Designer Diary: How and Why I Did Cthulhu Wars Duel

This Cthulhu Wars: Duel designer diary is, I think, useful for anyone, but it is clearly far MORE useful if you actually know my game Cthulhu Wars.

Back in 2013 when I first launched the campaign for Cthulhu Wars, the single most-heard comments were "Why is it so big?", "Why not use cheap meeples?", "Why can't I play it two-player?", and "Can you make a travel version?" I had just done my absolute dream game. It was so popular and had such strong reviews that naturally those who couldn't afford the price tag wanted me to do a less expensive version. I resisted — in my opinion, one important reason Cthulhu Wars was such a success was BECAUSE of its size and impact, not in spite of it.

The two-player fans were easier to ignore; Cthulhu Wars is emphatically a multiplayer game, and its interactions are seriously distorted in two-player mode. We tried it several times, but it lacked the "mouth feel" of what Cthulhu Wars should be and left us cold. "Combat" factions, such as Cthulhu, dominated "Infrastructure" factions, such as Black Goat. The game just didn't seen well-suited for a head-to-head version.

The Proper Use and Abuse of Testers

We moved on and basically forgot about it.

Then came 2018. In our Planet Apocalypse campaign, we'd included a "super-pledge" that we internally called the Masterminds. Those who backed it got to come to my house for a weekend, play unpublished games, hang out, get design practicums, and so forth. Well, in September 2018 the Masterminds showed up. We had five superfans on hand, all of whom loved my games, so I decided to use them for my own dark purposes.

No, I didn't sacrifice them to Yog-Sothoth. I sat them down with my assistant game designer, Lincoln P., and we forced them to work on a two-player version of Cthulhu Wars hot and heavy. It's not all they did — we had plenty of other frolics going on — but it had the most lasting result. Over the course of the weekend and lots of plays, we worked out what was needed. A few rules changes ensured that the game was still fun but was absolutely balanced.

In this way, the Masterminds got to have tons of fun, plus they were legitimately participating in a new game design, based off an old design they all loved. It was a marriage made in heaven.

The Decay Marker

One of the major strategic elements of Cthulhu Wars is to try to run out of power last so that you get the last few turns without interruption. With three or more players, this was a fine aspect to the game; usually the end player didn't have too many turns in a row, and if they did, they would "spread the love" among all their enemies — but in a two-player game, this game element was problematic. With only one target, taking 3-4 turns in a row could nearly destroy a victim and ruin the game.

To fix this problem, we added the decay marker to the game. Now if you run out of power first, the other player has to pay an ever-increasing "power tax" each time they take an extra turn. This has two effects. First, they do not want to draw out the turn because paying the power tax multiple times is painful. Second, players feel rewarded for going out first — the complete opposite of the "real" Cthulhu Wars experience. It's different, but it's super fun.

Doom Kill

Cthulhu Wars does not directly reward combat. I mean, combat is its own reward to an extent. By battling, you can force enemies out of desirable areas and eliminate cultists, and your factions may require combat to achieve spellbooks. The main limiter to combat is that both players take losses and get scattered, which means in a multi-player game, if you fight too much, a third party takes advantage of your weakness. Nobody's got time for that, so the existence of other players means you tend to spread out combat vs. multiple foes.

In a two-player game, this mechanism vanishes, which is why Cthulhu dominated Black Goat in our original two-player games. Combat is win-win for Cthulhu and other combat factions such as Windwalker — but we didn't want the two-player games to be combat-heavy match-ups. We wanted ALL the factions to be fun, and a faction that inflicts its damage by capturing (Sleeper) or nuking units from a distance (Black Goat, Opener) was plain disadvantaged in the old game.

