Episode 45 - Elder Sign

In this episode, we venture into the Miskatonic University Museum to seal away an ancient one before they destroy the world!  We're collecting clues, solving puzzles, and killing monsters.  This dice chucking co-operative game gives you an easy and quick setup while offering a lot of replay-ability through its tough adventures.  Listen to find out how many hours are in a day and where Jake's shameless ability to win leads him.

Game Info:
1-8 Players
90 Minute Playtime
Ages 13+

Board Game Geek Entry

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Transcript

Jake: 0:00

I have no shame. I will ruthlessly beat a nine year old in a children's game

Rachel Cutler: 0:18

Hello, and welcome. I'm Rachel.

Jake: 0:21

I'm Jake. And we're so bored.

Rachel Cutler: 0:24

The Podcast where each episode we take a close look at a tabletop game and discuss our personal experiences with said game to help answer the question. Well, this Kira boredom.

Jake: 0:34

That's right, we look at the mechanics complexity replayability in a game to determine if it's the perfect alternative to, let's say, waiting for three full days while your brand new motorcycle gets its first service. So you can take it on a nice long road trip to get Japanese curry in a town two hours away for lunch?

Rachel Cutler: 0:52

Why does it take three days for your motorcycle to get serviced?

Jake: 0:55

Okay, if the service doesn't take three days, the service is going to take one day, but because of my work schedule and their hours, I won't be able to pick it up for three days. So yes, yeah, shame. I know and then I won't be able to do that for lunch at least for almost a week. Oh my

Rachel Cutler: 1:15

gosh. Right. That's something you always talk about is going down to Tucson to get ja. Yeah, but you've never done it.

Jake: 1:25

No, I haven't because like I have these. Okay. Suffice it to say I want to but I have feelings like I should be. Okay, I feel like it's a waste. I feel like you'll get upset that I'm wasting my time.

Rachel Cutler: 1:39

Oh, no, I just don't care to do that myself. Okay, you go do that. That's fine.

Jake: 1:46

Maybe I will on Monday, then.

Rachel Cutler: 1:49

You will one day off. Let's say you're gonna spend your one day off.

Jake: 1:52

Well, after that I work one day, and then I I'm off until Friday, and then I work friday

Rachel Cutler: 1:59

I work. Everyone's getting an insight into our life. This is what our marriage is like. That's very exciting.

Jake: 2:05

Yep. I work three days a week. But they're long days, though.

Rachel Cutler: 2:09

All right. So streaming. We've been streaming lately. We've been doing it. We were taking a break. And then we came back and we're doing better and it's good. And we stream board games on Twitch on Wednesday evenings. It's been Halloween season. This is the end of Halloween season ish, in that we don't have any more episodes releasing in October. So as far as the streaming goes, we've been having lots of fun dressing up in costumes and trying somehow to theme those with our game that we're playing. It's going okay,

Jake: 2:45

it's ok

Rachel Cutler: 2:46

if you watched last week, that was our most fun costume. You know, we had promised that we were gonna save that to the end of October. But then Jake's work schedule messed everything up. So we did our bestest, our best, most fun costumes last week, and tomorrow, we'll still be doing something. But anyway, yeah, you can check us out on twitch.tv/soboardpodcast Again, we stream on Wednesday evenings, as I was saying, this is the last stream and the last podcast episode releasing for the month of October. So thank you, everybody who has joined us along the way. You know, if you enjoyed us going weekly, let us know. Because we're looking for feedback.

Jake: 3:32

We would really ultimately like this to go weekly, but we kind of need to see more. Not when I say the word support. I'm not talking financial. I'm talking like, we can't justify it with the number of people listening each week. But we want to like that that is our goal.

Rachel Cutler: 3:50

It would be really cool. If we could do this weekly. I have ideas for content that we could do for that to you know, go weekly and make that doable. But yeah, right now we're just, we don't have as large of an audience as we would like to have. And so, you know, the thing that you can do to help us with that is by sharing this podcast with your friends leaving ratings, talking about it or mentioning it. You know, if you hear anybody asking, Hey, what kind of media do you listen to or watch related to board games, you know, help us spread the word. There's only so much of that that we can do.

Jake: 4:24

It's true Word of mouth is the best. But speaking of streaming, I'm also streaming semi regularly on Twitch. I'm getting back into it. I do lots of stuff. I'm also open to all kinds of suggestions. So come check it out. I'm at twitch.tv/naughty Doc 541 That's NAU gh t IDOC 541. and turn on notifications so you know when I'll be on. You've been playing wilderness on their album playing wildermyth. Well, the myth is really really good. It's super cute.

Rachel Cutler: 4:53

Yeah, I haven't gotten into it yet. But Jake assures me it's something that I would enjoy.

Jake: 4:58

I think you will enjoy it. Yes. All right. So what are we talking about today?

Rachel Cutler: 5:05

I'm not going to make the crisis joke. It's old. It's tired.

Jake: 5:10

I'm old. I'm tired. But here I am. I'm still here.

