Octopus Overlords

Posted: **Sat Jan 17, 2015 5:35 pm**

My copy of Cthulhu Wars arrived today. Since this is a huge and rather special release I figured I would document the unboxing. I backed at a rather high level so I will also have the expansions coming later in the year if anyone is interested in seeing those as well.

The corner is a little damaged but I don’t care about that. Look at those puny peasant games in the background.

Space Hulk for Size comparison

So what is in the box?

A lot! Most of it seems really high quality, but what is really impressive is that Kickstarter backers should be receiving higher quality versions of a few of the thinner components later this year for free in addition to a bunch of free plastic models. On top of that, anyone who was willing to back at higher levels is getting some plastic components to swap out the cardboard with.

Detail on the larger models is pretty great.

They are also HUGE

Cthulhu now leads the Blood Ravens into an era of heresy!

Posted: **Sat Jan 17, 2015 9:34 pm**

Awesome. Going to paint the minis? And can we even call them minis at that size?

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 2:29 am**

Macro-inis.

I plan to paint them eventually but it’s probably not going to be any time soon. The reason I had all my Space Hulk minis there is that I have been (slowly) painting them up, usually about four at a time. Right now I still have about 8 Genestealers left to do.

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 2:03 pm**

So excited! Mine should come tomorrow (it is at my local PO, so they say). I'll confess, I backed at the DVM level, so I will be getting everything (yes, I am a madman). I wish the gates and extra pieces were coming in the first wave, but I have faith they will get those to us in a timely fashion.

Those "macro-tures" or "macro-minis" or whatever are going to be interesting to paint (harder in some ways because you can't "fudge" the small details). Also, I find the otherwordly color palette and alien nature of the Cthulhu mythos hard to paint (you have colors mixing in odd ways, like pinks into blues and the like).

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 3:13 pm**

Agreed on the painting. Most of the minis I’ve painted maintain a fairly consistent solid block of color motif. These will require more blends/gradients to look nice, which is a bit daunting. I figure if I wait and check out Board Game Geek in a few weeks, others will have done the work of finding good looking mixtures for me, and then I can mimic them.

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 4:06 pm**

So wish I had the spare cash to have gotten in on this. The game itself sounds really interesting.

It's too bad that a there won't be a more affordable version put out in wider numbers. It looks like the minis (maxis?) are awesome, but not required for the game mechanics, so doing a version subbing cardboard tokens for the plastic should be possible.

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 4:27 pm**

You have a copy of the reissue of Space Hulk?

Yeah yeah Cthulhu looks cool whatever.

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 5:02 pm**

killbot737 wrote:You have a copy of the reissue of Space Hulk?

Yeah yeah Cthulhu looks cool whatever.

I had one too and sold it. I was as ambivalent about Space Hulk as you are about Cthulhu. I'm just not sure what people see in that game. It seems more rolling the die than actual fun.

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 5:15 pm**

Chaz wrote:So wish I had the spare cash to have gotten in on this. The game itself sounds really interesting.

It's too bad that a there won't be a more affordable version put out in wider numbers. It looks like the minis (maxis?) are awesome, but not required for the game mechanics, so doing a version subbing cardboard tokens for the plastic should be possible.

After reading the rules and laying out a test game last night, I feel like it shares a lot of similarities with Chaos in the Old World. Cthulhu Wars is more streamlined and polished but it shares a lot of the same mechanics.

The big difference being that COW gives each player access to numerous spells, drawn randomly, to influence battles and areas, whereas CW gives each player only six, which you can plan for/around.

You may want to track down a copy of that game and see if it interests you. It still has miniatures but is much cheaper.

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 5:23 pm**

Lordnine wrote:
Chaz wrote:So wish I had the spare cash to have gotten in on this. The game itself sounds really interesting.

It's too bad that a there won't be a more affordable version put out in wider numbers. It looks like the minis (maxis?) are awesome, but not required for the game mechanics, so doing a version subbing cardboard tokens for the plastic should be possible.
After reading the rules and laying out a test game last night, I feel like it shares a lot of similarities with Chaos in the Old World. Cthulhu Wars is more streamlined and polished but it shares a lot of the same mechanics.

