Microreview [board game]: Kingsport Festival

It is safe to say that the Cthulhu Mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft has hit a point in mainstream consumerism where you question anything that is using this "hook" to sell a product.  Like the zombie craze, I tend to be a bit skeptical of products that appear to be cashing in on a trend.  It pleases me to say that the theme in Kingsport Festival is not an afterthought and was done with respect to the horrors that H.P. Lovecraft created.

Based on the short story, The Festival (you can read it for free here), players assume the roles of cult leaders and attempt to invoke the powers of the ancient ones and invoke unthinkable horrors in this bizarre celebration of the occult.  In addition to competing over what Gods to invoke and what buildings to occupy, players must deal with the threat of raids and losing their own sanity.  Investigators will periodically lead raids on the villages in an attempt to stop the actions of these cults and players must combat these raids through special abilities and spells.  The game supports 3-5 players and each game lasts just over an hour.  Players must strategically acquire unique spells, occupy specific buildings in town, and balance their ability to maintain sanity and prevent raids over a series of 12 rounds.

Each round takes place through six different phases (turn order, invocation, concession, expansion, raid and time). The breakdown of each round into these phases makes the game accessible and efficient.  Throughout these phases, you will earn a variety of resources from the different Gods in an attempt to harness the power of a variety of buildings.  This provides a worker placement feel, but based on your dice rolls and what Gods you evoke your strategy will change each round.   To me this game shines during rounds in which a raid occurs.  It mixes up the gameplay and adds an additional element of strategy in selecting which buildings to occupy.  The choice in selecting what building to occupy is further enhanced by balancing your needs vs. blocking your opponent's needs.  I feel this game plays best with four players, but has been an enjoyable experience each time it has hit the table.

The components in this game are top notch and the artwork is stunning.  The wooden bits are satisfying to place over the map of town and the cards help immerse you in this horrifying world.  Passport took great care in delivering a game with a high production value that is respectful to the horrors of H.P. Lovecraft.  My only complaint would be the wooden dice.  While they fit well with the other bits, I prefer my dice to have a bit more heft.





Kingsport Festival is a combination of strategy and the luck of the dice.  This balance makes it accessible to new gamers, but provides enough depth to bring it back to your table for multiple plays.  One of my favorite aspects of this game is how each round is truly unique.  What Gods are at your disposal and what order you are allowed to invoke them changes every round.  Players must think on their feet and be willing to adapt.  If you are an H.P. Lovecraft fan than this is a must own game.  There is something satisfying playing on the same team as Cthulhu.  While I have enjoyed other games playing as an investigator trying to stop the elder gods, it is very satisfying to leverage these gods to invoke unspeakable horrors.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 flipping the script and allowing us to side with the ancient ones.

Penalties: -1 for light wooden dice.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. well worth your time and attention

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]

POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Microreview [film]: The Whisperer in Darkness

Almost (but ever so slightly not) as wonderful as its predecessor

Film adaptations of Lovecraft are almost universally terrible. Until I watched the special features on the second disc of The Whisperer in Darkness (totally worth the purchase price), I never really had a clear idea as to why. But very astutely, writer/director Sean Branney and co-writer Andrew Leman pointed out in a behind-the-scenes featurette that the eponymous story this film was based on was really only the first two acts of what needed to be three acts in order to make a complete film. Most Lovecraft stories, they said, left off the third act to which they were building. That wily Lovecraft — giving you a beginning, a middle, and leaving the end to your imagination so he'd never get caught writing The Matrix: Revolutions. Maybe that's the real heart of why so many of the films have been terrible — filmmakers either had to scrap everything but some basic idea of the story and then build something entirely new, or invent a third act based on what Lovecraft only hinted at in his actual story.

Branney and Leman decided to go with the latter approach. They fleshed out the characters, built out the world a little, but tried to stay pretty true to the source material for about an hour. After that, it was off to the races with new material to bring the whole thing to a satisfying close. The result is as good a Lovecraft film as you're likely to see...unless you see these guys' earlier version of The Call of Cthulhu (which was one of the first film reviews I wrote for this site).

The Whisperer in Darkness centers on a folklorist and skeptic named Albert Wilmarth who gets invited to a remote Vermont farm by Henry Akeley and his son George to investigate the Akeleys' claims that terrible crab creatures were washed up in a flood and began slinking about the woods. Now I'll admit I had the "crab pe-pole, crab pe-pole" chant from the "South Park is Gay" episode of South Park stuck in my head for the rest of the movie, but that says more about me than it does about the movie. When Wilmarth arrives at Henry's farm, Henry informs him that he had been wrong to fear the crab people, and they were actually benevolent travelers from outer space that were going to open a portal to a select few humans and allow them to travel among the stars with them, in the form of disembodied heads existing in steampunk electrical jars...but Wilmarth smells a rat. If you're not already getting all tingly because of that sentence, I'm afraid there's no hope for you. 

This film was created by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which tries to create films as they may have been if Lovecraft's stories had been adapted at the time of their initial publication. So The Call of Cthulhu, published in 1926, was made as a silent film, with stop-motion effects and German Expressionistic lighting and set design. The Whisperer in Darkness was written in the 1930s, so the film is a black-and-white, creepy thriller in the vein of a Universal monster movie, made with miniatures and dramatic, high-contrast lighting, a mid-Atlantic accent or two, and a lot of suggestion. It mixes in some 21st century digital technology, too, sometimes for good and other times less so. On balance, it feels slightly less engrossing than Cthulhu in part because it's less foreign to present sensibilities, but it shares a wonderful sense of immersion in Lovecraft's world, despite the feeling that it could've been a bit shorter and all the more improved for that leaner narrative.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for doing just a hell of a job on an effect- and atmosphere-heavy film made using severely limited resources; +1 for the head-in-a-jar effect, which must've been some badass Frankenstein dream-come-true for the filmmakers to shoot; +1 for a real 1-2 punch of an ending

Penalties: -1 for playing the same dramatic moments too many times as the film pushed toward the finish line

Cult Film Coefficient: 8/10. The dread lord Cthulhu would find it a worthy offering.