Rachel Cutler: 5:15

What else can we possibly do for the last and final episode of our spooky season,

Jake: 5:20

well we are doing Elder Sign Elder Sign is a one to eight player, cooperative supernatural sci fi game is designed by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson. It was released in 2011. By Fantasy Flight Games, there is an electronic version on it that's available on Apple. It's available on Android. It's available on Steam, it's available pretty much everywhere. It's a great game, I do you really like it. I like the fact that it's electronic. And you play it by yourself as well.

Rachel Cutler: 5:53

Hmm. So what is Elder Sign? The goal of this game is to seal away an ancient one that's being awakened near the Miskatonic University Museum. So yes, we are talking about Lovecraftian stuff,

Jake: 6:08

HP Lovecraft, my boy.

Rachel Cutler: 6:11

So I'm gonna kind of describe what the setup looks like, there's not really a board that this comes with, it's just a bunch of different components that you kind of lay out. So you have an entrance card or sheets that kind of goes, you know, up at the top somewhere. And this is where you start. It's like it's the entrance to the museum, basically. And there are some things that you can do while you're there, you can receive first aid, which will heal your sanity and stamina and or stamina, you can search the lost and found which allows you to roll the dice and potentially get like items or clues or spells, but also has the potential to cause you to lose sanity. Or you can buy a souvenir, which you can spend trophies on, we'll talk a little bit more about those in a second. But you could spend those to get items, clues, spells, elder signs, all kinds of things. And those older signs are actually kind of your first goal, or your first win condition that you experience in the game. Yes, next to that entrance card is just a little like cardboard cutout clock with your hand that moves around. It starts at midnight and it increases in increments of three hours. Underneath those, you will have your ancient one card. So there are several options that you can either choose from or you can select randomly one a bunch of different ancient ones that are basically, in the process of awakening or something is summoning them and causing them to awaken.

Jake: 7:47

I think the base game has like six of them that you can choose from.

Rachel Cutler: 7:51

Sounds right? So on that card, you will have obviously the name of the Ancient One, you will have a battle task, which we'll talk a lot more about later. A special ability This is basically just a special rule that kind of applies to everyone during the game. So like the one that we had when we were playing last night was shoot, what was it?

Jake: 8:13

There was whenever you play a unique ability, or spell you lose one stamina? Hmm, yeah, we were playing against Ithaqua

Rachel Cutler: 8:22

yeah. And then over on the right side of the card, you have a doom track, that's just a bunch of little circles that can, you know, you can fill in and place just little tokens on there. And that's basically, you know, counting down or tracking to when the monster actually awakens. And then below the Doom track, you have its attack ability. And so this is what is going to happen when the Ancient One actually wakes up and you are fighting it or it's attacking people and it's alive and awake.

Jake: 8:57

So the next part of the components that make up the quote unquote board, because as we said there is an actual board for the adventure cards. These represent locations in and around the museum that you will visit as your investigators, you start out with six available to you. And each location contains tasks that need to be completed to gain clues, items, elder signs, etc. And monsters can also spawn in these locations or cover up previous tasks, which when defeating a monster, you'll get tokens, but every time you complete a task, you will also get tokens. That being said, there are also punishments or consequences for not completing the task. So if you go and attempt it and fail a lot of times there are things that will make you lose health make you lose sanity make you lose items make you cause more Doom on the Doom track. When you complete an adventure by completing all the tasks work wired for it, you will get the number of trophies associated with it in the top left corner.

Rachel Cutler: 10:05

And again, those trophies are like a currency to go and trade for items, clues, you can trade them for elder signs, whatever.

Jake: 10:16

And the next type of adventure cards are other worldly cards. These are more typically more difficult adventures. Sometimes they're actually not as difficult as you would expect them to be. But they replace adventure cards that have been previously completed. Or there are also items that can make you or can allow you to pull one from that other world cards deck and have that as an available adventure as well. Most of the time these other worldly cards in their rewards for completing them, you'll get other signs, which is once again, the first one condition.

Rachel Cutler: 10:53

And when I say the first one condition, what we mean is that the win condition changes at some point, if the elder one awakens, or sorry the ancient one awakens, yes, so the wind conditions change. But if you manage to get enough elder signs before that happens, then you win the game.

Jake: 11:13

Yes. Next we have your investigators, there are 16 different options for your investigator, each player gets one unless, as a house rule, you like to play a four player game with only two people, then you can you know, mix and match however you would like. That's how I like to do it when I play with two people to have two investigators per person. But that's just me. Each investigator has a stamina and sanity track depicted by a red heart and a blue brain respectively. And each of the investigators will start with specific items and spells. Sometimes there'll be clues. Sometimes there'll be common or unique items. Sometimes there'll be spells. Sometimes there'll be a mix and match of any of those. Each investigator then also has a special ability on top of that. So some of the ones that we played with the other day as whenever one of Rachel's characters gained a common item, you would get another one. One of the characters that I was playing was whenever I used to clue instead of using it once, during the turn, I was able to use it twice. Another investigator we were using is whenever she goes into the other worldly adventures, she gets to use more dice than everybody else, just because

