Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 15-30 minutes

Summary of the Components

Building an Elder God comes with a deck of cards.

Quality: Building an Elder God uses light- to medium-weight cards that unfortunately have a subpar finish on them that made the cards somewhat hard to shuffle and deal because they tend to stick together. The four-page black & white rules are also quite simple. 2 out of 5.

Beauty: The cards feature tentacular artwork which looks pretty computer generated. There were a few elements that were more attractive, like the Necronomicons and the monster mouths, but the rest was pretty plain. 2 out of 5.

Usability: The cards are easy to use. You connect together monster edges from one card to another. Cards with purple glows on them are invulnerable. This all comes across fine. 3 out of 5.

Theming: I think I was most disappointed by this game's theming. The long snake-like monster that you're constructing just doesn't scream "Mythos" to me. The Necronomicon and the Elder Sign do appear, and they're used fairly appropriately, but that doesn't feel as important as the monster that's the core of the game. 2 out of 5.

Overall, Building an Elder God looks like a first print publication, which it is. I've given it "2" out of "5" for Style, but with the comment that there's nothing here that's a deal breaker. If you think the tentacle monster looks Cthulhoid, than your rating will probably increase to an average "3" out of "5".

Summary of the Gameplay

The object of Building an Elder God is … to build an elder god. Which basically means you need to lay down a (twisting) line of body parts between your Elder God's base and its mouth.

At any time you have a hand full of body parts, most of which are simple tubes going in one direction or another, but which could also include branches or eyeballs (which end branches). On your turn, you can build your god, wound someone else's god, or heal yourgod.

If you want to build your god, you just put down a new card at the top end of your god (presuming you have a card whose orientation and connections are right). Certain body parts that you can place are invulnerable, which meant that they can't be wounded.

If you want to wound a god, you pick a shotgunned body part card and place it either atop a matching card or at the end of an enemy's god. It's particularly nasty to give your opponent wounded branches, because your opponent then has to heal the branch and close off the branch.

If you want to heal your god, you place a matching body part over a wounded body part. You can also heal with Necronomicons, a limited resource. (You have two at start.)

In the "advanced" game, there's one other option: you can draw and play an Elder Sign card which lets you blast away parts of an opponent's Elder God, at the cost of your own.

The game ends when a player's Elder God is long enough and closed, at which point he automatically places the mouth and wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Building an Elder God is one of an ever-growing family of Cthulhoid games, that's been appearing since Chaosium's release of Arkham Horror (1987), many years ago.

It's also a "pipe game", which means your goal is simply to get the water (monster) from one end of the pipe (the base) to the other end (the mouth). Building an Elder God is actually a very simple example of the genre, since you don't want to branch, just build a simple pipe from start to end.

The Game Design

To start with, I should say that Building an Elder God is a pretty simplistic card-play game with some take-that elements. There isn't a lot of strategy in many take-that games — which is fine if you're expecting to play a game in the genre. However, I feel like Building an Elder God is quite strategy-light even for the genre.

Since you've building a pretty singular path from your base to your mouth, there just aren't a lot of decision points. You're pretty much going to put down a piece on your monster if you can, and it'll be an invulnerable piece if you have one. Otherwise — or if an opponent is about to win — you'll try and wound an opponent's god. The only real strategic question for me was one of resource allocation: whether to use your scant Necronomicons for healing or not.

Beyond that, Building an Elder God has a problem very common with unbounded take-that games. The winner pretty much wins due to attrition. It's only when everyone runs out of take-that cards (the wounds) that someone can finally emerge to victory.

I also felt like Building an Elder God was underdeveloped. The biggest development problem had to do with the wound rules. According to the rules, each player's god can only be wounded once at a time — but you can keep building on a god even when it's wounded. So, why not just leave that first wound on, build your god until it's otherwise done, then fix your wound and win the game? This issue breaks the game, so we were forced to house rule it by saying you could only win by building your god, not by healing it.

I also had issues with underdevelopment of the Elder Sign cards (which refer to "outermost" cards but doesn't define for example if an eyestalk is considered more or less outer than the open edge of your monster) and invulnerable eyestalks (which could make a monster uncompleteable if you could hook up both a wounded eyestalk and an unvulnerable eyestalk to a monster from the same card). Overall, the game needed some more polish.

Other than the woundl issue, none of these problems were game-breakers, but I feel like the game not only was very shallow, but also had more problems than it should have given its depth. I've given it a "2" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Building an Elder God is a light and shallow game that could use a bit more polish. If you're just looking for a short game without much strategy to take up 15-30 minutes before a Call of Cthulhu game, it might work well, but otherwise you should probably look elsewhere.

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