The big difference being that COW gives each player access to numerous spells, drawn randomly, to influence battles and areas, whereas CW gives each player only six, which you can plan for/around.

You may want to track down a copy of that game and see if it interests you. It still has miniatures but is much cheaper.

Yeah, I agree. Having looked at the older set of rules and watched the playtests, CW is heavily influenced by CitOW. If theme doesn't matter, Chaos in the Old World is probably the cheaper pick. That being said, CW does seem to have a bit more going on in the strategy game/war game arena, IMHO. The unit powers in CW seem more combat oriented and there is less of the emphasis on the strange type of scoring that is present in CitOW (which is excellent, don't get me wrong, but you don't always win by dominating the map in CitOW). This is all early level thinking without the game in hand, so it could be that I am totally wrong and they are carbon copies of one another when they hit the table.

Posted: **Sun Jan 18, 2015 5:48 pm**

Oh, I've owned CitOW, and I do like it. But I'm okay with having more world domination games, especially ones that lean more toward direct conflict.

Posted: **Tue Jan 20, 2015 4:01 pm**

I have the worst goddamn luck. Even though the Shipping Fulfillment company (Newgistics) says that my Cthulhu Wars package was given to my local Post Office on Friday, I called them up and was told that they have no evidence that the package was in that shipment (it wasn't on the manifest nor was it scanned into the USPS ever). Newgistics didn't know anything at all. So, my package is officially lost.

Now I sit and wait to hear back from the Petersens, hoping they can find some way to help me.

Seriously... this seems to happen to me every. damn. time.

Posted: **Tue Jan 27, 2015 4:24 pm**

Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten a chance to play my copy yet. (silly friends having lives!)

But if anyone feels disappointed that they didn't get in on the game the first time around, you can get it as part of their new game launch, Theomachy. Not a great discount (shipping hurts), but if you are already interested in both games, not bad.

Posted: **Tue Jan 27, 2015 10:57 pm**

Yow, dat shipping. Effectively $30 extra just to ship Cthulhu Wars seems...excessive.

Posted: **Wed Jan 28, 2015 12:29 am**

Well, still haven't got my copy yet. Still in shipping limbo. The Petersens know about it and have promised to get me a copy - but so far no exact details on how and when.

Posted: **Wed Jan 28, 2015 2:21 am**

Now I want to see a copy of OGRE next to Cthulhu Wars.

Posted: **Wed Jan 28, 2015 9:53 am**

Send me a copy of Cthulhu Wars and I'l take the pictures.

Posted: **Wed Jan 28, 2015 10:03 am**

Zarathud wrote:Now I want to see a copy of OGRE next to Cthulhu Wars.

aaaannndddd add OGRE to the list of games you won't let the rest of us play here in Chicago. I don't even hear you talk about it any more.

Posted: **Wed Jan 28, 2015 10:09 am**

I did play someone else's copy of OGRE in the House of Yodel. I keep forgetting to reread the rules, much like Cyclades.

Posted: **Wed Jan 28, 2015 1:00 pm**

Zarathud wrote:Now I want to see a copy of OGRE next to Cthulhu Wars.

Whenever I get the damn game, I'll do this.

Posted: **Wed Jan 28, 2015 2:56 pm**

Zarathud wrote:I did play someone else's copy of OGRE in the House of Yodel.

You mean Yoder Dame?

Posted: **Sat Feb 14, 2015 8:48 pm**

I've played the game a few times now and have been very happy with the product. The games creator made an interesting admission recently though and I thought it was worth sharing since a lot of people have commented on the price.

Okay here is the honest to God truth about why the game was made so "overproduced" as it has now been infamously described.

I thought this was going to be the last game that Sandy Petersen ever designed on his own. I had had no income for about two years, while I failed to get a small phone app company going. I decided to take a job working for The Man - doing games decided upon by corporate suits, sequels, and knock-offs. I'm not whining - The Man is whom I worked for most of my life, and he has been good to me. So I was fine with this. I had gotten an excellent job offer with terrific benefits, a good salary, and even stock options. I was going to head to my new firm in August 2013.

