Review: Cthulhu – Dark Providence

Introduction & Overview

The Ancients exert their influence over realms known to them, populated by nations that speak human tongues and are tormented by shared nightmares. In one of these realities, amid the American Great Depression, they exploit human greed to sow discord and division. Corruption runs rampant in influential cities, where alliances shift and betrayal lurks at every turn.

This is how we are introduced to Cthulhu: Dark Providence, designed by Martin Wallace (Brass, Age of Steam) and Travis R. Chance (Path of Light and Shadow, Infamy). First published in 2025 by CMON in an English version, it is a reimagining of Martin Wallace’s A Study in Emerald. The artwork is handled by Anders Finér (Arkham Horror, A Game of Thrones: The Board Game).

It is published in Spanish by Asmodee (the game is quite language-dependent). It accommodates 1 to 5 players, with a suggested minimum age of 13 and an approximate duration of between 80 and 120 minutes. The retail price is €44.99. For this review, a copy of the Spanish version from Asmodee was used, which the publisher kindly provided as a review copy.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Go to Personal Opinion

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), with dimensions of 26×26×8.5 cm (a square box similar to Azul, but deeper), we find the following components:

• Main Board (cardboard)
• Track Board (cardboard)
• 5 Player Boards (cardstock)
• 30 Agent Stands (6 in each color) (cardboard)
• Bag (cloth)
• 12 Gate Tokens (cardboard)
• 95 Influence Cubes (19 in each color) (plastic)
• 5 Principal Agent Tokens (cardboard)
• 22 Recruited Agent Tokens (cardboard)
• 8 Deep One Tokens (cardboard)
• Mi-Go Token (cardboard)
• 60 Control Tokens (12 in each color) (cardboard)
• Investigation and Ritual Markers (cardboard)
• First Player Figures (cardboard)
• 3 Whateley Tiles (cardboard)
• 139 Cards (63.5×88 mm):
  • 50 Starting Asset Cards (10 per agent)
  • 60 Principal Asset Cards
  • 6 Loyalty Cards
  • 13 City Cards
  • 2 Cultist Cards for Solo Mode
  • 8 Cultist Behavior Cards for solo mode
• 35 Large Cards (80×122 mm):
  • 24 Mythos Cards
  • 5 Reference Cards
  • 6 Great Old One Cards for Solo Mode
• 2 Cultist Tokens for Solo Mode (cardboard)
• Rulebook

How to Play

Cthulhu: Dark Providence is a competitive deck-building and hidden-role game set in a Great Depression-era United States, where players compete to control the nation’s destiny under the secret roles of Investigators, Cultists, or Dissidents. At the start of the game, players receive a secret Loyalty card that defines their faction and scoring conditions, along with a starting deck of cards and a Principal Agent to place on the map. After this, players alternate turns clockwise, performing two actions. On each turn, the active player can play cards to place Influence cubes on Cities, Principal Asset cards, or Mythos cards, allowing them to perform a claim action at the start of their turn if they hold a majority. Actions allow players to expand and streamline their decks by acquiring new assets, travel with their agents along the map’s routes, manipulate the global Ritual or Investigation tracks, or trigger powerful card effects such as assassinating enemy agents and opening or closing interdimensional Gates—which, in turn, requires passing tense Sanity checks that put their characters’ lucidity at risk. The game ends immediately if a player reaches the required victory point threshold, if the track markers reach the end of their paths, or if insanity or the assassination of key investigators is triggered. Finally, hidden identities are revealed, and a general scoring takes place by adding up victory points accumulated from controlling cities, claimed cards, gates, and the bonus for keeping one’s identity secret. The player with the highest score is declared the winner, provided they survive the elimination of all players sharing a faction with whoever accumulated the fewest points.

Key Concepts

Let’s start with the Main Board. It consists of a fold-out map graphically representing the eastern region of the United States, divided into several Cities interconnected by printed lines known as routes, each with a movement cost to traverse. Each of these Cities displays its name, a circular space to hold dimensional Gates, a hexagonal space to record its political control, and an upper rectangular area reserved for the local deck of available Principal Asset cards. These cities are the zones where agents move by paying the travel costs printed on the routes, physical influence is added, combats are resolved to eliminate characters, and gates are permanently opened or closed.

On the other hand, we have the Track Board. It vertically displays three tracks. The blue track directly records the players’ overall score, while the pink Investigation track and the green Ritual track competitively measure the ideological and power advancement of the game’s factions through the movement of their respective markers. The board also includes designated spaces to its right for the display of available Mythos cards, the supply of City cards, the pool of principal cards, and a lower area called Limbo, designed to temporarily hold influence cubes removed from the map until they are recovered by their owners.

