The classic ones to get would be Opener, Windwalker, and Sleeper. After that, maybe look into azathoth.

I can’t recommend any of the expansions because I haven’t gotten a chance to try them yet. They never made it into retail and I have to wait for the arrival of them from Onslaught 2 before I can test any out.

Do you also recommend any of the expansions?

Did you KS the onslaught two?

Jeff: Ah, great point. I don’t think we played with that rule, and it definitely would have made a difference.

Also remember that the player with the GOO who captures a cultist does not get to pick which cultist he captures. So if you have multiple cultists in an area with a gate he cannot take the gate from you until he has captured all of the cultists in there.

You’re right, ghouls can’t control a gate, but they can be used to summon in a cultist. So after anyone has a battle, you can teleport them into the area, pain everyone out, and then on your next turn, summon a cultist into the spot. Boom. Easy gate. 🙂

Thanks for your thoughts. You’re right that I should have used the monsters as cultists–that would have helped. I did use the ghouls to cause pain around the map–that was fun. I don’t think they can control gates, though.

In our game, everyone got their GOOs on the map really early on, so they stomped around taking out cultists throughout the game. No one ever attacked me–they just walked in, took a cultist, and controlled the gate. 🙂

I definitely want to play again, though, to see if I can do a better job of defending my position.

Interesting you said that as the Black Goat. It sounds like you were playing it right, a GOO can capture a cultist even if a monster is there. That hasn’t happened a ton in our games.

It takes two turns to capture – 1 turn to move into the area and the second turn to capture. Usually that telegraphs the move a little. Unless they are doing it with an army, leaving your GOO without support is an easy way to get him killed.

Plus, unless you are the Crawling Chaos, players GOO can only move 1 area per turn, so their paths should be fairly predictable if they are just going after cultists. Other then Cthulhu, it’s really expensive to summon your GOO. I’d focus on killing anyone that was employing that strategy.

But as the black goat, you should have been at an advantage over that strategy. If you acquired the spell book (red sign I think) then you can use your monster as cultists (who can’t be captured). Also, with your thousand young spellbook, it’s pretty easy to summon a bunch of monsters in the area when he moves his GOO into your gate area. Even if he captures your cultist, you can battle him on your next turn. Losing your GOO is much worse then a captured cultists (except for maybe Cthulhu).

Finally, with your necrophagy spellbook, you could be using your ghouls to teleport around the map, clean up after battles and steal gates.

So I had my first play of the game tonight, and I just reread your review. I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about it. I know that I respect the design (especially the spellbook concept, though it’s a lot of text to manage) and the components are ridiculously awesome, but there’s a disconnect that I just now (a few hours later) put my finger on it: I didn’t ever feel like I had control over my position on the board. I was playing the Black Goat, and over the course of the game I had several gates under my control, each one protected by one or more creatures. However, the great old ones can completely ignore lesser creatures when they want to take a cultist hostage, so they did that over and over again (not just to me–we were all doing it). Perhaps it works thematically, but it was unsatisfying that I couldn’t defend a position (except with my great old one). I think it would have been more satisfying if having defensive creatures of any kind would result in combat, taking away ability to remove one of my cultists from a gate. Were we playing this incorrectly?