Games with Lovecraft

The hubby and I will soon be playing a round of Mansions of Madness with some of our board game group friends. We're also fans of other Lovecraft cardboard such as Arkham Horror and The Stars are Right. 


Mansions of Madness is an Ameritrash classic, with minis and murder and monsters and mayhem. Lovecraft's writing has inspired countless artists and designers of all stripes.

Seems like everyone wants to visit Lovecraft's world, if only for a few hours.

Above, illustrator Matt Buck depicts H. P. Lovecraft himself. The tentacle is everything. (I originally found this image on the Tor website, which has an entire page of Lovecraft artwork by contemporary fantasy artists.)
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Above is a depiction of the finale of The Dunwich Horror by Alberto Breccia. You can find the entire graphic adaptation in English translation on the Ragged Claws blog.

If you find yourself interested in Breccia's work, this link will take you to a downloadable version of the entire Los Mitos de Cthulhu. These are nine stories that Breccia and collaborator Norberto Buscaglia adapted in the 70's. The text is in Spanish, of course, but art is art.

Above is a gorgeous map of one of Lovecraft's other dimensions, The Dreamlands, created by Seattle-based artist Jason Thompson. 

And here we have a 1976 cover by illustrator Murray Tinkelman, found on the blog Too Much Horror Fiction, which has a nice collection of cover art. 

This is an illustration for Lovecraft's "The Temple" done by Stephen Hickman for Science Fiction Age magazine, which went sadly out of business in 2000.


But now, back to games....

The Stars Are Right is a Steve Jackson game in which you, for some reason, are attempting to summon various Old Ones. To do so, you have to make sure that certain constellations appear in the sky by collecting cards and making patterns of them.

The artwork is fun and the game is reasonably quick. It's only ranked at 1513 on Board Game Geek, but I like it, especially on a cold foggy night.

Fantasy Flight's Arkham Horror is probably my favorite of them all. It's a long, long game with tons of fiddly bits and Byzantine rules. It's cooperative, and it's hard to win.

There are also countless role playing games based on the Lovecraft stories; Call of Cthulhu first appeared in the early 80's, and may be the original.

Yog-Sothoth is a website dedicated to the Call of Cthulhu rpgs and all their spinoffs.