So we added a new rule: For each kill you inflict on an enemy, you earn Doom! Suddenly you are scoring points directly every time you use one of those weird special abilities. Sure, Cthulhu is still a battle titan and rakes in Doom by killing Black Goat's units — but Black Goat gets some Doom, too, plus now Black Goat's Ghroth spellbook, formerly obscure and little-used, becomes a devastating source of victory points. Other non-combat factions, such as Yellow Sign or Sleeper, also benefit from this. When Sleeper goes on one of his capturing rampages, instead of just earning power, he also is gathering Doom. Yellow Sign's Zingaya ability was always bothersome, but now it directly boosts his Doom, and so forth.

To balance this bigger Doom bonanza, we changed the Doom phase. Now you don't get Doom simply for controlling gates; you must also perform a Ritual of Annihilation.

Collect Them All!

In Cthulhu Wars, you can't win the game unless you have six spellbooks. This is great in the normal game, and I like everything about it, but it was awkward in the two-player game because many of the spellbooks require actions from another player. In a multi-player game, this is not an issue because someone always does whatever you need; not so in two-player games. Take Windwalker, for instance — one of his spellbook requirements is "another player has six spellbooks". Well, if his opponent is a dog in the manger, she could refuse to take her last spellbook, thus preventing Windwalker from ever winning. That sucked.

Our solution was simple: We just removed the six spellbook rule. Now you needn't get all the spellbooks to win. This had the unexpected side effect of making spellbooks easier to get. Since now you couldn't keep your enemy from winning just by holding out, players were likelier to take actions that might score you a spellbook because it was no longer such a constraint. Thus, the game became more fun AND more balanced.

Creating Cthulhu Wars: Duel

We had lots of editing and graphic layout changes to make. I had to go over the rules and the existing spellbooks and civ sheets to ensure everything made sense in two-player. In the end, we had a good two-player game — but it wasn't exactly Cthulhu Wars. The game had these extra rules that weren't in the base game (decay, Doom for kills, etc.) that players had to remember. It felt...clumsy.

In 2019, I was pondering whether to make this two-player version of Cthulhu Wars, and it came to me like a thunderbolt. THIS could be the "smaller" or "travel" Cthulhu Wars so many people had asked for! We'd create a new rulebook incorporating all the changes, and now it could be a game in its own right — not a competitor or replacement to the "old" Cthulhu Wars, but a peer, standing alongside it.

How to do it? Well, since this was also going to be the "travel" version, I decreed no plastic figures. I still liked the panoply of the big figures, so we went for cardboard standees. This way we had big, full-color units, but easy to transport and cheap to print.

(In passing, I will add that my French connection, Pit Petersen, went ahead and did 3D printed versions of my standees for his own personal copy, completely destroying the whole purpose of making it a travel version. I love Pit.)

We made the board smaller. Since we now had narrow standees instead of my infamous "bigatures" with bases as big as 80-100mm across, it was plausible. Since we were doing this, I went ahead and created a wholly new map for the game, based on Lovecraft Country. Well, I say "wholly new", but really it's topologically identical to our tried-and-true core game Earth map — but it looks really different!

Finally, we needed only two factions — it's a two-player game, after all. Cthulhu and Black Goat were now super-fun to play against each other and felt utterly different, so they made the cut.

What Next?

We included only two factions and didn't want to do "expansions" for a small game like this. Our current plan is to release the other factions in new boxes — each a complete, fully-playable game with its own unique map. Cthulhu Wars Duel: Extinction will be the first such release, featuring The Sleeper and Ithaqua, the Windwalker. (Cthulhu Wars Duel: Extinction has reached our EU, Asia, and Australia warehouses, but it won't arrive at the U.S. warehouse until late January 2022, so we're holding off on selling and distributing copies until that time — although those who pre-order a copy on our website will be among the first to receive it.) Of course, you can mix and match factions and maps from different boxes as you please, but only two players at a time!

Now Cthulhu Wars seems to have gone full circle in a sense. Some fans have asked for a multiplayer version of Duel or even about having figures — but the way I see it, I've already designed that game.

Sandy Petersen