It's been a while since I have played a game that I just plain didn't like. Unfortunately this happened last night, and perhaps even more surprising it was a game from Steve Jackson Games ... that involved Cthulhu. I'm as big a fan of Cthulhu as the next raving lunatic and I normally glom onto the goings on of the Elder One himself. But this game is just plain bad. It's far too simple and seems to rejoice in that simplicity but aside from use as a quick game that determines which player goes first in another game I can't see how the game is really even worth it's low, low $4.99 price tag.

The game plays quite quickly with each player having three sanity tokens and the final player with remaining sanity wins the game. Each round a player picks a "victim" and rolls the die against them and will affect their sanity in a few different ways and then the victim attacks the predator and the die passes to the predator's left. The game is just not in any way complex and really falls flat in both it's concept and it's presentation. The game contains one twelve-sided die, about 18 or so green glass counters so that you can play with 6 players, and a rules pamphlet; and that's all. I really have enjoyed a great deal of the games that I have played recently from Steve Jackson Games, namely among them Chez Cthulhu, but this is really just a sub par performance. 

I could even be more petty and say that the name is misleading as it only contains one die, and thus should be called Cthulhu Die but I can see where that would be a bit of a strange name when it gets down to brass tacks.