Blogger, Gamer, Writer

As a teen, one of the few games that we ever played together as a family was Risk. We would go to my uncle's house and spend an entire Saturday trying to dominate the world until one of us was a victor, or until my dad was upset that he'd lost Australia and flipped the game board off the table. It's one of the few board games I remember playing as a family. 

As an adult, one of the games I've had the most fun with, once I started to explore the world of tabletop gaming and attending conventions, was Dominion. Every year, I would look forward to playing the deck-builder game with my friends at Hypericon It's an itch that I haven't had scratched in a while. I bought the base Dominion game, but my husband isn't too keen on playing it. 

Eschaton is a deck-building strategy game by Archon Games. Eschaton also combines my two cherished tabletop game memories with a dark, occult theme. I was quite excited to learn about this game, and also a bit trepidatious on seeing the number of pieces involved in the heavy box. 

Call of Cthulhu is a game with a reputation.  It's a game that my husband was excited to pick up at PaxUnplugged when he saw it at the Chaosium booth, and given how nice everyone at the booth had been it was an expenditure that I couldn't say no to.  It had been one of the first RPGs that Loren ever played and his excitement over the game was infectious. 

I'll be honest here. Since my early days playing on AmberMUSH in the late 90s, the Cthulhu mythos had intrigued me. The Lovecraft writing style, however, is something I don't enjoy. Outside of a single time playing a Cthulhu board game, I'd never ventured into this world. Loren decided to run a game when our friend from Australia came to visit over Christmas. 

And where better to run a creepy, eldritch horror game? Why, the cabin we had rented in the middle of the woods... where no one would hear us scream!