The Cthulhu Wars board game is one of Peterson Games' best-known and most popular games, though its fourth expansion wave didn't help the studio make enough money to avoid major financial problems.
Cthulhu Wars is such a beautiful example of a "modern and huge" board game, which could only come into existence thanks to the boom of such giga games and the existence of Kickstarter. The game area takes up an entire dining room table, there's a bunch of figures, some of which are in the lower tens of centimetres in height, and all of this results in a staggering price tag, with just the base game starting at over 170 USD.
It's great for people who want a game for the whole evening that takes up the whole table and half the cupboard and don't mind paying that kind of money for it. Well, for those who don't have that kind of space or don't want to spend too much, there's Cthulhu Wars: Duel, which is literally a minimalist version of the great Cthulhu Wars.
Smaller scale, same rules
Just like in Big Brother, players take on the role of elder gods, or rather their cults, with one goal in mind: world domination. That is, the world is controlled in the original game, whereas in Duel it's "only" Massachusetts, but you'll find all the "Lovecraftian" locations like Innsmouth, Arkham, Dunwich, etc. (and the developers also state in the rules that it's no problem to play this smaller game on the world map).
Players gradually control areas on the map using monsters or cultists, building gates on them from which they summon other monsters that fight each other for territory and victory points from slain enemies. The action points required to activate units are in turn generated by the number of gates controlled and cultists alive.
From a gameplay perspective, players are forced to constantly advance across the map and kill enemies. And that's basically the whole mechanic of the game. Some monsters have even more special abilities, each cult has its own special rules, you unlock unique grimoires of spells/abilities, but in a nutshell the game is simply about moving pawns around the map, building gates, summoning monsters and beating the crap out of enemies with their help.
Even the combat isn't tactically complex or rules-heavy - monsters have a given number of attacks based on their summoning cost, equal to the number of dice rolls they make to hurt their opponents on a 5+. Nothing complicated, which is unfortunately true of the whole game.
A straightforward battle of two deities
Great Cthulhu Wars works nicely, Cthulhu Wars: Duel not so much. The Great Cthulhu Wars is played with 3 to 8 players, which has the advantage of having more cults on the map, thus more different special abilities, spells and monsters manifest. In the basic duel there is only Cthulhu (well, it's hard to imagine Cthulhu Wars without him) and Shub-Niggurath, a black goat with thousands of young.
So there are only two of them, and each has a subjectively different difficulty for me. Cthulhu is perfectly simple and straightforward, where you just crawl around the map and use the Ancient One himself. Even the special abilities in the spell grimoire are unlocked purely for making the game flow, so the player doesn't have to put in any extra effort. On the other hand, the Goat player has to take a real spin around and it takes several games to fully and properly understand what to do and not just get run over by Cthulhu.
Likewise, the fact that there are only two players on the map results in the complete social aspect of the game strategy falling out. There's no longer a need to agree with Carl to bully Paul because he gets too worked up and subsequently doesn't take advantage of Kate, who was standing on the sidelines waiting for her opportunity the whole time.
Now there's only two of you, and you're going at each other from the first round, which means you're practically pushing each other in the middle of the map, and that's practically the whole game. Once it's one-on-one, there's generally no way to stand back and wait, and so the game is just about taking squares and killing monsters. You have to go hard at your opponent from the start and go for the kill, or you'll lose crushingly.
The epic battle may one day blossom
On top of that, the game has really small squares on the game board, so when you inevitably meet in the middle of the map after a few rounds, there's a bit of hell in knowing which pieces are where, because you can't see the lines demarcating the boundaries of the squares through them. This chaos is aided by the fact that the cardboard standee figures are unnecessarily large.
I can see why the "real, plastic figures" are different sizes - it can make the extra detail stand out. But printed cardboard is still just printed cardboard. And you might as well forget about using figures from your big Cthulhu Wars, because the Duel game boxes are simply too small for them.
Equally unfortunate is that the game only has 10 dice in the box. Ten is absurdly low even for just one player, let alone both. Sure, everyone probably has some extra dice at home, but it's just sad that players don't get the number of dice they need to start with and have to scavenge for them on the side.
As a result, the whole game doesn't feel like "Cthulhu Wars adapted for two players" at all, but more like "Cthulhu Wars forcefully grafted onto two-player play", and for me, the game sadly doesn't work in this state. More than a standalone game, it's more of a demonstration of how the mechanics of the big game work, i.e. an advertisement for it. All that might change when more expansions are on the market that bring more options, but for now it's just a weird variant of the great Cthulhu Wars.
Verdict:
Ctulhu Wars: Duel strives to be a " pocket-sized" and more accessible replacement for the big two-player Cthulhu Wars, using virtually identical mechanics. However, the rules that work in multiplayer fail in the two-player version. The game has virtually no tension and there is no opportunity to build strategy. You just move around the squares and whoever rolls the dice better wins. Maybe this will change with expansions, where there will be more maps and cults with their own rules and the necessary variation, but at the moment Cthulhu Wars: Duel is a bland, neutered variation on the great Cthulhu Wars.
Also, if you find this article helpful, you can just buy me coffee. :)
Originally published in Czech on the ZeStolu portal. Unless otherwise stated, images taken from my Hobby Instagram page @Potan_CZ.
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