Rachel Cutler: 12:23

Yeah some of those different investigative powers can be really powerful. Yes, very useful. So that's basically what like the setup looks like in front of you. The way that you play the game is very simple. To be honest, your turn consists of only three things, you move once to a single location, you may attempt to resolve one of tasks at that location. So if you're going to one of the adventure cards or where a monster is, or something like that, you can attempt to resolve one of those. Or if you're at the entrance, you can complete one of the items that is in that list, such as the receiving first aid, or searching for the lost and found or buying souvenirs you can do one of those. That's your turn, and then the clock advances to the next three hours. That's it, it's all there is that is it. Resolving the adventure cards, we need to get into a lot more detail. This is really where the meat of the game is. Yes. So all of these adventure cards depict usually multiple tasks on them and which just is certain phases of dice that you need to have, you know, this is a dice rolling game.

Jake: 13:39

It is a little bit of a dice chucker.

Rachel Cutler: 13:42

It is very much a dice chucker. But you need to get certain roles in order to complete these various tasks. So you will always start out being able to roll six green dice unless one of them is locked up, which we'll talk about in a minute. But you've got six green dice, and then you may have items that allow you to add a yellow or a red dice. And those all pretty much have the same symbols on them. The green ones all have the investigation which is a magnifying glass with a number on it. And typically you need a certain number of those. In order to complete a task like you might need to have a value adding up to six or something. And then you have lore which is like a rolled up scroll peril which is a skull and terror which I don't know how to describe other than like a squiggly fire

Jake: 14:40

tentacles is what they are.

Rachel Cutler: 14:42

Is that what it's supposed to be okay

Jake: 14:44

it is technically it is not squiggly fire.

Rachel Cutler: 14:47

I'm gonna squiggly fire.

Jake: 14:50

you know how I feel about tentacles

Rachel Cutler: 14:55

Okay, so other symbols that you might see on these ads venture cards would be like in a single box, you could have a skull and a scroll together. And that's just kind of an or symbol, either the peril or the lore die face can be used to complete that. There is also a clock, which just indicates that time will advance extra at the end of completing that task.

Jake: 15:21

And I hate those.

Rachel Cutler: 15:23

There could also be a negative one blue brain, which indicates that you lose a sanity when the task is complete, or a negative one red heart, which indicates that you lose a stamina when the task is complete. So these are the various things that you will see like all in a line, along the card in there will be like, you know, two or three rows, usually of these various different things. And these are all the different dice faces slash things you need to sacrifice in order to complete these tasks. So there are multiple tasks that need to be completed at each location, as I said, and you can usually complete them in any order unless there is a little down arrow next to the tasks. If that's the case, then it needs to be completed from top to bottom in that order, which makes it significantly harder.

Jake: 16:15

Yes, it does.

Rachel Cutler: 16:16

If a task can't be completed after the roll, so you just you didn't get all the faces that you need, you can discard one die and roll again. You may also, you know, at any point, choose to basically save which is called focusing a die. So you can set one aside for yourself and kind of save that so that you can maybe put that towards another task after you reroll. If there's someone else at your location, you can also request help, basically, and they can do the same thing and save a die for you. But each person can only hold one.

Jake: 16:55

The only other way to maintain or to save those dice is with specific spell cards. Yes, that will allow you to do that.

Rachel Cutler: 17:04

You can basically keep doing that, where you discard a die every time you don't complete a task and keep re rolling until you run out of dice or until you've completed all the tasks. If the tasks are not all completed by a single person doing this process, then anything they did manage to complete is wiped out doesn't count. The next person has to start from scratch when they go back to try which also unfortunate. Yeah, okay, so last thing about these adventure cards is they're just some other like effects or things that you might see on there. So there can be a terror effect, which will appear kind of where the flavor text is towards the top. And this is something that happens whenever you roll the squiggly fire or the tentacles on the dice.

Jake: 17:58

No, that is not true. No, it's not when you roll them. It's when you are unable to complete a task.

Rachel Cutler: 18:04

No, that's literally what I read out of the rulebook.

Jake: 18:08

Are you sure

Rachel Cutler: 18:10

grabbing the rulebook everybody?

Jake: 18:12

Because I'm like 99% sure that

Rachel Cutler: 18:15

that's what that is. Okay, so terror effect, game effect that occurs if a task is not completed while a terror result has been rolled. Okay. It's a little bit of both. It's a little bit of both

Jake: 18:29

We're both, right? Yes, so yes, it is only available if a terror is rolled. But also if you do not complete a task.

Rachel Cutler: 18:39

Got it? Okay. That's better than what I was thinking. Because it's like, Oh, what have you roll like five of those tears? Like you summoned five monsters? That's crazy.

Jake: 18:50

No, it only happens once per roll.

