Тайны Аркхэма

EvEvanstar2,5

This is a mystery solving game in the same style as Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. The general idea is there's a choose your own adventure book, and players take turns deciding who to talk to and where to go. When you think you've solved the mystery, the book asks you questions about the case, and you score based on how well you can answer the questions minus points for wrong turns you made. The game was fun, and introduced some nice mechanisms beyond that you find in Sherlock, for example, this game might give you a different encounter text based on if you have an item or not, or even what time of day it is. On the other hand, the text passages aren't quite as well written in Sherlock. In Sherlock, the person you meet will give you some piece of information, and then you need to figure out what to do with it, without much guidance. In Mythos, so far anyway, guy A tells you to go see guy B, who tells you that you really should talk to guy C. Another difference is that Sherlock lets you walk around talking to people, accumulating negative points as you go, as long as you want to. Mythos has a fixed timer. This is an interesting element, but it does make me feel like I'm missing out on plot, and it sort of seems like a crutch to compensate for the different investigation paths being too straightforward. I'm tempted to say, we should just ignore the timer in future plays and just take negative points beyond a certain point? ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ☆☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

TATaha Afyounistar5,9

The Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective games are my favorite board games, so I was really interested in this even though I'm not generally a Cthulhu fan. My group had fun with this one. While there was quite a bit of errata, we still enjoyed our time with it.