2012 Nerd Gift Guide: Vance

Star Trek Pez: For the Nerd Who Can't Wait for Into Darkness
Currently, Star Trek: The Next Generation is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and the TNG Collectors' Edition Pez set is available at many fine retailers such as Rite-Aid and, potentially, Walgreens. But if you do a little digging, you can still find the Star Trek Pez dispensers for the Original Series. They're a little pricier, since they're out of production, but that's only...logical. Amazon

A Dusty Delorean: For the Nerd Who Knows Everything Was Better Back in the Day
I have the Back to the Future: Part II edition at home, and I can attest that this is a pretty neat tribute to the films. The car itself is about a foot long, with push button-activated lights and sounds, including a teensy flux capacitor inside the cabin that actually fluxes. Or, lights up. This new Back to the Future: Part III edition is fitted with railroad wheels, steampunkish stylings, and a healthy patina of Old West dust. Entertainment Earth

Cuddle-thulhu: For the Nerd Who Just Needs a Good Hug

Got a case of "the Mondays"? What could cheer you up better than Cthulhu, the Crawling Chaos himself, the Thing that Should Not Be, in cuddly plush hand-puppet form? That's what I thought: nothing. Not even a shipful of Norwegian saliors' souls. Entertainment Earth

Microreview [film]: The Call of Cthulhu

The Meat

H.P. Lovecraft has a shaky inspirational track record when it comes to film. Most film adaptations of his fiction are abysmally bad, and this is all the more confusing when you consider how good almost everything else Lovecraft inspired is. Take, for simply two examples, Metallica from 1984 to 1986, and the career of Stephen King. What is it about Lovecraft's dense, intricate fiction that has made it so hard to adapt that probably the best Lovecraft adaptation is a movie that pretends to be something else entirely -- an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation? (The Haunted Palace, a 1963 entry in the Roger Corman-Vincent Price series of Poe collaborations, actually based on Lovecraft's novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

If director Andrew Leman's adaptation of Lovecraft's seminal The Call of Cthulhu is any indication, it may be because Lovecraft's stories and prose are decidedly of their own time. So what Leman did, he left the story where it belonged, and in 2005 he made a silent film out of it. This adaptation of the 1926 story was inspired by the idea that it would be a "timely" adaptation of a story written and published when the visual currency of the day had non-sync sound. Writer Sean Branney's transposition of the story to the screen is straightforward, almost literal, hewing to the original structure of the story, but the execution is nearly flawless. The opening credits could pass for vintage, and while the movie is clearly shot on digital video (there's no recapturing the look of that old, slow film shot on hand-cranked cameras) and the green screen process shots are obvious, everything from the camera framing to the character makeup to the staging and performances are totally credible signatures of silent film. But beyond that, with limited resources these filmmakers leveraged their creativity and design prowess to bring Lovecraft's imagination to life.

To date, this is my favorite discovery I've made on Netflix Instant, where you can still catch the movie and I recommend you do so in time for Halloween. You can buy the DVD from the filmmakers here.

And yes, Cthulhu makes an appearance. And he is stop-motion. And he is awesome.

The Math

Objective Quality: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for the opening credits alone; +1 the dream sequences in R'lyeh; +1 for the combination of old-school and new-school visual effects techniques (which they call the "Mythoscope" process); and +1 for the balls to even attempt this thing in the first place.

Penalties: -1 for feeling a little bloated even at only 47 minutes

Cult Movie Coefficient: 9/10. Very high quality/standout in its category.

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]

Microreview [games] - Cthulhu Dice

The Meat

Cthulhu + Dice + Steve Jackson Games = Fun

Horror master H.P. Lovecraft published the “Call of Cthulhu” in 1928.  Since his debut, Cthulhu has been slowly causing sailors and cultists to lose their mind.  The creature Lovecraft described as "an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature” has been permanently cemented in horror and nerd culture. Recently, it would seem Cthulhu has been getting ready to wake from his not-dead sleep, with oodles of 'hulhu cropping up all over pop culture (ie, Facebook). 

An unconventional, but democratic,
way of restoring the Ancient Ones to power.

When you take someone with the pedigree of Steve Jackson (Munchkin, Zombie Dice, etc. – look at www.sjgames.com for a full offering) and add in the cosmic entity of bad mental hoodoo that is Cthulhu, you have yourself a pretty enjoyable game.  The rules are simple.  You battle other cultists in a contest to see who can remain sane the longest. 

Each individual starts out with a certain number of sanity marbles, and if Cthulhu causes you to lose all of your marbles then you go insane.  The last sane cultist wins.  On your turn you roll a 12-sided die and either roll Cthulhu himself (everyone loses a sanity marble), a tentacle (you steal someone else’s sanity token), an elder sign (you take a sanity marble from Cthulhu) or yellow sign (whoever you are rolling against loses one sanity marble to Cthulhu).

That’s it!  It is a game so simple a five-year old can master it.  No, seriously.  My five-year old son Henry has mastered this game and wins 80% of the time.  It is more fun with more people (up to 6!)  Games last anywhere from 2-10 minutes and are quite enjoyable

The Math

Objective Quality: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for creating a Cthulhu game for kids!

Penalties: -1 for Henry constantly demolishing me in this game.

Game Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]