But before I went back to The Man, I wanted to do One Last Game. And if it was going to be my last game from the innermost depths of the soul, it was going to be on my favorite topic, using my favorite type of gameplay, and by golly I was going to finally fulfill my boyhood dream of making a big plastic Cthulhu toy. My favorite toys as a lad were plastic dinosaurs, and I would have LOVED to have Cthulhu monsters as well.

I wanted my last game to be a massive,deluxe horror that was basically a love-song to my favorite author, genre, and games, all rolled into one. So it had to be 28mm figures, and LOTS of them. It had to be striking, stellar art, creating a whole new style for Lovecraftian horror - no longer staid and underplayed but active and wriggling. I really sweated blood on this one.

But despite this, I expected Cthulhu Wars to be a simple cash cow that would earn maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars, and set up an income flow to help support me in the future.

Instead it skyrocketed, and I had to phone The Man and tell him I had created myself a new job from scratch. Instead of being my last game ever, I founded a whole new company from it and now I am kept busy designing more games.

I will never regret the high price of Cthulhu Wars, because of where it came from. If I had expected it to be the first in a series of projects, it might have been smaller-scale, I admit. But on the other hand it might not have had so much of ... my soul ... in it.

Posted: **Mon Feb 16, 2015 1:51 pm**

After a month, several emails, and switching from USPS to 2nd-Day UPS shipping... I GOT MY COPY!!!!

As promised, the pics with Ogre Deluxe:

You can see, Ogre Deluxe is about two times bigger, but the models for Cthulhu Wars are three times the size of the Ogres. Is this game overproduced? Absolutely. But I have to say that Tom Vasel's complaints about this seem unfounded when you think about why the game was made in this way. Also, he complained about the other parts of the game having weaker production values, but all the cardboard chits are extremely heavy duty, so I'm not sure what he means. The faction boards could be a bit nicer, but a bit of lamination might cure that.

Posted: **Mon Feb 16, 2015 2:24 pm**

Glad you finally got it! Given it a test run yet? Among my group it has been a constant hit (played four times so far), the only problem is that with the base game, it’s only four players and my group tends to run 5-6.

As to the production values, I kind of the agree on the player boards and doom tracks, but at the same time, I believe Kickstarter backers are getting thicker cardboard boards when we get the remainder of the stuff this summer. That doesn’t help newcomers but it makes it harder for me to complain about.

Posted: **Wed Apr 29, 2015 1:02 pm**

It was revealed recently that the Cthulhu Wars expansions cost too much to produce to actually keep in stock. That means that anyone who did not back at higher levels on the Kickstarter are sadly out of luck. After a bunch of people voiced their disappointment, Peterson Games has decided to move forward with a Season Two Cthulhu Wars Kickstarter. (likely within the next month)

So far, things on the agenda include:

Free component upgrades for people who backed the original Kickstarter. This includes thicker Ritual/Doom Tracks to go with the thicker player boards we’re already getting.
Reprint of all expansion factions.
Access to the plastic gates and dice.
New neutral GOO’s, likely including those created by Ramsey Campbell.
Possibly a MASSIVE sized map to accommodate 8 players.
Possibly a new faction expansion. (there has been talk of a human faction)

On the bad side, they have admitted that shipping the first KS was painful, so shipping prices will likely be much higher this time.
What this also means, is if any of you are interested in getting the faction expansions instead of just the base game, this is probably your only opportunity, at least within the next year or so.

Posted: **Wed Apr 29, 2015 2:40 pm**

I did finally get my copy, but it was after two of them disappeared (I am pretty sure they got stolen and sold on eBay). I am glad that I backed at the DVM level, and I expected something like this to happen (that the neutral GOOs would eventually be basically KS exclusive). With the way this project was worded, it sounded like it was a "this may be the only time these are available" sort of thing.

That being said, a Season 2 sounds interesting. Hopefully, having gone all in for the last one, I can get some of the new stuff at a lower cost pledge.

I still haven't been able to play a proper game of it. I intend to play the weekend after next with some major Cthulhu cultists, so that should be fun!

Posted: **Sun Dec 06, 2015 12:21 pm**

My box 'o goodies for the rest of the Kickstarter pledge showed up this week... an 18lb box stuffed with boxes and boxes in boxes. No clue how I'm going to store all of it.

