Cthulhu: Death May Die

Let’s just get this out of the way, you can beat Cthulhu himself into submission with your bare hands in the final scene of this game, in about three rounds, and if that sentence bothers you as much as it bothers a couple of the more skeptical reviews I’ve read, this one’s going to sit funny with you the whole way through. I’m not that bothered by it, honestly, I went in knowing it’s Zombicide with better miniatures and Lovecraft names slapped on, and once I stopped expecting cosmic dread I had a genuinely great time.

The miniatures are the real draw and they deserve it, gorgeous sculpts, real presence on the table, the kind of production quality that makes you want to paint even if you never usually bother. Where the table footprint actually becomes a problem is mid-to-late game, once monsters start piling up and you’re dragging figures across cramped tiles trying to find room, which does weirdly add to the frantic against-the-odds feeling even while it’s annoying to physically manage.

Player count matters a lot here. Two or three feels tight and involved, five starts producing real dead time between turns since there’s not that much for any one investigator to actually do on their turn, mostly upkeep. I’ve settled on three as the sweet spot for my group and I’d steer anyone new toward the same.

The rules reference could use an icon key, more than once I’ve had to flip back through the book mid-turn to remember what a symbol means, a small thing but it repeats every session until you’ve internalized the whole set. Four stars, a genuinely fun and replayable dungeon crawler that happens to wear a mythos costume rather than live inside one, and I’ve made peace with that trade.