The Kraken 2014 – Day 1

Day one of the Kraken 2014 started out with a few sessions of 7 wonders. I’m still not hugely into board games but this is a really nice game. We played it once with 4 people, and again with 5 people. First time I played, I slacked on getting resources and it bit me in the ass in the third era. Second time around I had a lot of resources but the cards were spread around a lot more due to this extra player so it seems still a different strategy is needed. But a great game. Definitely one I might pick up myself. I’m also curious to see what the expansions add to the game.

The Horror lottery was held in which Sandy Petersen draws a couple of people from a hat who can play in his Cthulhu game. For this year he brought a scenario called See, taking place in Texas where a drug has been found that cures all other drug addictions. Didn’t get into the game so I’ll have to put my name on one of the Cthulhu Wars sessions for sure. People are really positive about that one.

And lo and behold, 5 minutes later Sandy Petersen walks by looking for a player for Cthulhu Wars. So I happily jumped in (and Glyn was so kind to let me play even though he wanted to play Cthulhu Wars again himself). I played the crawling chaos and was in the lead on points the whole game. I reached the 30 victory points limit first. But when it was time to hand in the elder signs, I was beaten by the Cthulhu faction by 1 point. I spent the game mainly trying to keep my power and silently gather my spell books. The other factions were doing the same until Cthulhu started hunting down one gate after the next. The King in Yellow was desecrating the whole board while Shub-Niggurath tried to get all her units on the board and succeeded. Remarkably there was not that much combat.

I was approaching the 30 victory point marker very fast and didn’t have all my spell books yet. I just needed to spend power to get them but didn’t have sufficient power to get it. So I waded Nyarlathotep into battle with Hastur, got killed, but pained him so I received enough power from that to get my last spell book. I then activated my The Thousand Forms spell book and rolled a 6. The opponents now had one minute to choose whether they wanted to give up 6 power amongst them or give me 6 power. This 6 would put all of them out of power so they decided to let me have it, giving me enough to move into uncharted territory, summon a cultist and get a gate. This, in the following Gather Power phase, gave me just enough to reach 30 victory conditions which meant the end of the game. Then the elder signs you gain during the game by doing rituals are added to your victory points. Each of these have a point value on the bottom and I only had two of them with a value of 1. So Cthulhu overtook me with one point. What a great game! But this will take a lot of playing to master the different factions. Quite glad now that I supported the kickstarter on the highest level, meaning I get the game and all of its expansions and Great Old Ones all together.

After dinner it was time for Nick Davison’s Primeval RPG, based on a British television series where dinosaurs are popping up through gates called anomalies. We’re playing secret government agents that need to cover up this fact from the general public and close down these anomalies. The session starts right after we get back from closing down an anomaly and step back into the ARC headquarters. We are greeted by ARC staff that we don’t know meaning some kind of time lapse has happened. This sometimes occurs when things are changed in the past so the “now” that we know didn’t happen. While we’re trying to figure out what has happened, another anomaly gets reported and our team is sent out to investigate. The ARC, that suddenly is called the ANA, is located in a different part of town it seems. We are however able to navigate towards a big shopping center where the gate is being reported. After parking our SUV’s, we start deploying SAS troops to seal down the place.

The team enters and inside spots a janitor that suddenly gets attacked by a huge prehistoric bird. Two of our SAS agents that happened to be close also bite the dust. Stephen and me, playing Professor Cutter, start shooting tranquilizers into the bird. After two shots it went down. We started exploring the rest of the shopping center and discovered another bird about to break out through the windows into the street. Stephen was luckily able to shoot it down right on time. When we approached the dinosaur, a guy was staring through the window pointing at the bird. So I invited him in, in order to be able to detain him and avoid the story getting out. Jenny, our PR agent, came up with a great cover story as usual and the guy totally bought it. After further exploration we ended up in a bowling alley where we spotted the anomaly and another bird that was shot down. Stephen thought it would be a good idea to roll a bowling ball down the lane and even managed to get a strike. The bowling ball however ended up in prehistoric times through the gate.

After getting the bowling ball back, Abby also placed the dinosaurs back in their own timeline. We then secured the rest of the shopping center, located the security office and also confiscated all the security camera footage. After the session GM Nick checked our procedures and it seemed we handled the situation rather well, not leaving any glaring discoveries available for the general public. Sandy Petersen walked into the game as well, advertising his movie night which some of us joined after the Primeval game.

Uncle Sandy showed us Island of the Living Dead, a pretty bad zombie movie but it was great fun hearing Sandy point out all the glaring inconsistencies with the plot, actors, and special effects. After laughing throughout pretty much the complete movie, it was time to end the Kraken 2014 Day 1. It was a great day!

The Kraken 2014 convention reports

• The Kraken 2014 Day 0
• The Kraken 2014 Day 1
• The Kraken 2014 Day 2
• The Kraken 2014 Day 3
• The Kraken 2014 Day 4

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