Rachel Cutler: 18:53

Yeah, something else you might see on there is like an ad midnight effect. And so this is something that happens when the clock strikes midnight if that adventure card is still in play when that happens. And so again, that could be like a summon a monster, or you know, a variety of other things. And then the last thing that you might see on these adventure cards is a locked dice symbol. So it's basically a padlock that has a either green yellow or red background. When you see that you need to take one of those dice and place it there and it's basically locked in unavailable for use until that adventure card is completed.

Jake: 19:36

That is pretty much all of the adventure cards information. Now what we have is we got to talk about what happens at midnight as we said there's a clock tracking in increments of three hours. So at the end of one person or one investigators turn that clock is advanced to three hours. When that clock reaches midnight. You resolve all midnight effects on Adventure card. So some of those adventures cards that we mentioned have effects at midnight, that are not great. A lot of times, a lot of them are investigators will lose sanity or lose an item or a monster will appear. Not great. So you want to get those down as quick as you can, then you will pull a mythos card, there's usually two effects on them. One is an immediate effect. The example that we have here is advanced the Doom track, so you will add a doom to the tracker. The second effect is usually a lingering effect. It's a special world that takes place during this day. So the next four turns until the clock strikes midnight again, one of the examples that we had was, players are no longer allowed to use unique items or spells while we were playing. So for that day, we could not use any of the red items or the spells. And we did mention that monsters appear. Monsters are summoned as part of the ritual of waking up this monster. So at different points on the Doom track, you will spawn monsters when those get covered up. These monsters are cardboard pieces with a battle task on them, that will be placed on to other adventure card locations. And the way that you choose where they go is there are silver boxes on some adventure cards that will show that this gets covered up by a monster. Or sometimes there is a white blank spot above all the rows of tasks that you will put the monster up there as an additional task. So instead of covering one up, it actually makes that whole place more difficult.

Rachel Cutler: 21:42

There's also the option I saw this in the rulebook, I didn't see this on any of the adventure cards we had yesterday when we played but there is an option actually for only a partial cover up of a row. So like you might keep some of the requirements for one task and then cover up some other ones with the monster. And so now the monster is adding additionally to what that task was.

Jake: 22:05

Yes, and we did not get any of those in our game though. So the Ancient One can awaken while you are playing this game. If the Doom track is ever filled, the Ancient One is summoned. And depending on who you are so many sometimes it's summons at midnight, sometimes it's summons immediately, at midnight. Instead of a mythos card you will then resolve the Ancient Ones attack. If they are still in play. The new wind condition is then revealed or is now activated, I should say. And the way that you will now win is to remove all doom from the ancient one by battling it. So the h1 will have a task listed on it. And that is what you will go to do to do battle with this ancient one. And by completing that task, you can then remove Doom from the tracker. Dice cannot be saved during this battle. After battling you then advance the clock and continue the game by battling this monster until either all investigators are dead. Insane, or the Ancient One is dead.

Rachel Cutler: 23:12

Oh yeah. And one thing I forgot to mention that we did not do correctly when we were playing this is if you die if you are devoured by the Ancient One while battling it, your person still advances the clock when they would have taken their turn. They don't get to take their turn anymore. They're out of the game. But they still advanced the clock.

Jake: 23:34

don't like that. Yeah,

Rachel Cutler: 23:35

that's rough.

Jake: 23:37

It's really rough.

Rachel Cutler: 23:39

But anyway, that's basically the game. That's Elder Sign. What are our thoughts about this?

Jake: 23:44

I really liked this game. I'm a big huge nerd and love HP Lovecraft. So like this hits home for me, like I really like this. But I understand it's not for everyone. It is a dice chucking game, I will give you that much. It is not exactly a skill based game.

Rachel Cutler: 24:03

It's almost as if you know what I'm going to say.

Jake: 24:08

I know you

Rachel Cutler: 24:09

I'm not a huge fan of this. It's a fine game. And you know, it's not so much of a time commitment that it's like, oh, this was awful. But like it's too luck based for me. I like the theme and everything that's going on there. I mean, it actually very much reminds me of Mansions of Madness which is intentional. For sure because like even the same characters exist in both games. Yeah, so this is meant to be a simplified version of Mansions of Madness you know I have a hard time like not comparing it to that and just thinking oh I like Mansions of Madness better. You know and it just it's I don't like the dice chucking I don't like how luck based it is. But I did see even though it is very heavily luck based, Jake did have some skills in this, when we were playing like,

Jake: 25:06

I got skills that kills and pays the bills,

Rachel Cutler: 25:10

there is definitely still some strategy to go into things with items and clues and stuff to increase your chances and improve your luck, essentially. So I definitely did kind of see some of Jake's skills there.

Jake: 25:27

Mm hmm. Dice chucking is not a skill, but it's the amount of what can I use and when should I use it. And really, I know that because I have played this game a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. So, story about this game, when I was, as I said earlier, there's a great, great electronic version of this game available. It's very true to the game, there are some minor changes, but very true to how the game play is played out. I loved it so much. After I played this for the first time, I bought it on my phone. And I used to work nights, and I worked in the hospital and between about midnight till about 330, there will usually be nothing to do. So I'd play this game on my phone for a couple hours, and do a couple of Run, run throughs on it. And I loved it so much fun. Because you can pick the number, a number of investigators, you want to play with up to four on the app. So you make your own team and mix and match and see how they work together. It's pretty cool. Okay, there's a lot of fine tuning your, your team that that you can do, and how abilities can build off of each other, especially if you know the ancient that you're getting because we chose a random agent. And then Rachel chose a random person to random people yeah to. And then I chose people based on what we had available. So fine tuning your team is important in this game.

