West of Arkham...
West of Arkham, the hills rise wild. That's the first line of Lovecraft's splendidly creepy and moody story The Colour Out of Space.

This game has nothing to do with that story. Essentially, the premise of this game, which is basically about vaguely Lovecraftian gangs of mutant hillbillies, Deep Ones, Ghouls, and cultists of debatable humanity shooting and beating hell out of each other in order to be the first group of evil loons to retrieve the Necronomicon from the Old Whately Mansion and summon their own monstrous Greta Old One and win the game. One thing I love about Pagan Publishing: all their stuff is in suchg great taste...

The Stuff
In the box, you get a lot of cardboard. Several sheets of counters, which include 24 characters, their grisly corpses, and loads of "hats", of which more later; 18 heavier stock terrain tiles, which are used to lay out the game; 6 double-sided faction sheets, of which there are 3 copies of each of four factions; a manual, a deck of cards, a tape measure and a 20-sided die.

There are loads of counters. Mostly, they're utilitarian, but the characters are each individually drawn, as are the corpses. The artwork is nice and evocative, the stand-ups and the corpses giving each character an individual personality and his, her or its own personal grisly fate. Each piece also includes the character's name, its movement rating, and its defence rating.

The board is laid out in a 4x4 grid. The tiles contain computer-generated terrain on a background which is made from photos of one of the designer's lawn, weirdly enough. Terrain includes trees, fences, shacks and The Old Whately Mansion, as well as special home tiles for each of the four factions (if you don't use a faction, you replace its tile with one of the spare terrain tiles).

When the board is laid out, which is done in a semi-random style, given that the Mansion is in one of the four middle tiles and 2 to 4 of the home times sit at the corners of the board, the cards are laid face down on each of the eleven shacks, which is precisely large enough to hold a card, and on each of the four spaces in the mansion, again designed to hold a card. There are many more cards than there are spaces, meaning that not all of the cards are used - the only cards used in every game are the "Great Whately Seal", which sits in one of the shacks, and "I got me thuh Necronomicon"" which lives in one of the Mansion spaces.

The cards are printed on thin linen-texture cardstock, and have no art, although their background and layout is nicely done, and is slightly different, depending on whether the card is in the mansion or in a shack. The text on the cards is done hillbilly style; they include titles like "Hey Maw, ah Secret Passage!", "Praise Yog and Pass thuh Ammo!" and "Tarnation! It's a booby trap!" Some of the cards include small duplicate copies of the damage tables, which can be handed out to each player for reference.

The faction sheets contain stats for each of the characters laid out, six to a page, with a space for most of the characters to hold one card, and little circles to mark off ammunition, hit points, and the one-use Special Ability that each character has.

Gameplay

You play the game like this: You start your faction on your home tile. You try to get into shacks and turn over the cards , in order to find the Great Whately Seal, which you need to get into the Mansion. When you've opened the Mansion, which you simply do by walking to one of the Mansion doors carrying the Seal, the Mansion stays open. In the mansion, you find which of the four cards is the Necronomicon and take it home, where you then attempt to summon Great Cthulhu or Yog Sothoth or whatever.

Each turn has a movement phase and a combat phase; to attack someone or shoot them, you roll a D20, add your weapon rating and subtract your opponent's defence rating. if you get 12, you hit, and roll on the Damage Table, adding your weapon's damage table; if you get a 20 or more, or roll a natural 20, you get a Critical and roll on the Brutal Damage Table (which includes headings with names like "Why won't you stay dead?" and "Daddy's home!" each of which denotes something gory and horrible happening to the uinfortunate victim), which you also get to roll on if you get a high enough roll on the Damage Table.

There's more: most characters have an ability which can be used at any time, and they all one rulesbusting special ability, which can be used once. Some have missile weapons which use up ammunition, some don't. Each card introduces a special case, for good or ill, some of which are faction-specific. You keep track of which characters are wounded and which characters are carrying which items (found in shacks on cards) by the use of hats, fiddly little folded bits of card with each state or item written on them. It's a nice idea, but it's tiny and fiddly.

The Shadow over... I've played this game with two sets of people, once with a pair of fairly dedicated wargamers and one with an equally dedicated roleplayer.

The wargamers hated it. They thought it was slow, and they spent ages making sure that all the modifiers were applied and that they had their tactical plans sorted out. Each turn took forever. On the other hand, the roleplayer (a Cthulhu fan, and an owner of a pair of Cthulhu slippers, no less) loved it, taking pleasure out of the figures, the card headers and the Brutal Damage table, and treating it like a light-hearted romp.

The game works better if you disregard a lot of the optional rules, in my opinion, and if played in the right Troma-movie spirit, can be quite fun. You've got to respect the idea of Wilbur Whately and Cap'n Marsh duking it out for the big ol' book using Ol' Bessie the Gatling Gun and a random bucket of tasty guts (mmm, guts).

Its replayability is helped by the device of having a different selection of cards. and by the different board layouts (along with several game variants, like "capture the flag", mentioned in the back of the rulebook), but I think it's hampered by having too many optional rules, and by essentially being very fiddly indeed, with all those hats and tables and things, which flies in the face of its intended light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek atmosphere. It's too much like a wargame to be funny, although it is fun for a few games.

It loses more points for the flimsiness of the stand-ups and the hats, which are on very thin card. You have to be very careful with them, or they'll be all torn and shredded by the time you've played half-a-dozen games. Given that it's nearly $40 (or £28 in the UK), it's simply not worth it, even with the tape measure. I got mine in a closing down sale for about 12 quid, which felt about all right. But 28? Don't think so.