Elder Sign: Omens: Monterey Jack and the case of the ancient relics

Ancient relics? Monterey Jack knows ancient relics, even if they’re guarded by a high priest. He’s got his cigarettes and his two magic books. Lighting up and reading a page from The Nameless Cults, he rolls the dice.

After the jump, Yahtzee!

A hardcore wargamer friend of mine whose name rhymes with Loose Geryk claims Elder Sign: Omens is just Yahtzee. He’s not wrong. He’s just assuming Yahtzee is a bad foundation for a game. But is it still Yahtzee when it also has a whole mess of dice management gimmicks and resources and cards and markers and rules exceptions, all modeled for fast fuss-less solitaire play on my iPhone? Ultimately, the mechanics might be Yahtzee. Yeah, these are dice and instead of trying to roll two sixes, I’m trying to roll two skulls where the sixes would normally be. But you can hardly see the Yahtzee anymore, what with all this Lovecraft stuff piled on top.

Previously, we lost Darrell Simmons to the Medusa Exhibit. Today, Monterery Jack at the Ancient Relics runs afoul of a special condition that causes a sanity loss if a terror result comes up. Which it does. I suspect the terror icon — tentacles, don’t you know? — is where the five would be on a regular die. Maybe the four. If this was Yahtzee, I would have pushed too hard and had to put the roll in a slot where it scored me zero points.

But this isn’t Yahtzee. So what happens instead is that Monterey Jack, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, coolly kills a high priest by reading an incantation from an eldritch tome and then completely and utterly flips out when it comes time to examine the relic the high priest was guarding. I’ll just quote the flavor text from the game, because sometimes flavor text hides the Yahtzee even more.

I struggled to keep calm, but given the evidence presented by these artifacts, madness was the only rational response.

By the way, you know that hardcore wargame called East Front? It’s just checkers.

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