Rachel Cutler: 27:02

And that's the thing I don't like about can I call this an old school cooperative game? I mean, yeah, I

Jake: 27:08

think you call it old school.

Rachel Cutler: 27:10

That's the thing I don't like about these old school cooperative games is, you know, the way it tells you to set up. It's so it gives you the option to select these things, but it almost makes you feel like oh, yeah, you know, if you want to play on like super easy mode, I guess you could pick, you know, but really, the way it's meant to be played is you have to randomly select the Ancient One, randomly select your investigators. And like that's the thing is that some of them are way better than others. Some are way better than others. And like that randomness of just getting a crappy team. That's not fun.

Jake: 27:48

So I never played that way. I never randomly.

Rachel Cutler: 27:52

Yeah. It just seems like that's the way it's encouraged with like these old school cooperative games like pandemic, anything like that, is all that stuff is randomly assigned. And then you're supposed to just figure it out. And it's meant to be very hard. Very, very

Jake: 28:10

difficult. Yeah, it is. This is not an easy game to win. And I think I'm probably about even with having a lot of experience with this game about 5050 success rate. Hmm. That being said, we also didn't choose the easiest one to do yesterday.

Rachel Cutler: 28:28

No, like, because you told me to set it up. And I was following the rules to select randomly. Yeah, I have a really minor lore complaint

Jake: 28:39

about this game. Oh, no.

Rachel Cutler: 28:43

Not lore. I don't know. You guys could figure out the right terminology for me. But every time the clock strikes 12 That's midnight. Why is there only 12 hours in a day?

Jake: 28:55

Because you just you don't understand how time and physics works inside and anomaly.

Rachel Cutler: 29:02

Oh, okay. Yeah. Is that what it is? Actually what it is? Yeah, I mean, that's a really stupid thing to complain about. Obviously, this is just a mechanic that's designed to make something happen every once in a while, right? Yeah. And it's very silly to kind of get hung up on that. But like, hey, there's 24 hours in a day.

Jake: 29:23

Are there? Yeah. Okay, I guess I believe you.

Rachel Cutler: 29:31

All right. Tell us about some of the expansions and add ons.

Jake: 29:34

Oh, man. There's actually a lot more expansions than I thought there were. There are a total of 12345 expansions. That does not include any of the promos. Full disclosure. We typically don't list promos that are available, unless they include Felicia Day for some reason true. I did not see a Felicia Day promo but I do want to go ahead and be Be sure of that. So give me just one second. No, there is no Felicia Day promo. Okay, so we're good. So as of right now, there are a bunch of promos not including Felicia Day. But the first ad on our expansion was unseen forces in 2011. This adds blessings and curses. When a character is blessed, they are able to use a white dye that is added to their pool of characters, and they're able to add that result to whatever they choose. If they are cursed, the character is forced to use a black dye whatever face is showing on the black guy that has rolled any matching faces on all the other dice are removed. Oof. Yes, this adds four new ancient ones and eight new investigators. The next expansion was gates of Arkham. This is was released in 2015. It adds four new ancient ones and eight new investigators. That also adds a skill mechanic. And these are permanent upgrades that are earned throughout the game that are separate from your character's abilities. The next would be omens of ice, which was released in 2016. Now this is actually a two part scenario that takes place first in the museum, like you would normally and then you move to Alaska for the second part. And this adds environmental hazards like weather, hunger, and animals that your characters are also going to have to manage. This one I have played, it's very difficult. Same with the next one omens of the deep, it was released in 2017. It also adds a new two part adventure. This is an adventure that begins in the museum once again. And then you move to the ocean and go to R'lyeh which is where Cthulhu lives, and you are going to be assembling an amulet to defeat Cthulhu. This one I have never been it is very, very difficult. And then the final expansion is omens of the sand in 2018. This one was released in 2018. It's similar to omens of the deep and omens of ice. It's a two part adventure. It starts in the museum. And then the second part is going into Cairo, and finding and destroying the old one nephron. Ca. So there's a lot a lot, a lot of additional stuff for this game that you can get for a lot of replay value.

Rachel Cutler: 32:23

The scenario sounds kind of cool, even though you're saying they're very, very, very difficult.

