Robin D. Laws - Gaming Hut: Cthulhu 500

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October 7th, 2004

11:00 am

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Gaming Hut: Cthulhu 500
Wow, I meant to have a round-up of my Gaming Gurus Pick the Goods picks from GenCon done and posted long before now. Well, time whips by pretty fast from August to October out here at the RDL Ranchero and I’m nowhere near carving out the necessary time to write about games for free.

However, I can give a hearty shout-out to my #1 pick of the show, Jeff Tidball’s Cthulhu 500, a standalone card game from Atlas Games. Yes, both Jeff and the fine folks at Atlas reside firmly within my cronies file, but I wouldn’t publicly plug anything I didn’t authentically groove upon.

Like any GGPG item, I picked it because it scored in two areas:

1) a fun setting hook: fast cars and elder gods! NASCAR meets Nyarlathotep! You’d think spoofy puns on Lovecraftian tropes would have gotten tired by now, but oddly enough, “The Arkham House of Chicken and Waffles” is still funny after all these years.

2) a cool mechanical idea: instead of driving the cards that represent your cars around a track, you simply keep track of their relative positions, adding lap counters as the first car passes the last one. (I also like the way the car cards are flipped over to reveal different stats when damaged.)

Now, thanks to low turnout at a recent game night, I’ve had a chance to actually play the thing and can say that it not only looks fun, but plays well, too. The lap mechanism, and the high variety of choices you get each round, combine to add a genuinely suspenseful element to the race genre. Normally I’m not so enamored of race games, but this one had enough going on to keep me stoked throughout.

I even got to win in my Big Honking Truck, which has the advantage of getting faster when it’s damaged. And what can be better than a game in which I win?

If card games are your scene, give it an eldritch look-see. You’ll be glad you did.

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Comments

From:	mnemex
Date:	October 7th, 2004 04:03 pm (UTC)

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I still somehow didn't get around to playing this game, mostly because of the price tag. But I did demo it briefly at Gencon on your recommendation.

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From:	(Anonymous)
Date:	October 12th, 2004 06:18 am (UTC)

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If I recall correctly, in 2003 at the Origins gaming convention you participated in a charity event to break the world record for the longest role-playing game. Is that so and do you remember any of the people involved? Specifically I'm looking for anyone who helped organize the event, helped officiate the record, or worked in any other official capacity

Alex Jacobs
first_wizard@hotmail.com

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From:	robin_d_laws
Date:	October 12th, 2004 02:12 pm (UTC)

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You must be thinking of someone else. I wasn't at Origins in 2003 so I'm afraid I can't even point you in the right direction.

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