Elder Sign: Omens 1.5.3

Being that today's equinox new moon eclipse, it is only natural that a great old one is about to invade our reality and put an end to our world as we know it. Unless you want Cthulhu for president, you better grab your gear, form an investigating team and face the unspeakable evil that is pouring into our dimension. Welcome to the Cthulhu mythos! We hope you have a pleasant stay. Please refrain from going mad in the process.

Roll and Roll

Elder Sign: Omens is a game set in the world envisioned by H. P. Lovecraft in his Cthulhu mythos stories. A terrible ancient god is about to breach into our world and the only chance of stopping it is for a team of investigators to acquire a set of Elder Signs. These are the only symbols known to have a bane like effect on the impending doom. Elder Sign: Omens is an adaptation of the Elder Sign tabletop game, in which each player takes on the role of an investigator and tries to succeed at different challenges in order to acquire more weapons, items and of course, elder signs. In this digital incarnation you will get to control all four investigators as they walk around the museum and go through adventures of various difficulties.

An adventure is composed of a series of challenges (generally 2). A challenge is a set of required glyphs (symbols) that an investigator must conjure (roll on six dice) in order to complete it. Generally, it will be composed of 3 glyphs. To obtain glyphs, you will roll the dice and assign any matching challenge symbols. You then re-roll the remaining dice in the hope of rolling the remaining symbols. If you don't manage to roll anything useful, you must put aside a die and roll again, until you either succeed or are left with no dice. Although this sounds like a complete luck fest, there are plenty of useful tools that help you mitigate it. If you pick your adventures wisely, then you will be able to acquire some special items before embarking on more difficult adventures. These items include two different special dice which are more powerful than standard dice along with other special abilities such as free re-rolls, saving up dice but even items that let you pick a glyph without re-rolling.

Pacing is very important during a game of Elder Sign. Every attempt at an adventure consumes a turn, and after each investigator has had his or her turn, the time tracker will move towards midnight. At midnight the doom track will advance. The doom track represents the time that the investigators have before the malevolent entity becomes too powerful to be stopped and you lose the game. In short, you have a difficult job ahead and time is short.

Elder Sign: Omens allow you to play against 4 different ancient ones. Cthulhu unfortunately is only available as an in-app purchase along with two other ancient ones. The investigator team is composed of 4 characters out of the 16 available in the core game (and 16 more with IAP). There's plenty of replay-ability in the core game so you can safely enjoy Elder Sign: Omens without worrying about the extra content.

Conclusion

Although it is highly abstracted, Elder Sign: Omens manages to capture the sense of doom and urgency associated with a Cthulhu mythos adventure. The main mechanism is dice rolling and dice manipulation. So if you enjoy these types of games or if you are a fan of Cthulhu and have a plush replica on your desk, then you'll want to check this one out.