If there’s one board game theme that rivals pleasing Renaissance-era nobles in popularity, it’s the works of H. P. Lovecraft. There’s just something about those tentacled horrors from outer space that seems to keep on appealing to tabletop adaptations. Just look at the ongoing acclaim heaped on Arkham Horror: The Card Game.
Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth is the latest game to join this crowded lineage. But it’s attempting to stand out by taking a different route to the majority of its sticky, ichorous peers. A leaflet in the box suggests that you might want to go buy not another Lovecraftian board game but the role-playing game based on his works: Call of Cthulhu. This is more of a storytelling game than a strategy game.
What’s in the Box
The box is so hefty that you might worry it could actually contain an avatar of Nyarthatolep, but you can lift the lid in safety: the weight comes from the inclusion of three big spiral-bound books that contain the text paragraphs you’ll be referring to during the game. They’re good quality and will absolutely stand to be bent and flipped through time and time again. What’s less inspiring is the sheets of errata stickers you’ll need to paste onto various entries to ensure you have all the options the designers intended.
The remainder of the weight is mostly from several decks of cards. There are square location cards that are used to build the map, tarot-sized encounter cards for the bad guys you can meet on your adventures, and several standard playing-card sized decks. These include condition cards to track the bad – and occasionally beneficial – things that can happen to your character and a ton of skill cards that you’ll play to meet challenges. Most of these cards are purely informational, with solid graphic design that favors function over form but the location cards are graced with darkly evocative artwork.
It’s a similar story for the selection of character boards and their accompanying punch-out standees, representing an excellent variety of character types in every sense of the word, brought to life nicely in all their 1920s glory. There are lots of other, more workmanlike tokens to punch out, too, for tracking various actions and statuses during play.
Rules and How It Plays
Alongside the weighty components is an innocuous-looking, lightweight rulebook that you’ll quickly find is poorly laid out and worded. Everything you need to play is in there, but you’ll need repeated puzzled flip-throughs during setup and the first few turns before everyone is comfortable with what’s going on.
Broadly, your group will choose one of three missions, which are best played in order, and which you’ll work together to complete. You place a starting location and objective card and read an introductory paragraph of text which explains the various options that you have in that location. Most of them require you to discard one of your character’s skill cards to do something, while others require you to pass a skill check. This involves characters, often more than one if working together, to discard cards either of the skill type required for one automatic “success” towards the target number, or a card of a similar type to get a dice to roll which may, or may not, generate a success. You need enough successes to pass the target number in order to succeed.
In addition to the dice you get by generating cards you will also always roll a red dice in these checks. This can give you an extra success, but it can also roll scary-looking symbols like skulls or tentacles. These cause the matching track to increment and, often, to cause you to flip to a paragraph in the book, triggering an event in the in-game narrative, usually an undesirable one.
Running out of cards also causes a time track to increment with similar paragraphs along the route, putting you under a bit of pressure to hurry along and achieve your objectives. It’s a neat way of giving your adventures a sense of time and dynamism as you move through the locations.
You’ll spend a lot of your time in Miskatonic Tales reading paragraphs, not only from the tracks but when you enter a new location and in describing the results of your actions, pass or fail. You can appoint one person to read these out to the group, or take turns, or there’s a free app to download which will do it for you with very questionable voice acting. The writing is fine: it’s not overloaded with the obscure adjectives that Lovecraft was fond of, nor is it lifeless, but it’s not especially inspiring, either. It’s just about enough to set the scene and keep you engaged.
Where the paragraphs really shine is in giving you options. The choose your own adventure books this style of play derives from often leave players feeling as though they’d like to do things that aren’t offered as choices. That rarely happens here: there are paragraphs to interact in different ways with pretty much everything described. Indeed there are too many options to explore them all without running down your time track dangerously fast. You’ll need to pick and choose what you do based on your curiosity and your objectives.
The trouble is that you don’t have very much else beyond those two things to guide your picks. Again, like the gamebooks it evokes, most of the decision-making happens in the dark as you have very little information on which to guess which options are better than others. You can’t even really strategize around the skill check system beyond a bit of risk-reward analysis. The closest the game comes to giving you meaningful decisions are your use of when to spend magic points which give you re-rolls, and when to use each character’s special abilities. As a result, this feels less like a board game and more like a particularly fancy way to run a role-playing game without a GM.
You don’t even get much strategy or tactics when it comes to combat. Encounters can either be fought with weapons, if you have them, or via a different skill, either of which is resolved with the standard dice-rolling skill check mechanism. That’s pretty much the only choice you get. Damage is taken off your character’s health or sanity values and you can also take hits to these tracks from accumulating status cards like panic or injury that are given out by in-game events. If either track runs down to zero, that investigator is out of the game.
Win or lose, one thing the plethora of exploration options gives you is a decent amount of replay value. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Miksatonic Tales and a second attempt at a scenario can work out very differently from the first. The game has a neat keyword system that tracks how past decisions can impact future situations although, as per most of the game, you have no way of knowing how this will play out. Many of the choices lead to blind alleys or horrible punishments you cannot anticipate, which can feel frustrating but it suits the source material well enough. What it lacks in strategy, it makes up for in anticipation. However, whether you’ll want to replay a scenario is a moot point as game times run long, much of which is taken up by players reading out text. You can “save” your game to stretch it across multiple sessions if needs be.
Where to Buy
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