Chaosium’s new Cthulhu board game makes Innsmouth spooky again

Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth is a cooperative adventure game by Call of Cthulhu creator Chaosium, with three sizable scenarios exploring fishy goings-on in the Lovecraftian town of Innsmouth. Alone or with friends, you’ll take four 1920s characters through a series of investigations to figure out what sinister schemes are afoot. I mean, the setting is Innsmouth, I bet you could hazard a guess.

Three whopping great books will guide you through the adventures, each of which will likely take upwards of six hours to complete, though the time can vary depending on how many stones you decide to leave unturned. They’re firmly in the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook category, with players taking actions and making RPG-style attribute tests then turning to different pages to discover their outcome.

On top of this is a card mechanic that determines the attributes your characters can use for tests each turn, and how quickly their sanity and vitality is sapped away; as well as a related dice rolling system that delivers clutch victories or stinging failures, and also progresses the story, whether or not you’re moving forward and making meaningful progress.

The way I wrote that makes it sound quite ‘fail-forward’ and friendly. But what I mean is that failing to progress the story in time will be ruthlessly, gleefully punished.

Reading will take up the bulk of your time while playing Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth, so the books and written content deserve a fair amount of attention in this review.

This is not a game for people who are scared of a lot of words, let’s start with that. There is tons of text to read, and while it’s a little inconsistent, the quality is generally high. The writing describes the sights, sounds, and smells the characters experience, and even when I was pretty sure I knew what lay around the corner, it still managed to creep me out with its visceral, disturbing detail. It’s not perfect: the writers often use too much depth to describe mundane objects, and occasionally employ overly mundane language to describe the fantastical, but overall I was impressed.

While the game isn’t packed with branching paths, it still makes your choices and progression feel meaningful. Actions you take will unlock certain keywords, which lead to different passages of text in the scenarios. You’ll often be turning to different pages, based on what you’ve experienced so far, what items you’ve discovered, and which characters you chose, and it’s mightily satisfying.

Pleasingly, the game comes with a companion app to narrate passages for you, something I consider essential for this sort of experience. While its inclusion was welcome, you’ll find that it’s a bit basic. The narration is clear but fairly monotone, and although the reader is surprisingly good at character voices, the production quality is lacking. The “immersive audio” advertised on the box had me anticipating sound effects and music to really set the atmosphere, but not only were these missing, distracting and very audible lip smacking and background sounds had not been edited out.

The core mechanics for Miskatonic Tales are pretty innovative. Rather than each character just having stats that dictate how easy or difficult certain activities are for them, their attributes are reflected by personalized decks, which you’ll shuffle and draw five cards from each turn. These attribute cards can be spent as actions each round to move between locations and perform basic activities, but they can also be spent on tests, more taxing tasks which require a certain number of successes to achieve a good outcome.

When attempting tests, cards with the correct attribute (strength for a strength test) provide a guaranteed success, while related stat cards (agility for strength) let you add an extra dice to the roll. There’s a push-your-luck gambling element inherent to this system. Will you invest as many cards as you can – and get your friends to lend some of theirs too – to ensure a success, or will you risk a roll that could result in failure, so you can get more actions done that round?

Why not just invest the maximum amount of resources each time? Well, each round a token moves along a game board tracker, creating more and more disaster each time a milestone is reached. Some RPGs have a problem where their scenarios feel like fairground rides set up especially for the players. That is not the case here. You have a clear time limit, and this pernicious plot is going to be resolved whether you intervene or not.

On top of this, each time you have to roll dice for a test, you have to throw a special red die as well. Each time this die lands on one of three symbols (tentacles, skull, or pentagram) you add one of the corresponding tokens to three additional trackers on the gameboard, with three more sets of negative events waiting for you down their respective tracks.

There’s a common joke among Call of Cthulhu players that the best way for PCs to escape with their sanity is to ignore anything scary and just plough on through the adventure. This feels somehow equivalent. When you start a scenario, you’ll happily bash down every lock and search under every pile of rags. But as symbol tokens start to pile up, you get more and more desperate to complete your mission, without attempting anything beyond your main objective. It’s a good way of building up tension and, eventually, desperation.

Later on in scenarios, Miskatonic Tales likes to throw negative status cards like stress or injury at you, which get shuffled into your attribute decks. When two matching cards are drawn in one turn, you lose sanity or health. This adds another push-you-luck element to the game. When you draw your five cards per round, you can keep going until you have five useful attributes to play with, or stop at any point after you’ve drawn five, even if all of those were negative status cards. This means you can end up killing your own character by continuing to draw while horrible cards keep piling up.

Overall, I thought these systems worked really well. There’s some clunkiness in switching between cards and dice, but they create lots of interesting decision points and excitement. There was, however, one fly in the ointment: the game felt rather bloated. The components I’ve described so far are all well and good, but on top of these you have map tiles, encounter cards, objective cards, clue cards, item cards, and literally dozens of fiddly little tokens dictating everything from weapon durability to single-turn statuses.

Many of these didn’t do enough to justify their existence, and I felt some other, more elegant solution could’ve been found for many of these, from checking a box on a piece of paper, to simply adding another entry in the scenario game book. At times I wondered if the designers weren’t so keen to differentiate the game from the Call of Cthulhu RPG that they were adding extra components for the sake of it.

The second major problem comes down to clarity. The rulebook leaves a lot to be desired. Even though the game isn’t all that complicated, there are still multiple ambiguities and rules that lack clarity, requiring googling the FAQ or deciding on some common sense solutions. Based on the fact that the first thing you’re greeted with upon opening the box is a list of errata stickers to add to each scenario, it seems like this was an even bigger problem up until recently.

These issues combined mean there’s a fair bit of squeeze required to get to the tasty juice of Journey to Innsmouth. From the rulebook to the components, a little tightening up and shedding of excess weight would’ve done wonders and turned this from a recommendation into a must-buy for Cthulhu fans.

Source: Wargamer