When Chaosium announced Old Ones Origins, one question was on everyone’s lips. ‘Alright, famed Warhammer board game Forbidden Stars is about Cthulhu now – but is this just a reskin?’ After a brief demo of the prototype at this year’s Gen Con, I have the answer: absolutely not. Designer Samuel Bailey has leapt at the chance to upgrade the 2015 design he co-created.
A lot has changed. Here are the differences so big that even the Elder Gods can’t ignore them:
Round structure
Each round still takes place over three phases, but the actual events of each have been tweaked. Most significantly, scheme cards now play a major part in your planning. Each faction (Cthulhu, Hastur, Yog-Sothoth, and the All-Mother Shub-Gorath) have a set of these cards for strategizing with.
During the first phase, the scheming phase, everyone selects a card and reveals. These cards determine your initiative (turn order), provide an instant effect, and offer a powerful ongoing effect for the round.
“If you want something more aggressive”, Bailey tells me during our demo, “you might play something like The Stars Are Right, which allows you to warp your guys to a good position and give everyone flying to move around the board easier”. “If you want to be more defensive, you might play a card which lets you sacrifice a unit to gain your resources – but also makes the spawn tougher.”
Phase two is the plotting phase, which more closely resembles Forbidden Stars’ planning phases. You place influence markers face-down on the board to indicate where you plan to act, but no one knows what you’ll do until the resolution phase, where players take turns activating their markers, one at a time . This bluffing mini-game will feel familiar to Forbidden Stars lovers, but don’t get too comfortable, because:
Token placement
Where you can place your influence markers has changed! “Each region has five different slots to place down markers that affect the region”, Bailey says. “If you place in the center, you are definitely going to activate in that region, and you have priority, so you’ll be able to activate before anyone else.”
Edge spaces, however, “give you flexibility”. “When you activate here, you can choose any of the regions it’s touching to activate”. It makes that classic bluffing game a little more complex, as you can’t know for sure where those edge tokens are going to resolve.
The strategy gets even more interesting when you consider the requirements for placing influence markers. In order to put your marker down in a region, you must have units there, or it must be adjacent to a region where you already have a marker. Some players might set up token chains in order to reach the region they really want to act in, “but that gives people a chance to play a marker and block them off” as turns are passed.
Action flexibility
Let’s talk about the actions your influence markers allow you to take. Many of them will feel familiar to Forbidden Stars veterans, but there’s some notable tweaks that give you more flexibility turn-to-turn.
Ascension allows you to upgrade pretty much anything in your arsenal. You might give your units new powers, or you might beef up your structures.. You can also upgrade your Conflict Deck or unlock new abilities that trigger when you play certain influence markers. “There’s a lot of customizing”, Bailey says, “and a lot of ways to expand and improve your faction as you play throughout the game.”
Conjuration is your way of summoning units and building structures on the board. Structures are particularly intriguing, as you can expand them as you play – or shrink them again when they take damage. An outpost might turn into a necropolis, but it’ll go back to being an outpost if it’s poorly defended – and might be wiped off the map after that if you don’t intervene.
Next comes Dominion, which allows you to gather resources in an area you control. Dominion also allows you to ‘break seals’, removing tokens placed on the board by opponents and netting you victory points. Bailey tells me breaking seals is crucial to winning the game, so presumably this replaces Forbidden Stars’ objectives system.
“Seals represent your control over that part of reality, so breaking it weakens your opponent and makes you stronger”, he adds. “When you break an enemy seal, you gain a victory point and release a little of their power back to them that was held in their seal in the form of Ancient Signs.”
Ancient Signs can be used as any type of resource, so returning them to your enemy’s pool at least gives them a small boon for their losses. Plus, they can be used to empower tokens, giving them an empowered ability from your faction’s Elder God avatar. “Everyone has one default empowered token, but you can use Ancient Signs to empower more”, Bailey explains.
Ancient Signs can also be spent to flip your avatar’s board. This summons your Elder God to the board in miniature form, bolstering your fighting forces significantly. “You no longer have access to your empowered ability, because you’re no longer a cosmic entity affecting things from afar”, Bailey says. “However, should you be destroyed, you go back and take a nap, and you can use your empowered ability once more.”
The last action available to you is Invasion. “When you invade, you can move as many units as you want from one region to an adjacent region”. This begins conflict with “anyone who has plastic there”. Or, if it’s a Nexus area, anyone from across the board can jump in to join the battle.
As in Forbidden Stars, you resolve conflict with a mix of dice rolls and card draws. There’s two rounds of playing conflict cards, and once everyone’s played two cards, you have the opportunity to cast spells by paying a cost or exhausting units. However, as well as attacks and defensive shields, players can also interfere with anti-magic, which makes an opponent’s spellcasting more costly. “Different factions are better at casting spells or blocking than others”, Bailey explains.
A dynamic, thematic board
On first impression, the board for Old One Origins seems more dynamic than ever before. Those conflict rounds I mentioned? They have a permanent effect on the landscape.
“If anyone survives the conflict, each faction who does adds one Fracture token to the area”, Bailey tells me. “As these Old Ones clash, reality itself starts falling apart.” “In future conflicts, for each Fracture token that’s present, everyone takes one damage at the start of conflict, so it becomes more dangerous.” “This also means that, even if everyone blocks all damage, the board state changes whenever a conflict happens.”
This is one of my favorite ways Old One Origins realizes its new theme. Another is the tie-breaker. Play typically ends when someone reaches a certain victory point threshold, but if there’s a tie for VP in the end, Azathoth awakens and ends the universe – so everyone loses. “This creates incentive not to kingmake”, Bailey says, “because, if you’re behind, you can get people to tie so if you lose, so does everyone else”.
Variable play time
Victory points aren’t the only conditions for game-end. If players run out of scheme cards to play, that also cuts the game short. This addition allows Old One Origins to have an adjustable play time, as you can add or subtract cards to your liking. The base game is still estimated to take around two hours, but now, you can turn this into an all-day mega-game, if you like.
Forbidden Stars is one of the best Warhammer games you simply can’t get any more – hell, maybe even one of the best board games that’s still out of print. I need more time with Old One Origins to say whether it’s a truly worthy successor, so watch this space for more in future. Until then, feel free to pick my brain about tabletop in the Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
