A Study in Emerald, from prolific designer Martin Wallace who also designed Brass, widely regarded as one of the best strategy games ever made, was a curious and quirky design from 2013. It was full of novel ideas but proved divisive, as aspects of the game didn’t entirely gel. Now it’s had a thematic, visual and mechanical makeover, and is back, rebranded as Cthulhu: Dark Providence, promising better balance and more exciting gameplay. Has new designer Travis R. Chance managed to salvage what was worthwhile from the original while smoothing off its rougher corners?
What’s in the Box
This is a pretty component-light game, presenting you with a main board, a side-board, a few sheets of cardboard tokens to punch out and two sizes of card, one standard and one tarot-sized. Visually, it’s pretty impressive, with a mix of clean graphic design and some outstanding Lovecraftian artwork that does a great job of evoking both the 1930s setting and the tentacled horrors of the mythos. That art takes center stage on all the cards, most of which only carry a few icons to indicate their purpose.
Despite the quality of the components, however, they present some practical problems for the discerning gamer. The board shows a network of city spaces but is also used as a display area for cards players can acquire during play, which looks great but makes the movement paths between the spaces difficult to parse. Cities also need to hold a mix of player pieces and bidding cubes, which can get crowded and confusing. The box insert has some peculiar molding that makes it difficult to slot the cards away.
Worst of all are the player-color sleds used to indicate who owns what on the board. These are two-piece cardboard affairs that punch out, fold and slot together – which is fine except they don’t fit tightly and fall apart during play. This is easily fixed with a touch of glue, but it’s still an unnecessary frustration. The box insert also has a display area to slot these in individually which not only makes them fiddly to put away but takes up a lot of space, making it fiddly to try and cram everything else in.
Rules and How It Plays
Cthulhu Dark Providence is not an especially complex game, but it does have a number of seemingly small, fiddly rules that you need to implement correctly for the game to function.
Combined with its unusual mix of deck-building, area control, and hidden role mechanics, this means it may take a couple of games before you figure out how to play effectively and make decisions that further your in-game goals. At the beginning of the game you get a role card which casts you as an investigator, a cultist or – and this is the biggest change from A Study In Emerald – a dissident linked to one group or the other but pursuing their own ends.
At the side of the board are two tracks for “ritual” and “investigation” which can be increased during play, earning points for the cultists and investigators respectively. But don’t mistake this for a cooperative game: each player also has an individual victory point total and only one player can win. Individual points are scored for controlling cities and either opening or closing gates depending on your role. At the end of the game, players add the points from their linked track to their personal total, while a smattering of extra points can be gleaned for actions depending on your role: cultists and dissidents get points for killing enemy agents, for example.
On your turn, you get two actions which must be paid for by playing cards from your hand with the required symbol. Commonly, you’ll want to play influence cubes you can place on cities or cards. If you have a majority of cubes on a given city or card you can spend an action to claim it but, crucially, this can only be taken as your first action in a turn. This means that whenever you bid on something, other players will always have a chance to contest it before you can claim it.
Winning means your cubes go into “limbo” while other bidders get their cubes back, and always adds a card to your hand, either the card you were bidding on or the linked city card. Cities are also worth points but there’s a catch: once you “own” a city there’s nothing to stop another player putting cubes on the now-empty city and starting the bids all over again, meaning anyone can potentially take it off you. You lose the points and the card, and they gain them. The only way to prevent this vicious bidding war is to “lock” the city with the matching action, although even that process can be reversed.
These bidding wars are taut and incredibly tense, especially for high-value cities and doubly so when individual player scores begin to rise toward game-ending territory. A single action can only add cubes to one target and the cubes themselves are a limited resource, making your choices around where to place them pleasingly challenging. Sometimes it’s worth going hard on a single target. Other times it’s better to spread your bets and swoop in to claim whatever others leave. Often, it’s necessary to put your plans on hold to stop someone racing into the lead, but will it be you who takes the hit or will you risk leaving it to another?
Uncertainty over what roles each player holds feeds into the paranoia of these collective decisions. They’re absolutely crucial when the game ends thanks to a dramatic rule that links players of the same faction. While you can only win individually, the player in last position when the scores are tallied automatically disqualifies any other player with the same role. This is why it’s important to figure out who is who while trying to protect your own identity, otherwise you can be inadvertently sabotaged by a weak or unlucky companion. Equally, it leaves you in a bind as to whether to push your linked track. Doing so might stop your companion dragging you down but it might also help them win or, worse, hand the victory to a dissident.
Clues are provided by a player’s actions. Generally, you want to push the track you’re linked to, which is done by acquiring and playing cards with the same-color symbol as the track. Cultists usually want to open gates and investigators to close them – confusingly, these are variants of the same action that you take on an unclaimed gate space, a gate doesn’t need to be opened before it can be closed. This earns you individual victory points but you’ll need not only a card that offers the gate action but also cards with enough blue power icons to match the gate value.
However, lots of things muddy the waters. More cards close gates than open them, so it’s sometimes worthwhile for a cultist to close a gate to deny points to investigators, for example. But the real kickers in this regard are the dissidents, who gain points from a mix of sources, such as for opening or closing gates, regardless of which faction they’re linked to. They’re a fantastic addition to the mix, ramping up ambiguity and suspicion compared to the original, where it was a little too easy to figure out where each player’s allegiance lay, while still offering their own clues as to who is who through their choices.
And so players move through the rich soup of the game, contriving to use its various levers to further their plans without giving away their loyalties. There are various ways to approach play: you can focus on cities and run the risk of having them snatched from you, or try to build your deck with enough power icons to close high-value gates or assassinate enemies, which uses a similar mechanism. Both require you to have agents on the board: you start with one, representing your own character, and can acquire others via cards, who can then move around the board to target gates and enemy agents. Unlike many deck-builders your starting deck is fairly decent, so ignoring card acquisition to focus on building influence instead is also a viable strategy.
Often, the most successful approach is simply to recognize scoring opportunities when they arise and leverage a mix of strategies, although this takes experience to recognize. And all the while you’ll need one eye over your shoulder to try and figure out player’s loyalties and ensure you’re not accidentally taken down by your unwitting companion coming in last. If you even have one, that is: the loyalty card mix varies by player count and it’s possible that you’re working on your own. This aspect of the game means it’s definitely best to play with higher player numbers, although it features a surprisingly robust solo mode against an automated cultist opponent.
Where to Buy
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