Review

Great Old ones in down under

Auztralien

Really spelled with a Z

Australia was the last continent to be discovered, charted and surveyed by Europeans; no wonder that the Great Old Ones after their defeat by Humans under the leadership of Sherlock Holmes in the year 1888 took refuge there in the deepest hinterland. But mankind expands and, finally, Auztralia, too, is explored by rails tracks leading from harbors at the coast into the heartland, with the purpose to set up farms and to extract resources from the Outback; but gold, coal, phosphates and iron are not the only things that we will find there ...

On the double-sided board (showing the South East or the South West of Australia; when three or four players are participating, the South East side is used) you lay out – using so-called surveyor tiles on various hex cases – coal, phosphate, iron and, of course face-down, also tiles for the Great Old Ones in varying strength (for instance Cthulhu, Shoggothen, Mi-Go‘s, Zombies, Cultists, etc.). This guarantees that each game is different in its starter set up, a very good solution, I must say.

Each of the maximum four players is equipped with various starting components like farms, rail track tiles, 20 grey little cubes for markers, a little bit of gold, coal and iron and a time disc to put on the time track that runs around the board. Furthermore, there are various decks of cards, like Revelation cards – they are used to reveal and move the tiles of the Great Old ones, Personality cards with helpful characters and a very important harbor disc, which is placed on a coastal case in front of every player.

Very interesting, but not new, is the turn order in the game – the active player is the player who is currently furthest back and on top on the time trick (just as, for instance, in “Jenseits von Theben”). You can spend maximum three time units (ZE) at one time, for many actions, however, the spending is limited to one ZE.

Essentially, the mechanism is a worker placement mechanism, whereby each player, however, selects the desired action out of ten possible options on his own action board with his own markers and then resolves the action immediately. You can also use action where there are already markers, by paying one gold per marker already on the case; an option that is readily used by players, because you can only take back the markers from the board by resolving the action “collect markers”, which, however, costs 1 ZE; until then, they stay in place which results in a corresponding multitude of actions.

But now to the action:

For “place rail track” at the cost of 1 coal and 1 iron for two tracks at the same time, there are two action cases; payment of 3 ZE allows you to place them on the separation line between all three landscape types available on the board; if you pay only two ZE you cannot lay track on a hill case. Of course, there are various additional rules for track building that need to be taken into account. The action option “extract resource”, which is also available on two action cases, you can completely empty one type of resources, for instance iron, from a landscape tile that is connected to your track network. The important action “set up farm” can be used to build one to three farms for payment of one to three ZE; if you build two or three farms, you must build them on different landscape types, which must of course be reachable with your own tracks. This demands planning ahead already in the action “place track”, as each of your own, still intact farm scores two victory points, and if you build them you are paid one gold per farm. Action options of “import/export” and “hire help” are used to swap resources (coal, iron, gold) at certain exchange rates or to hire an often very useful character, selected from those on display, who assists you in combat, once only, at the end of the game or permanently. 36 character cards offer enough variation, another point in favor of the game.

The action options „acquisition of military unit” and “attack” merit a special mention; they must be resolved in any case and are somehow the core of this game by Martin Wallace, because, at some point, they will appear, those Great Old Ones. There are five different types of military units, in some cases extremely limited in number, some of them even only available three times, so that not every player can acquire every type of unit – there are Infantry, Armored Cars, Airships, etc., and they have different costs in gold, but also different resistance values against the Great Old Ones as well as landscape ranges of  0 to 4 hex cases outside your own track network. It is recommended to diversify your military unit types as much as you can, to one minimum three or more different types of units if possible. You will appreciate them during combat, because not every Great Old One can be fought equally well against with any type of unit; and in case of still unrevealed opponents you do not know which Great Old One is hiding there.