Jake: 32:27

They are very difficult. They're not impossible, from what I understand, but they are. Yeah, I have gotten very close to beating Cthulhu I have gotten him on the ropes.And then I lost. Okay, yeah, this sounds interesting. I mean, I would check them out. I don't know if I'd spend money on them. But you know, again, brain assault coming from a person who's not super in to the game to begin with. If this sounds up your alley, take Jake's opinion with way more weight than mine. Yeah. Like I said, HP Lovecraft is amazing. He's one of my absolute favorites always has been and always will be. That being said, we want to talk about the board game geeks rating now. Okay, so

Rachel Cutler: 33:09

the base game has a 7.0 rating out of 24,000 reviewers. So it seems like a decent number of people have played the game? And I don't know, it's kind of average, I guess. It's about what I expect for a lightweight dice trucker? Yeah, the unseen forces expansion is rated at 7.6 with 3.8 Reviews. So obviously, as we're getting into the expansions here, we're having less and less people play them. But I think we're also going to see an increase in ratings. As you know, the people who would go out and buy these expansions are the ones who are really into the game to begin with, and more likely to read it higher. So that's a 7.6. We've got a 7.8 for the gates of Arkham. With a 2.6 1000. Reviewers, omens of ice is a 7.6 with 1000 reviewers, omens of the deep is a 7.8 with 466 reviewers. And lastly, the omens of sand is an 8.0 with 575 reviewers.

Jake: 34:14

Yes, so not a whole lot of reviews on some of the later expansions. And I don't know how well that they have been distributed. Because I personally have never. So this is a game that you can get at a local game store or target. A lot of times has this game. I've never seen any of the expansions accompanying this game on a shelf. So I don't know if they're just not well distributed or what. But the expansions that I have played I have played through the application or the app, because I mean, it was convenient and I bought it and played them.

Rachel Cutler: 34:51

So yeah, I do see some of them available on Amazon for $25. So

Jake: 34:58

you're right like I said in store on shelf. I've never seen them. Yeah,

Rachel Cutler: 35:01

I think you might have gotten some of the names wrong here though.

Jake: 35:05

These are pulled directly from Board Game geeks.

Rachel Cutler: 35:07

Hmm. So I don't see an omens of of deep, but oh yeah opens of deep okay. But instead of omens of sand, I see omens of the Pharaoh.

Jake: 35:17

Okay, well, then that needs to be changed in board game geeks, because this is where I got my information. Mm hmm.

Rachel Cutler: 35:25

So I don't know that they're 25 bucks is not too much. You know, I guess it's, again, it's kind of up to you and how well you enjoy this game. It seems like it would be worth it for Jake. You said that. These are also available. The omens ones are available through the app, but not the other ones. Is that right?

Jake: 35:42

On the app a lot of the or not a lot. But some of the content in those previous expansions is available in the standard version of the app. Okay, so like, some of the investigators are just there, they you don't have to pay for them. They're just there. Some of them are actually unlocked by beating certain things. Which is pretty interesting. I thought that was a cool, because you didn't have to pay for them. You could just continue to play the game and get some of them. Okay, the omens expansions? I did pay for

Rachel Cutler: 36:11

yes. Yeah. Okay. And how much are those in the app?

Jake: 36:15

I want to say like four or five bucks. It's been a long time since I purchased them.

Rachel Cutler: 36:20

Okay. I mean, that really seems like the way to go probably, is just to

Jake: 36:25

get the app. There is also a Steam version of this game. Oh, yeah. Let's go look at this on Steam. They have it everywhere. Like this game is available everywhere. So

Rachel Cutler: 36:36

Elder Sign omens is available on Steam for 5.99. Lets us It says it was released in 2011. Yeah, but Well, the name omens makes me think that it contains some of the expansions but maybe not. I don't know. That's really not bad. That seems like a pretty good deal. Lots of replayability to it seems like

Jake: 37:02

for the amount of replayability, you get Yeah.

Rachel Cutler: 37:06

All right, shall we move on to our reading section?

Jake: 37:09

Our first reading section is easy versus difficult. How easy is it? To understand the rules and mechanics? How easy is it for a new player to just sit down and learn to play? How often do we need to go back to the rules and rehash something? There is a little bit of difficulty to this. There's a lot of symbols in this that aren't completely explained. Unless you go and find them in the rulebook hidden off to the side in those boxes that Rachel has said she hates. Something happened yesterday, where you're like, find it in the rulebook and I found it immediately. Oh, no, that wasn't a boy. Yeah, that's when we were playing a boy. That was when we were playing coy. But so there are some things like that that are hidden in the rulebook that you have to go and search for as you're playing the game. But not as much as something like route. Mm hmm.

Rachel Cutler: 38:02

That's always gonna be the the bottom end comparison.

Jake: 38:05

Look, I love route. I love those guys. They do a great job.

Rachel Cutler: 38:10

Yeah, I get I get you. Alright, I have a confession to make. I didn't read the rulebook this time.

Jake: 38:16

I know you didn't who read the rulebook? Well,

Rachel Cutler: 38:21

you didn't really read the rulebook either. You just like knew how to play the game.

Jake: 38:28

Because one of us has read the rulebook.

Rachel Cutler: 38:31

I've kind of read it now in the process of going and documenting it for our outline here. But I didn't read it like cover to cover like I normally do. And so it was interesting being on the other side of things and having Jake explain the game to me.

