BoLS Board Game Bonanza – Fate of the Elder Gods
The BoLS crew try to summon Great Cthulhu. Hoo boy.
That’s right! The stars are right this week as we tackle the newly released Fate of the Elder Gods. Provided courtesy of Greater Than Games, Fate of the Elder Gods Casts players as the leader of a cult devoted to one of the Elder Gods. The game is then all about trying to rouse your chosen entity from the state of dreaming death they linger in. Check it out!
Every week the BoLS crew takes on a different board game for your entertainment, right here at the BoLS Board Game Bonanza. Join us every Tuesday on Twitch, or watch the whole series on our YouTube page.
This week we took on Fate of the Elder Gods and sacrificed some cultists, killed some investigators, and then summoned an Elder God. All in a days work, I suppose.
Fate of the Elder Gods $79.95
This game is a ton of fun. It features a unique turn order mechanic–players draw cards with Eldritch Symbols on the back, and these determine where you’re able to take actions. Each move you make adds to the column of Eldritch power that you’ll be using to cast spells. Which you’ll need to do in order to summon your god before the investigators close in and seal your power away with Elder Signs.
Of course your fellow cultists are trying to do the same thing. There are some strategic decisions to make when planning your turn. Taking actions carries a cumulative cost and consumes your limited resources. So you’ll have to choose carefully–do you recruit cultists? Carry out your ceremony? Risk a raid to grab artifacts?
The game plays quickly once you get the hang of it. And it offers considerable depth upon your return. There’s a layer of strategy that reveals itself–your primary resource is your cultists. And, as you might expect from a game about Lovecraftian deities, they’re going to be dying a lot. Each turn you pick a location and send a cultist from your lodge (sort of a ready pool) there. But an investigator follows them–and if there are enough investigators in a single location on your turn, they infiltrate your headquarters (also your lodge). Ordinarily this won’t do anything until there’s a big raid, at which point you start getting into trouble.
And each of the Elder Gods has their own unique ability that adds another wrinkle to the game. For instance, in the playthrough above, we had Cthulhu, whose cultists could always seem to be where they needed to, but we also had Bokrug who could manipulate the rate at which raids and stuff happened. The random nature of which location you can go to kept us from getting too in-depth at the beginning, I’d recommend new players really take time and be aware that you can discard two cards with the same symbol to travel to any location–trust me, this is going to help more than you know. But if you can keep all the little interactions straight, this game is an absolute blast. So get there and check it out!
Ia ia BoLS ftaghn!