Posted: **Sun Dec 06, 2015 4:13 pm**

Nice! Mine is expected to arrive tomorrow. I suppose this means I need to hurry up and finish painting my Blood Rage figures…

Posted: **Sun Dec 06, 2015 5:54 pm**

Lordnine wrote:Nice! Mine is expected to arrive tomorrow. I suppose this means I need to hurry up and finish painting my Blood Rage figures…

Mine is Tuesday. I really should get back to painting. The blood rage figures would look awesome painted!

Posted: **Sun Dec 06, 2015 6:12 pm**

baelthazar wrote:The blood rage figures would look awesome painted!

The amount of detail in them really is impressive. I have all the Monsters and one set of sculpts (4x5) for each army painted at this point. The Cthulhu Minis look good but CMON really knock it out of the park.

Posted: **Wed Dec 09, 2015 11:33 pm**

Ok, the sheer mass of Cthulhu Wars stuff is pretty amazing. I have no idea where I am going to store the 3 boxes and 30+ pounds worth of new stuff!

Posted: **Thu Dec 10, 2015 2:43 pm**

baelthazar wrote:Ok, the sheer mass of Cthulhu Wars stuff is pretty amazing. I have no idea where I am going to store the 3 boxes and 30+ pounds worth of new stuff!

Well, I would be happy to take a 6-8 player map and extra faction off your hands if they are cluttering up your space too much.

Posted: **Thu Dec 10, 2015 2:58 pm**

Lordnine wrote:
baelthazar wrote:Ok, the sheer mass of Cthulhu Wars stuff is pretty amazing. I have no idea where I am going to store the 3 boxes and 30+ pounds worth of new stuff!
Well, I would be happy to take a 6-8 player map and extra faction off your hands if they are cluttering up your space too much.

LOL! Not likely, at least in the case of the factions. On the other hand... check back with me in a few months about that other map. I will probably never get a chance to use it.

Posted: **Thu Dec 10, 2015 3:10 pm**

Hah, well, I actually pledged enough on the OS2 Kickstarter to get the 6-8 player map, but that wont likely arrive till next August at the earliest.

Posted: **Thu Dec 10, 2015 5:13 pm**

Some pictures of the new stuff!

This is MOST of the items from my CDG pledge. The cardboard box on the right is filled with the plastic grey gates and there are about a dozen more figures that are duplicates of monsters from the main factions, as well as little plastic stands to display them all in another box.

A comparison of the largest new models in CW with the largest from Blood Rage.

I think the Giant can take it!

Sword lady, maybe not so much.

Posted: **Thu Dec 10, 2015 10:55 pm**

Those painted minis look so excellent! I wish you could give me a master class in painting!

I am also so stocked that we got a set of red CW minis as part of the KS (along with awesome altars). Those will look great painted and on my office desk!

Posted: **Sat Dec 12, 2015 1:28 am**

Thanks. I find them really fun to paint because of the huge amount of detail they have. With the exception of Games Workshop, I’ve never seen minis that were better.

Posted: **Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:45 pm**

Lordnine wrote:Thanks. I find them really fun to paint because of the huge amount of detail they have. With the exception of Games Workshop, I’ve never seen minis that were better.

I got a chance to play Blood Wars and, in addition to the excellent minis (as you said), the game itself it quite fun. I think it was one of my favorite backed projects, just under Arcadia Quest and Cthulhu Wars for sheer value and awesome stuff.

Posted: **Mon Dec 14, 2015 1:49 pm**

Lordnine wrote:
Sword lady, maybe not so much.

Is that Mum-Ra?

Posted: **Mon Dec 14, 2015 7:33 pm**

So I have to admit, I went back on my original plan and upped my pledge for Onslaught 2. I thought that my original pledge in O1 included the high priest expansion. Adding them now increased my pledge to within $30 of the tier to unlock the extras, so I figured I might as well just go for it even though they didn’t excite me that much.

Now I’m also getting the Library Map Expansion.

El Guapo wrote:
Is that Mum-Ra?

Don’t pick on my fire giant! He is angry and burny!

Octopus Overlords

Cthulhu Wars (Board game) Season 2

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