The Great Old Ones awaken and become active, when a certain case on the time track, case 22 out of 53, that is, is crossed; they even have their own time disc on the time track and they thus become active, exactly like any player, when the disc is in last position on the track, resulting in the using up of exactly one ZE by the Great Old Ones. On every second case on the time track, a Revelation card is drawn, too, and resolved. This very often results in the revealing of a Great Old One on a certain case – the board cases are numbered. For each such activation by a Great Old One card, one or more open types of Great Old Ones (there are five that move) eventually advance one step in direction of the nearest farm, which is inevitably destroyed when it is reached, or in direction of the nearest harbor, regardless of which player owns farm or harbor. By the way, should the harbor of a player be reached, and the involved player cannot win the resulting combat, one of the game end conditions has been met; otherwise, the game ends when all time discs of all players have reached the end of the track.

Combat resolving in case of fighting the various types of the Great Old Ones has been done very elegantly. There are no dice, but for each round of combat exactly one card is revealed and checked, if the combat units previously selected for the fight by the player, cause damage to the respective opponent, or not. Then you check, which military units take damage from the Great Old One or if you need to destroy an airship or how high the loss of Mental Health is for the current combat; the starting value before each fight is 3. Should the value of Mental Health fall below Zero, the flight is lost, all damaged units are immediately destroyed and the fight ends. For each hit taken by the Great Old one, a marker of the respective player is placed on it. If the Resistance value of such an opponent is reached, he is defeated, and players involved in the defeat by having caused damage now and previously divide the resulting victory points evenly among themselves.

Cthulhu is that strong that in fact he cannot be defeated in one round of combat by one player alone. At this point, a semi-cooperative way to act comes into play; you can withdraw certain types of military units before round of combat begins, even all of them if you want to. Of course, you are not refunded the time units that you have spent for this, as you have to spend one ZE in advance for nearly every type of military unit; some units can be used without spending ZEs for them, but an attack always costs one ZE. The more types, however, that you use the higher the probability that you cause enough damage to the Great Old One.

When the game end is triggered (a harbor is destroyed, or all time discs have arrived at the end of the time track), the score for each player is calculated. Each undestroyed farm is worth two points, each phosphate resource scores three points (they are very scarce), plus victory points from tiles of Great Old Ones that you killed alone, victory points from cooperatively killed Great Old Ones and points from eventual character cards. The chief attraction, however, is, that you also score the victory points for the Great Old Ones. Each destroyed farm is worth one point, each revealed Great Old Ones as many points as the tile shows, and – here we are – each Great Old one still hidden, scores double his value. Yes, the Great Old Ones can win the game, too, this happens mainly when players look after their own interests instead acting against them consequently and strongly, meaning that a player only builds farms and collects resources. You really have to build track to connect the Great Old Ones and then fight them together, of course with the necessary military units, because if you not do this, they will unavoidably win.

Conclusion: A really, really well-made and felicitous game by Martin Wallace (and I do not like all of them, truly!), that is fun to play. It also comes with variants for experienced players that give even more strength to the Great Old Ones. It must be said, however, that a rather high frustration tolerance is necessary, because it can happen that a strong Great Old One keeps destroying one farm often the other by only one player, because these farms have been built along his own track, often only a few cases apart. This can really hurt, especially towards the end of the game, when each destroyed farm causes the loss of two victory points.

Gert Stöckl

Players: 1-4

Age: 13+

Time: 120+

Designer: Martin Wallace

Artist: James Colmer

Price: ca. 60 Euro

Publisher: Schwerkraft-Verlag 2018

Web: www.schwerkraft-verlag.de

Genre: Military/economy/adventure/rails

Users: For experts

Special: 1 player

Version: de

Rules: de en es fr it pl pt

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Variable starting set-p

Variety also from character card

Basically, a worker placement game

Variants for experienced players

Compares to:

First game combining railway and Cthulhu, maybe “A Study in Emerald” from the same publisher

Other editions:

Ediciones MasQueOca (pt), Giochix (it), Ludofy (es), Nuts! Publishing (fr), Phalanx (pl), Schilmil/Stronghold (en)

My rating: 5

Gert Stöckl:

A very well-made and felicitous game by Martin Wallace, this time combining a railroad topic with the Great Old Ones like Cthulhu etc.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 3

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 1

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0