Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game

Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game
Designer(s) Eric M. Lang
Publisher(s) Fantasy Flight Games
Players 2 or more
Age range 14+
Setup time < 2 minutes
Playing time ~ 20 minutes1
Random chance Some
Skill(s) required

Card playing

Arithmetic
1 Games may take much longer or shorter depending on a deck's play style and the number of players.

The Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game or Call of Cthulhu Living Card Game is a collectible card game (CCG) marketed by Fantasy Flight Games. It is based on the fiction of the Cthulhu Mythos, primarily the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. The Call of Cthulhu CCG is the successor to an earlier CCG, Chaosium's Mythos, also based on the Cthulhu Mythos.

It shares art and characters with FFG's other Cthulhu Mythos product Arkham Horror.

Contents

Overview

Chaosium had previously been involved in the collectible card game (CCG) business in the mid-1990s, printing Mythos, its Cthulhu mythos CCG. However, Chaosium discontinued the game in 1997 after poor sales. In 2004, Chaosium instead licensed the property to Fantasy Flight Games (FFG), allowing FFG to produce the official Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game. It was designed by Eric M. Lang as a more accessible introduction to gaming in the Mythos environment and to provide a fast and lively interplay with the usual elements of the mythos (e.g. arcane tomes and secrets, paranormal investigations, the elder gods and their terrible servants, dark sinister plots, inhuman conspiracies, and dangers from beyond the stars). The game is nominally set in 1928.

FFG staffer Darrell Hardy developed the storyline background for the game. Most of the storyline text (including card names and flavor text) is written by creative developer Pat Harrigan. In the Living Card Game format, the story line is penned by Nate French, with the help of Dan Clark.

The games current developer is Nate French.

The game

Players attach resources (taken from the cards in their hand) onto domains (similar to the lands of Magic: The Gathering), later draining them by putting a "drain counter" on them to play various cards. Both players compete to complete "stories" by winning success tokens. Five success tokens wins a story; three stories wins the game. Players typically assign character cards to stories, to win struggles and gain these success tokens. Additionally, the first player to run out of cards to draw from loses the game, making "deck destruction" another potentially effective strategy.

The cards

Five types of card exist in Call of Cthulhu: Story Cards, Character cards, Event cards, Support cards and Conspiracy cards. All cards (except story cards) have a cost and belong to a faction (described below). Various cards have subtypes (such as investigator, tome, or location).

The factions

There are eight factions in Call of Cthulhu, as well as "neutral" cards (light grey in color) that are not part of any faction. A card may only be played if a domain with that faction attached is drained (neutral cards can be paid for using any faction).

Availability

The Call of Cthulhu card game is currently produced in the form of a core set, featuring cards from all 7 factions, neutral cards, story cards, success/wound tokens, a full-colour manual, a game board, and Cthulhu-shaped domain markers. The game is ready to play straight out of the box, and decks can be made quickly by combining cards from two of the factions along with several neutral cards.

Every month, FFG releases "Asylum Packs", which are small expansions with fixed contents, designed to increase the users card pool in a balanced and affordable way. 20 new cards are introduced in each pack, supplied in playsets of 3 cards for a total of 60 cards (originally the Asylum Packs were 10 cards appearing once in the pack and 10 cards as a playset of 3, for 40 cards total). Casual gamers can play using a single core set and have the option of using supplemental packs if they want to.

Here are the Asylum Packs fitting the LCG format (white bordered):

Madness and Horror: (stand alone asylum packs which do not fit into a cycle)

Summons of the Deep:

Dreamlands:

The Yuggoth Contract:

The Rituals of the Order:

Deluxe Expansions:

Older products may still be available from Fantasy Flight Games and other retailers, though these cards have black borders and different backs. Official tournaments so far have been "white border only", so it is not necessary to chase down the older cards. The only reasons to do so are for fun or to complete a collection, though if intended for play, sleeves are required to disguise the different backs.

Here is a list of the older CCG-format products:

Each booster pack contains 11 cards (including 3 'uncommon' and 1 'rare'). In addition, the Arkham and Eldritch base sets offered starter sets with fixed contents, designed to introduce players to the game.

The decision to cease producing the game in a collectible format came in May 2006. Newer products were released in the current Asylum Pack form, though the first four are not part of the new LCG format and contain black-bordered cards.

These are the original four Asylum Packs:

The Asylum Packs were very successful and are the reason for the conversion of the game to the LCG format. The announcement came on February 5, 2008, that the LCG would be launched in October 2008 with a brand new core set. To bridge the gap, two more Asylum Decks were announced. These were The Mountains of Madness and Ancient Horrors (see above).

Gaming Milestones

Yithians

Around May, 2006 as a special promotion, copies of the Yithian deck where handed out to tournament organisers. The Yithian deck was a purposely unbalanced deck, ignoring normal deck-building rules and featuring overpowered cards representing Yithians. Since these cards are so overpowered, they are illegal in normal tournament play. This Yithian Tournament had the following special rules:

The Yithian Deck consists out of the following promo cards:

Player Designed Cards

The winners of the Call of Cthulhu World Championship are invited to design a card that is released within the other products. These cards usually have a high power level, and the art features the likeness of the person that designed it.

World Championship Winner Designed Cards

Programs

Servitor Program

Fantasy Flight Games have set up the Servitor program to help tournament organizers by giving tournament support, like promo cards, Sanity Certificates and access to special promotional items like the Yithian Deck, to give away as prizes.

Sanity Redemption

Older products in the line come with Sanity Points on the packaging, which range from 1 Sanity Point on boosters, to 5 on Asylum packs. Servitors are given Sanity Certificates to hand out to tournament winners. These Sanity Points could be redeemed until June 30, 2008[1] for items like promo cards or T-shirts.

Awards

See also

References

External links