Welcome to our Review of Fantasy Flight Games‘ Elder Sign. This game is unique in the Arkham Horror Files series in that it is a dice-based game. It is one of 6 games in the Arkham Horror Files series and, in our opinion, one of the more underrated games. If you want to find out more about the games in this series, check out our World of Arkham Horror page for more details. 

We will be releasing our Game Overview of Elder Sign next week. In that article, we’ll teach you HOW to play this game. If you are interested in finding out what we think about it, read on.

Game Overview – Elder Sign

In Elder Sign, each player takes on the role of an investigator in the 1920’s. They are trying to defeat an Ancient One. The core game takes place at Miskatonic Museum, and each adventure takes place in a room of the museum. To complete an adventure card, a player rolls all the green custom dice that come with the game, and if the dice match any of the tasks on the adventure, they can commit those dice to the task. Then reroll the rest to try and complete the other tasks on the adventure. Throughout the game, you gain item cards that allow you either a one-time particular skill or add in a yellow or red die to your roll to complete a task.

The game’s goal is to complete enough adventures to gain elder signs equal to the number on the Ancient One Scenario sheet. Having enough Elder signs means you can defeat it. Also, as you complete tasks, some of them cause doom or terror to occur. Terror causes a negative effect to the game, and either more enemies come out or doom increases. Every time the clock hits midnight, a new mythos card comes out, making your job that much harder.

Game Components

The game doesn’t have as many tokens as other Arkham Horror Files. This game has large adventure cards and other-world cards along with smaller item cards. The main components of the game are these adventure cards and the dice. 

An excellent clock allows you to track the advancement towards midnight when a new mythos cards. Unfortunately, the hour hand on our clock was attached a bit flimsily, and it broke off a bit. It is an excellent idea to have the clock, but I wonder if there is a better way to represent the time.

The overall look and feel of the cards keep with the theme of the Arkham Series. I particularly like the fact that the same illustrations appear in each game and mean the same thing for the most part. 

Also, the dice quality is quite good. The dice have some upgrades you can buy at the Fantasy Flight Store. Still, in our opinion, those are more cosmetic and not functionally needed. 

Game Setup

The game set up for this one is pretty quick. The main thing to do here is to choose an ancient one, shuffle the items, mythos, adventure, and other world deck, deal out six adventure cards, and separate all the tokens. After that, each player chooses an investigator and takes their starting items and the appropriate health and horror, and you are ready to go.

Game Play

Elder Sign is a speedy game to play. The main goal is to collect elder sign tokens on the Ancient One before their card fills up with doom. 

You start at the entrance at the beginning of your turn (or wherever you ended the last turn). You can rest, search lost and found by rolling a green die or buy a souvenir by spending completed adventures at the entrance. We found we didn’t utilize this space nearly enough during the game. Instead, we used it as the space we moved to after completing or failing an adventure. You won’t spend a turn on this space most of the time, but it can be a good place if you need to regain some stamina or sanity. 

Choose and Adventure

The majority of the game has you choosing an adventure card to complete. Once you have selected one, you then roll the green dice. If you have rolled dice that’s symbols match the icons in a task, you may move the dice onto the task. Suppose this completes a task, you may reroll all the remaining dice to complete another task on the adventure card. If you can complete all tasks on a card, you get the reward on the white bottom section of the card. Some of those rewards include elder signs which you need to win the game!

When you roll the dice and don’t complete a task, you may discard one dice to reroll. You can continue to discard dice to reroll until you are down to a single die. Rerolling dice allows you multiple attempts to complete an adventure card. Unfortunately, as you keep removing dice, you may not have enough total dice left to complete an adventure. If this happens, you must incur the harmful elements shown in the red section at the bottom of the adventure card. 

Ancient One arrives

If you do not collect enough elder signs before the doom track fills up on the ancient one, you have awakened that ancient one and must now defeat it to win the game. To beat it, you must successfully roll the dice task listed on the Ancient One card. Each time you complete the task, you may remove one doom token. Once the investigators remove all doom, they win the game. 

We like the fact you get to battle the Ancient One. In some of the other games, you don’t ever see the Ancient One.

We particularly enjoy the idea that our dice roll has more meaning here than in other Arkham Horror Files games. Typically, the dice are six-sided in other games, and either 1-4 is a fail or 5,6 is a success. Each side of the die could be a potential success depending on the tasks you are trying to complete. We also like that some tasks don’t just need dice rolls to complete. Sometimes you need to incur doom or lose stamina or sanity. We also like that once you complete an adventure card, you get to keep it and use it when buying Souvenirs later.

One smart thing about the game happens when you fail to complete a task. If one of the dice you rolled had a Cthulhu icon on it, you need to resolve the card’s terror effect and any terror effects on the current mythos card. You must complete tasks with a Cthulhu icon on them, so you don’t incur terror during your turn.

From time to time, monsters appear on the board by an investigator pulling them from the monster cup. A monster is a tile with its own set of task dice required to defeat it. You have to place the monster on any adventure card with an empty monster white space when revealed. Then when you complete the adventure, you need to complete the monster task and all other tasks on the card. Completing monster tasks makes that adventure card much more difficult. The good thing is you can defeat a monster separately from completing the full adventure card. So even if you fail an adventure but complete the monster task, you can still remove the monster from play.

Clues are another thing that’s helpful in the game. You gain them by completing adventure cards, and by spending a clue, you can reroll any number of dice.

There is one area where we think there is a missed opportunity. The common and unique items are bland if you ask us. The vast majority of these cards only have a picture and a title, but there is no flavor text on the card to tell you about the item. It simply shows a +1 red or yellow die. We are all for being efficient, but it would have been nice to see some flavor text to keep these cards in the theme. The spell and the ally cards do an excellent job with this. 

We also like the idea that if you fail to complete a task, you can focus on one of your remaining dice. Focusing means keeping the dice stored on your investigator card. You then reroll the remaining dice and can add the stored die into a result to complete a future task. 

Finally, we like this game because you become devoured if you lose all your stamina or sanity, but the game doesn’t end. The player who has the devoured investigator chooses a new investigator to continue the investigation. They do, however, lose all the gained cards the previous investigator had amassed. Still, it’s a small price to pay to be able to continue in the game.

Overall Impressions

We like this game a lot here at Detective Hawk Games. It is fast-paced and not as heavy on the rules as other Arkham Horror Files games. Elder Sign is an excellent game if you want to dip your foot into the world of Arkham without having a ton of time to spend. Don’t get us wrong, there’s still a decent amount of strategy involved in this game, but it comes down to deciding what dice you will focus on if you fail an adventure. As with all dice-heavy games, you need a fair amount of luck to succeed, but this game moves fast and keeps things interesting with the different adventure cards and other world cards. 

We do feel there was a missed opportunity with the item cards. They keep the theme through the artwork, but we think it would be nice to have additional flavor text regarding the item rather than just a picture of the die you can add to your pool.

Overall, this is an entertaining game, and we would recommend it to anyone interested in the Arkham Horror Files games. 

If you think this is something you’d enjoy, check it out in our store today.

Also, throughout October, we are offering everyone a copy of the Investigators of Arkham Horror coffee table book ($40 value) for free with a purchase of $50 or more of any Arkham Products through our store.