Jake: 38:45

Yeah, interesting is the word you want to use.

Rachel Cutler: 38:47

Interesting. Yeah, I had to kind of Jake is ADD, like legitimately very, I had to kind of like step back and like, Okay, we need to frame this. Like, let me give you the context of how I want you to explain the rules, because the way he was going about it initially was not great.

Jake: 39:07

But got my point across.

Rachel Cutler: 39:10

So I was like, okay, hold back. Like, think about how I normally explained the rules. Can you do that for me? Try and do that. Okay,

Jake: 39:19

I tried to add each read.

Rachel Cutler: 39:21

But yeah, so the symbols was going to be my point about this. That makes it a little bit difficult. There are quite a lot of symbols that are at the bottom of the adventure cards that I couldn't quite keep straight. Like, oh, what does this one do? Someone's a monster and this one advances the Doom track and this one, I don't know. Like there's a lot of other symbols besides like you just getting items and clues and stuff. So that was going to be my big kind of complaint, but I would say not terribly difficult in terms of like grasping the concepts of the game. I mean, it's really just, it's dice chucking

Jake: 39:59

is that that it difficult as far as the concepts, but the things you have to remember, especially with the cards themselves, the adventure cards, like you have to remember all this, it hasn't been night affected this as a terror effect you have to remember to, to go and do those things.

Rachel Cutler: 40:15

Yeah. So I don't know, I'm gonna give it I'm debating between the three and a four 3.5 3.5.

Jake: 40:23

I mean, I'm gonna give it a four. Okay, because there is a lot.

Rachel Cutler: 40:28

Yeah, they don't have the little, like cheat sheet cards that a lot of games come with, you know, for the symbols. So you, you do legitimately have to go back to the rulebook and look that up. Our next rating system is simple versus complex. So if this is confusing, when compared to easy versus difficult, we like to use the example of chess, chess is an easy game to pick up, there's only so many pieces, each piece can only do it certain type of moves. There's, there's only so many rules to it. But it's an incredibly complex game, because of the amount of strategy that you can bring to it. And so that's what this rating system is really focused on is what are the levels of strategy? Personally, there's more strategy. And then what I would have initially given this, I probably would have initially said one on this, like, there's no strategy, it's all random. No, it's not. There is a little bit of strategy in terms of like making sure that you have the right kinds of items and spells and stuff before you go into like a difficult thing, a difficult role, keeping track of what your sanity and your stamina is at and looking at, like, what are the fail conditions, if you don't succeed at this role? Is that going to kill you, you know, and when to use your like yellow and red dice, because those do have slightly better odds for some of these things. Or, you know, the red dice has a wild face on it that you can use for anything. So, when to use those.

Jake: 42:03

But then you also have to remember things like the yellow dyed does not have the tentacle terror icon. So if that's what you're trying to get a lot of in, in that task. It doesn't really benefit you using it.

Rachel Cutler: 42:14

The squiggly fire you mean? Yeah.

Jake: 42:16

Tentacles? Yes, yeah. Yes, I remember.

Rachel Cutler: 42:20

Yeah. So I don't know. Still pretty simple. I'm gonna give this a three.

Jake: 42:26

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking. I'm also thinking at three because it is pretty limited on what your are. Yeah, what kind of strategy you can bring to the game? Yeah, really, the strategy I think comes at the very, very beginning, when you're building your team, if you're not doing it as you ran, it's just supposed to randomly do and choosing your team, like the way that you want to, then that makes it a little more strategic. But if you are randomly choosing everything, then it doesn't. It's very difficult to say that there's any sort of real complexity involved. Yeah. Look, read. I would give this a three.

Rachel Cutler: 43:04

Okay, that's fair. All right. Lastly, we have wrote versus random, what are the mechanics in this game that make it randomize such as dice, rolling,

Jake: 43:14

dice rolling, and a lot of cards, you have four decks of items, quote, unquote, you've got your common items, your uncommon items, your spells and your allies. You have normal locations. You have other worldly locations. And then you have the mythos deck. Like all of that is completely randomized.

Rachel Cutler: 43:41

Monsters are randomized when you draw a monster

Jake: 43:44

monsters are randomly drawn as well. Oh, and of course, dice rolling.

Rachel Cutler: 43:50

So I'm gonna give this like an eight. An eight. Hmm, yeah. On the random scale. Yes. Highly, highly random.

Jake: 43:58

That is a lot. I think I'm probably gonna say an eight as well, like a seven or an eight. I'm trying to decide between the two. Yeah, this is a very, very randomized game.

Rachel Cutler: 44:08

Yeah. The thing that I always kind of forget to say, about like dice chuckers as these are typically more welcoming, I think to younger kids, because, you know, kids like things that are based on chance. It gives them you know, a fighting chance against an adult who could come up with a more sophisticated strategy than a five year old good, right?

Jake: 44:31

Unless you're that nine year old who plays a carnival of monsters with me, then you just you're not gonna win.

Rachel Cutler: 44:39

Jake doesn't not know how to like pull his punches.

