the reverse and a Trophy value. The final components are the card Clock, used to measure the passing of time and determine when new Mythos cards are drawn; the Museum Entrance card; and the dice. The dice are the heart of the game, rolled by an Investigator to try and match the symbols listed for each Task on the Adventure cards. They come in three colours. The six green dice are the most common and all of them are usually rolled when a Task is attempted.
The yellow dice gives better results than a green die whilst the red dice gives better results than the yellow die. There is only the one yellow and one red die in the game. Game set up is quick and simple. Each player selects an Investigator and receives its starting items. An Ancient One is chosen and placed on the table where everyone can see it along with the Clock — which is set at midnight, the Museum Entrance card, and six Adventure Cards.
The first Mythos card is drawn and takes effect. On his a turn, a player sends his Investigator to the chosen Adventure Card. He takes up the green dice and the yellow or red die if he decides to use an Item or has a Special Ability. The Tasks are arranged on each Adventure Card in lines and with each roll of the dice, a player must match the symbols on a single line with those on the dice. He can only attempt to match the symbols on one line at a time and if he does, he places those dice on the symbols on the card.
He can then go on to roll for the Tasks on the other lines. If he fails to roll the right symbols for a line, he can continue rolling, but must discard a die each time he fails to match the symbols. On some Adventure Cards, there is a Terror effect for failing to match any symbols and rolling a Terror on the dice.
If the player completes all of the Tasks, he receives all of the rewards at the bottom of the Adventure Card. He also receives the Adventure Card to keep as a Trophy which can be spent at the Museum Entrance for various effects. If he does not complete any of them, he suffers the penalties also given at the bottom of the Adventure Card. Alternatively, a player could have sent his Investigator to the Museum Entrance. When the Clock reaches Midnight a new Mythos Card is drawn and its effects applied.
Since the two effects on the Mythos Cards vary greatly, often the players will find themselves hoping for one with less dangerous effects. So drawing one every fourth turn is another way in which Elder Sign can turn up the tension. The individual Tasks on each line are not difficult in themselves, but the Arrow symbol beside them means that they have to be done in order.
Harvey decides that he will use both, meaning that he rolls both the green and the red dice. On the red die, he gets the Wild Card symbol, which can be used to match any other symbol. The 1 Clue and 2 Clue symbols are enough to complete the Task on the first line and places those dice on the Adventure Card.
He takes the red die and stores it on the Spell Card. This leaves him with just four green dice to roll. On the second roll, Harvey needs two Skulls, but is unlucky and gets neither. He is forced to discard one of the green dice leaving him with three to roll. He gets 1 Clue, 3 Clue, and a Skull. He needs another Skull, so uses the Wild Card symbol on the red die that he stored earlier to match the symbols needed to complete the Task. This leaves him with just two dice and needing two Scrolls to complete the third Task and the whole Adventure Card.
Continue if you are looking for games like Elder Sign and are curious about what similar games to play next. Players take the roles of investigators racing against time to stave off the imminent return of the Ancient One. Armed with tools, allies, and occult knowledge, investigators must put their sanity and stamina to the test as they adventure to locate Elder Signs, the eldritch symbols used to seal away the Ancient Ones and win the game. To determine this list we broke down Elder Sign to what it is.
Elder Sign is a cooperative dice rolling game where players are taking on the dangers of a darkly fantastical world. The world is open, giving you many different monsters you can target with your special icon dice. How everyone works together and the order of taking enemies down will determine if you can outlast the storm. If you are looking for something similar, you have come to the right place. We took all this into consideration and came up with this list of the 5 board games like Elder Sign.
D-Day Dice makes the list of board games like Elder Sign because it is a strategic adventure that is pushed forward by how you want to split up your dice and then what you do with them.
Instead of dealing with the horrors of a fantastical world. Normandy, June 6th, — as you land on the well-defended beaches, a German machine gun nest is killing your comrades like flies. Players are Allied soldiers trying to organize improvised units for an attack against the machine gun nest.
Each player starts with just a few units. As the game progresses, each player will collect resources and advance on the beach, sector by sector, as their units grows stronger and deadlier. For 1 — 4 players, games run about 45 minutes. Zombicide: Black Plague makes the list of board games like Elder Sign because this is a great dice driven survival game.
It is a zombie invasion and what is cool about the Black Plague standalone version is that it brings the gameplay into a thematic setting very similar to Elder Sign. This game takes the zombie apocalypse into a fantastical medieval setting.
Take on the zombie invasion from the medieval streets to secret vaults that create quick passages through the citadel and often hold special artifacts. Chase down the elusive Necromancers to keep them from multiplying the zombie masses.
Sign in with Facebook. Forgot Password. Email: Reset Password. Card Game. Party Game. View All. Elder Sign. Description Discussions Marketplace Expansions Description Game description from the publisher: It is , and the museum's extensive collection of exotic curios and occult artifacts poses a threat to the barriers between our world and the elder evils lurking between dimensions. Game Discussions Add Comment. Please enter at least one item. Please enter the link of the website.
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