Elder Sign: The Curator is the new Koi Pond

The board game Elder Sign basically kicked my ass today.

I’d finally gotten past the whole Koi Pond disaster. That card showed up in 3 of the 4 games I’ve played since my previous post — something that ought to be statistically impossible. I avoided tackling it the first game, and then decided I ought to face my fears and have another run at it. So I did, and I beat it in both of the following games — first with Bob the Salesman and then with The Doctor. I knew it was risky to try with a character other than Kate, given the Terror effect of that card, but these characters were both loaded for bear with items, spells, and clues, so I figured the risk was minimal.

Today, the game apparently realized that it needed a new card to terrorize me, and it picked a choice one. The Curator has a Midnight effect on it, so you can’t just ignore it; each time Midnight strikes, every player loses either 2 trophies or 1 sanity and stamina. It doesn’t take many turns for that to really decimate a team.

This card is also a bitch to beat, given that you need 3 Lore together, plus a Lore and 3 investigations. And it costs 2 sanity each time you try and fail.

I lost 2 investigators to that card. Finally, Carolyn (the psychologist) beat it with pure, sheer improbable luck: she got nothing the first time, re-rolled with a clue, and got the whole damned shooting match: 4 Lores, plus investigations. She  filled in the first row (the triple Lore), focused one Lore on a spell and defeated the card easily with her next roll.

But the game still won, no contest. This set was pretty much doomed from the start — tons of monsters and terror effects, lots of locked dies, difficult cards — the whole thing was just a mess. Defeating The Curator was the only bright spot.

Part of the irony is that I was playing a near-duplicate of the team used by Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day on TableTop, a combination that the TableTop staff said was particularly powerful. I was using Amanda (the student), Dexter (the magician), and Darrell (the photographer), and only deviated by substituting Jenny (the dilettante) for Carolyn. (I put Carolyn into play after Jenny bit the dust.)

I won’t complain too much, though. I usually win, or at least come close; I haven’t lost this badly since my very first game of Elder Sign. And I plan to kick Narcolepsy back to Hell next time.

Elder Sign: The Koi Pond

board-game-elder-sign-koi-pondSo, I was playing the board game Elder Sign last night and it was going very, very well — I had 9 of the 11 Elder Signs I needed to win and very few tokens on the Doom track after just three hours on the game clock (12 turns). I was thinking it was going to be a pretty quick game (unlike the usual 2 to 3 hours it takes me to finish) — and then I thought something like, “This is going too well — something has to go wrong.”

Truer words have never been said.

Around this time, I made a huge, huge mistake: I tried to tackle a card called The Koi Pond. It looks deceptively easy, since you only need 4 dice to beat it, and I was playing the character of Kate (the scientist), which eliminated the Terror effect (you automatically fail if you didn’t accomplish a task and you rolled a Terror). Unfortunately, it’s very hard to roll two skulls and a Terror all in one go, and without a spell to focus an extra die, I was sunk.

Then I compounded my mistake by putting another investigator (Jenny) on the card. I was thinking that having an extra person to focus a die would make a difference — but all of my other investigators were subject to the Terror effect, which ultimately did them in.

All of them.

Yes, I made the hugely stupid mistake of thinking that throwing more investigators in the mix would help. Since my next investigator (Amanda) had cards to roll extra dice and had a couple of clues, I thought she could defeat it. She was close, but ultimately fell to the Terror effect — as did Sister Mary when I threw her on the pile in a last-ditch attempt to save Kate. A very bad thing about The Koi Pond is that it costs 2 stamina if you lose, and Kate only has 4 stamina total — so losing that card twice means no more Kate. (Ditto for Jenny, etc etc.) But in my bid to save Kate and her 3 Elder Signs, I ended up losing ALL FOUR investigators. So, I basically ended up back at square one, with all new investigators and no Elder Signs.

AUGH!!!

I have now learned my lesson about The Koi Pond. You do NOT try this card unless you’re playing Kate and she’s got both extra dice, a focusing spell, and six clues in her hand. (Sheesh!)

The game is still going, by the way — after 2 hours, I was too tired to keep playing, so it’s all still out on my desk. Current tally: I have 6 elder signs, while Narcolepsy (don’t ask me to remember the correct name) has 5 out of 9 Doom tokens. And 4 of my 7 location cards (6 regular, one Other World) have monsters on them. But one of those is The Damned Koi Pond, and you know I’m not going back there.

I’ll let you know who wins.

UPDATE: I won! And I still had 2 empty spots on the Doom track. Take that, Narcolepsy!