Jake: 44:42

Apparently not. I have no shame. I will ruthlessly beat a nine year old in a children's game. Ah. Anyway, that's Elder Sign

Rachel Cutler: 44:55

anyways, so Well, no, we have to ask the question. Soon, Rachel. No, I have to

Jake: 45:04

ask the question you get to ask the question.

Rachel Cutler: 45:06

What are you doing? You're messing everything up

Jake: 45:08

online. Oh, my. Jake,

Rachel Cutler: 45:12

would you rather play Elder Sign than wait for three full days for your brand new motorcycle to get its service so that you can take it on the nice long trip down to Tucson and get that awesome Japanese curry that you love. Two hours away?

Jake: 45:27

Here's the thing. I would much rather play elder signs and wait for it to be done. But then once it's done, I'm gonna go get that curry, of course. So the waiting part yes. much rather do. Yes.

Rachel Cutler: 45:42

The anticipation of the curry.

Jake: 45:45

Exactly. It's the curry. It's got the juice. It's got the juice. It's got the juice. But anyways, that is Elder Sign. Thank you all so much for listening. Please hit us up on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at snowboard podcast. That's s OB o ARD podcast. We'd love to hear about any fun house rules or experiences you've had with this game. And I'm sure some of you have played this or heard of it. Because it's, you know, 10 years old at this point. You'll also be able to find pictures and short stories of other games we played recently and interact with us about all things tabletop gaming. You can also email us at We are so bored@gmail.com That's W E ar e s o b o ARD and make sure you subscribe so you can receive notifications when our new episodes are available. Sorry, we are no longer going weekly. For this month. This is our last weekly episode. So you you will not get another episode for two weeks.

Rachel Cutler: 46:46

Yeah, but for real. I mean, if you enjoyed this, if you want to see more of this, you know, feel free to reach out to us. Let us know how you liked it. Let us know. I don't know what it meant to you. And, you know, we can consider doing it again. In the future. It's just we really need to grow our audience more.

Jake: 47:05

Yeah, as of right now we need to grow our audience. We would like I said in the beginning, we want this to be weekly show. But as of right now, we can't justify it.

Rachel Cutler: 47:17

And like I have so many ideas on content that we could do to make this weekly because okay, it's not realistic that we would be able to go weekly and do a new board game every single week. Like, it just takes a lot of time, especially if it's a brand new board game to us that you know, we have to learn the rules. And we usually like to play it multiple times before we record an episode on it. And so it's hard to do that on a weekly cadence. But I got lots of ideas like, hey, why don't we compare games that seem to have similar themes? Like my father's work? And abomination? Hmm. Someone looking at those two games separately, not knowing much about them might be really interested in like a head to head comparison on what that is? I think so. We've also done episodes in the past where we've had people on for interviews where we have talked about just kind of general genres of games. We've got lots of things like that. So I have ideas. You know, just at this point in time, it's not. We need a larger audience to make it worth that time and effort to do that.

Jake: 48:25

Yeah, like we said, we want it to be that we're just trying to get to that point. So please help us get there. That would be awesome.

Rachel Cutler: 48:32

Spread the word, write a review, give us some stars, give us some likes, tell other people about it. That's really the big thing like spread the word. Yes,

Jake: 48:41

that is huge.

Rachel Cutler: 48:43

We greatly appreciate it. We love you guys. I'm not trying to diminish any of the support or you know, the listeners that we have currently. I absolutely love that we have you know what we have? Right? We just would like to reach more people and do more. We'd like to do more with this. Yes. All right. Anyway, that's enough of that shelling out and begging for support and all that. We'd like to thank our podcast management company, a n t podcast management. They are professional podcast editors and can be found at a n t dash podcast management.com. There's also a shout out for our lovely artist Michel Mims. He is accepting commissions so you can go and check him out on Instagram at MIMSCOSA RA or on his website at M i c h e l m i m s.ca rd that CO

Jake: 49:46

once again, we are streaming on Twitch every Wednesday we play board games. That's so bored podcast. So that's twitch.tv/sobo ard podcast.

Rachel Cutler: 49:58

Tomorrow is our last October stream I'm where we are dressing up in costumes and doing all the silly things.

Jake: 50:03

Yes. So come check it out. It will be fun. More than likely for at least one of you.

Rachel Cutler: 50:11

What does that mean?

Jake: 50:14

Oh, no, it should be fun. Okay, well, yeah, we have a good time. Yeah, it's fun. I'm also trying to get back into streaming on Twitch. I've been off for quite a while. Took a large break for some personal stuff. But I am back baby. I'm been playing a lot of wilderness which is kind of like d&d, but not. It's really cool. I am really a big fan of it so far. Okay. So come check it out. I met twitch.tv/naughty Doc 541. That's NAU gh t IDOC 541.

Rachel Cutler: 50:48

And that is it. I hope everybody has a lovely Halloween who those who celebrate it. Happy spooky season.

Jake: 50:56

It is the spookiest season of them all. And we will see you guys next time. All right, everyone. Bye