Mythos Tales

I backed this on KickStarter and love this game. Probably one of the best KS games I have.I am a fan of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, so it stands to reason I would like Mythos Tales.Mythos Tales takes SHCD and expands on it, it actually makes it better! I love how you have to keep track of your moves, meaning morning, noon and night some times can change what occurs when you visit a location. You also need have evidence (represented in a card with a number on it) at times to advance the story further. Like, "the door is locked, if you have card 1 read xxx, if you don't have card 1 read xxx" (bad example, but you get it). This all helps bring you into the game more than SHCD does.The map isn't as good as SHCD, and is a bit of a let down. There are mistakes in the printing, the graphics really needed to be worked on, and there are no names on the map like there are in SHCD. The directory also has some mistakes in it, but overall works without many issues. Newspapers are cool too, but would have been nice to have had a bit of an ageing affect to them (yellowish vs white paper), and not double sided, but that helped cut costs.The end of some of the cases seem a bit flat, not fully explaining what occurred, and that is a shame. There have been times at the end during the questions that they asked questions that we just looked at each other and asked "Where did that come from?", as in, no place we visited mentioned it. That is kind of cool, and kind of not. In the one case this was a big factor in, two of the six players wanted to investigate something in the newspaper, while the others didn't, if we would have, we would have stumbled upon more information and really changed the case. As it turned out, we were able to figure out the answers with what we knew anyway, but knowing there was a whole new side to that case was cool.I am not a Lovecraftian, and I'm kind of getting sick of the IP, however, 8th Summit did a very good job with this game, mistakes and all. The mistakes won't stop you from playing and enjoying the game either. Unlike my copy of SHCD that has two cases that are almost unwinnable due to the English to French back to English translation mistakes, Mythos Tales does not have that issue, and with a game like this, it is almost impossible to catch everything.

This is based on Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. The inherited mechanics are wonderful for a couple who doesn't mind reading, deduction and story-telling. There is enough to think about to be engaging. It is exciting and there is more of a sense of accomplishment than most games can provide. It is entirely different up to six times. This version of the mechanics does have it's disadvantages.In my opinion is is hurt badly by the theme. Due to being super natural in nature, the logical deduction of the original is hampered by randomness. If you don't get the initial few guesses right to get onto the track, then logical deduction isn't possible ( hence SUPER natural). This means there is no RIGHT answer - there is just how far down the "track" of information you got. This means there are very few "AHA!" moments (if any). Most (all?) of the times I felt I was making a logical leap and was excited I discovered that it was just a dead end. One example (sort of spoiler - not really) I remembered that a woman had been mentioned winning a theater ticket in the previous week's paper. A diabolical deed had been done in the front row of the theater and I decided to go to talk to her since contest tickets are commonly for good seating. Nope. She wasn't home. I would have known that if I'd gone through in order, but since I'd leaped ahead I got punished. That's right, it punishes you for trying to make the sorts of deductions it seems like it's designed for. In terms of game mechanics one was good, two were okay, two of them were nonsensical and one was outright stupid ( as a game ). I recommend it if you're done with the originals or are a big fan of Cthulu and want to read about it in an interactive way. It seems very strongly tied to it's source materials and is well written as a story. If you get it I do hope you enjoy it as much as we did at first, just don't expect too much from the middle cases.

This would be an easy 5 star game... except it's broken: Typos. Incomplete information. A map that doesn't include the necessary locations. The total package adds up to something where it's impossible to play the game in a satisfactory fashion out of the box.Each case can only be played once, which means that by the time you realize what the problem is, it's too late... that scenario has been permanently wrecked. The publisher still hasn't issued complete errata, and the limited errata that they've issued in a semi-official capacity isn't formatted in a way which allows you to actually use it without spoiling the scenario... which defeats the entire point of the game!I'll also note that the game features too many situations in which no proper deduction can actually be made in regards to how the case should proceed, leading to a frustrating "guess what I'm thinking! ha ha! you guessed wrong!" form of game play. (The scenario of "guess whether Bob is at location A or location B -- nope it was the other one!" being a common one.) This appears to be further exacerbated by the flawed production, but it's difficult to say (and this is a flaw shared by the game's predecessor). For example, the scenario of "Bob went to a cafe on Main Street... but there are no cafes on Main Street, so do we mean one of the two cafes just around the corner from Main Street or the cafe that he would have walked past on his way to Main Street?" is a surprisingly common one.