Alex Riviello | APPS | 11.14.2011 @ 8:30 am
The Game: Elder Sign: Omens
The Device: Motorola Droid X (Android)
The Price: $3.99 for the Android and iPod/iPhone versions, $6.99 for the iPad and Mac OS HD versions.
The Basics: One of the biggest problems about being a board game geek is trying to wrangle up your friends. It’s certainly not hard to get people excited about Arkham Horror once they’ve had a taste (Lovecraftian crack!) but working everyone’s schedules out gets increasingly tricky the older we get. Which is why it’s so exciting that Fantasy Flight Games has taken a huge step into mobile gaming, shrinking its recent release Elder Sign to fit your phone. Itís not a replacement for the real thing but hey, your phone never needs to get up early tomorrow or watch the kids.
Elder Sign has been described as Arkham Horror Light, but that’s not quite fair. It reuses much of the same art, characters and items from Fantasy Flight’s most famous title but the mechanics give it a completely different experience. Rather than a massive board covered in cardboard pieces most of Elder Sign focuses on rolling dice and matching the symbols (known here as glyphs) to complete adventures.
It’s a perfect mix of luck and strategy that makes for a remarkably atmospheric and addictive game. Elder Sign: Omens is a near-perfect adaptation.
The Review: Unlike Arkham Horror, which saw you dealing with an entire town descending into madness, Elder Sign’s insanity is solely concentrated in the local Museum. Spook Central, if you will. As you explore the dusty old place all sorts of strange and horrific events will take place, and you’ll find out that a nefarious cult is trying to resurrect Azathoth, a Great Old One.
If that made no sense to you, you need to brush up on your H.P. Lovecraft. Think of the Great Old Ones as Gods that existed before time as we know it, powerful beings that are currently imprisoned and will one day be freed and devour us all. It’s not a happy thought, and gives your investigators a real incentive to find the titular Elder Signs, because the powerful arcane symbols are the only things that can stop Azathoth from breaking out and destroying the world.
You’ll choose from up to four of the sixteen available investigators (everything from a scientist to a nun) based on their varied stamina and sanity stats, as well as their unique special ability. Stamina and sanity are important because there is much more than one threat in this game. Throughout you’ll face lesser monsters from vampires to Eldritch horror, horrifying creatures that assault both body and mind. You’ll either end up dead or insane (and out of the game) if one goes all the way down. The abilities are important so choose your characters wisely: some will allow you to change the glyph you’ve rolled, some can heal, some will get more dice to use.
Once you’ve chosen investigators youíll head to the museum and start hunting for Elder Signs among the many artifacts, exhibits, and occurrences. You’ll need 14 to win the game, but the Great Old One isn’t defenseless. Every four turns, the clock strikes midnight and something will happen… generally either monsters appearing or a number of doom tokens being added to the doom track. When the doom track gets to 12, the game is over. (If those numbers seem arbitrary, it’s because in the tabletop game there are different Great Old Ones that are easier or harder and have different abilities.)
After you get to the museum you’ll pick an adventure to attempt. There are dozens of possible adventures and all come with icons representing the various risks and rewards you may face. You’ll roll six dice and try to match the glyphs to the ones required for the various challenges the adventure contains. Complete them all and you win the adventure and whatever comes with it- Elder Signs, weapons and spells, other goodies.
Fail a roll and you can sacrifice one die to try again, but it gets harder to roll the required glyphs as your number of dice dwindle. This is when the various items you’ve earned come in handy. Weapons can give you different colored dice to roll with (yellow or red versus the six main green ones) that have better results on their sides and make things a whole lot easier. Spells can hold dice for you for the next roll in case you need a specific glyph, and there are many other objects to fool around with. But if you run out of dice and fail the adventure, expect to feel the pain as monsters are spawned and your health and stamina takes hits.
And that’s pretty much it. You’ll go around completing adventures, trying to earn items to get extra dice and bonuses to more easily complete the adventures that net you Elder Signs, since they tend to be much harder.
There’s a scoring system in place to keep you playing for a higher score but the results seem arbitrary. My one perfect game (didn’t fail a single adventure!) netted me a lesser score than one that saw a doom track near the top and poor old Harvey Walters in an asylum.
There’s no online multiplayer included, but since the game supports up to four characters it’s entirely possible to pass it around among friends. Of course, if you’re doing that you’ll wonder why you didn’t just pick up the full thing for the authentic dice-rolling experience.
The design of the app is absolutely fantastic, with the beautiful art and character design getting featured frequently. It has an appropriately moody soundtrack and nice special effects- splattery sounds when your character gets hurt, lightning strikes that help get you in the mood. When you first start up the app, you might be overwhelmed with all the stuff on screen and the many, many icons, but once you get the hang of things you’ll appreciate how everything you need is right there on screen. It’s remarkable how simple they made a relatively complex experience. The game also comes complete with a huge help section and a bunch of video tutorials to help you figure things out, but a lot of Android users (including this author) have been having troubles with the videos working. Fantasy Flight has released two patches for the game already so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re working on a fix. This is their first Android app, after all. From reports, the iOS versions don’t seem to have the same problems.
Anyone who has picked up the tabletop game will find mostly the same experience here. The one big difference is that (as mentioned before) there’s only one Great Old One to battle- Azathoth. This is a shame and a bit weird, because when you download the files for the game you’ll see the rest of the crew is there as well- Yig, Ithaqua, Cthulhu, the works. Likely Fantasy Flight will be releasing the rest as in-app DLC at some point but it would be nice to have it as an update, since each one changes up the gameplay nicely, and offers a chance for a final battle. Omens is also a bit tougher now since you can get three doom tokens at once when midnight strikes, and Ally cards are conspicuously absent.
Still, this is a game that will appear to Arkham Horror vets and newcomers alike. Don’t be put off by the complexity as this is a tremendous effort from Fantasy Flight Games, and hopefully a sign (ahem) of things to come.
The Final Grade: A-