One of the game’s key elements is the Influence Cubes. They act as control elements, as players deploy them from their personal supply to physically place them on City spaces, Principal Asset cards, or Mythos cards. They serve to establish numerical majorities that grant the right to claim ownership of these elements, after which they go to Limbo (the cubes of players who did not win the element are returned to their personal supplies). Players start with a limited number of them and can acquire more through one of the available actions.

To indicate possession of various elements, players have Control Tokens in each participant’s color. Their function in the game is twofold: on one hand, they are placed in the hexagonal spaces of Cities to visually indicate which player currently holds political dominance over that location (and its card); on the other hand, they are positioned on top of Gate tiles to stamp authorship over the opening or closing of the dimensional rift.

The physical presence of players on the main board is represented by Agent Tokens. These are double-sided tokens showing the artwork and name of a specific character. The principal ones represent the starting and irreplaceable agent of each deck, while the recruited ones represent potential allies waiting face-up on the asset cards available for purchase in cities. If a player loses their principal agent, the game will come to an end, although a principal agent is protected as long as the controlling player has at least one recruited agent.

To identify which players control the different agents, Agent Stands are provided. These are small plastic stands in the players’ colors that hold the agent tokens upright.

Gate Tokens serve to visually represent the physical state of a City’s interdimensional rift, showing a normal side for its closed state (pink) and the reverse side for when a rift has been opened (green). When a city’s gate is opened or closed, one of these tokens is placed in the corresponding space with the appropriate face showing, along with a Control Token on top to indicate who performed the action.

At the start of the game, each player has a deck of Starting Asset Cards. These are fixed sets of ten cards associated with each player’s principal character, sharing the same card back design. They display specific resource icons in their upper left corner, such as influence, combat strength, wealth, or movement. Each player will begin every turn with five cards drawn from their deck. Most actions that can be resolved require using symbols from these cards, which are played together to pool the necessary symbols of a type to execute the action.

To this deck, players can add Principal Asset Cards. These are distributed in small decks across the Cities during setup, leaving the top card visible to everyone. They feature the same design style as the principal agent cards and are divided into two types: actions and agents. The former allow players to resolve actions directly (some of them as free actions in addition to the two actions a player can take on their turn). The latter allow players to recruit the corresponding agent, with whom the player can resolve actions from that moment forward.

Controlling a city grants the use of the corresponding City Card. When a player gains control of a city (either by taking it from a rival or claiming it for the first time), they take this card and add it to their discard pile. If it is in another player’s possession, that player must locate the card (which could be in their hand, deck, or discard pile) to transfer it.

Each participant will manage their resources using the Player Boards. These are individual cardstock boards customized by color that serve to organize the deck, discard pile, and captured Mythos cards. In the bottom row, we find well-defined specific zones: the Crypt, a physical space enabled to accumulate tokens of agents eliminated during the game; and the Sanity zone, a circular repository destined to store the mental health tokens drawn from the bag.

Supernatural forces manifest through Mythos Cards. These are cards that depict cosmic horrors and entities, forming their own deck and displayed publicly in a row. Unlike assets, they are never added to the player’s deck; instead, they are left face-up next to the player board, allowing players to immediately or repeatedly trigger powerful special effects, summon unique three-dimensional physical components, and add faction-specific direct victory points during final scoring.

When performing certain actions, such as opening/closing gates or acquiring some mythos, players will have to perform a sanity check. To do this, they draw a token from a bag containing Sanity Tokens and Insanity Tokens. These tokens act as the gauge for the players’ mental risk. While Sanity tokens accumulate harmlessly on the player’s personal board without causing repercussions, Insanity tokens gradually deplete the faction’s mental health; accumulating a third token of this type penalizes the participant, causing them to fall into madness, which forces them to reveal their secret identity and can trigger the end of the game.

Lastly, each player will belong to a faction reflected in the Loyalty Cards. These are dealt at the start of the game and divide participants into opposing factions like Investigators, Cultists, or Dissidents. Each side possesses specific scoring rules at the end of the game, determining which elements on the board will grant them victory points and which will trigger their direct elimination or the immediate conclusion of the game if their identity is exposed due to a loss of mental health. It is important to note that all players belonging to the same faction as the player with the lowest score at the end of the game are eliminated, regardless of their own individual scores.

That is enough to get started.

Setup

1. Place the game board within reach of all players.
2. Place the track board to the right of the game board, with the Ritual and Investigation markers on the starting spaces of their respective tracks.
3. Mix the Sanity and Insanity tokens into the Sanity Check bag and leave the bag near the board.
4. Set the City Asset cards in a face-up deck to the right of their designated space on the track board.
5. Shuffle the Principal Asset cards and place a face-down deck in each of the twelve Cities based on player count: three cards for two or three players, and four cards for four or five players.
6. Reveal the top Principal Asset card of each City, leaving it face-up on top of its deck, and, if it is an Agent, place its corresponding token on it.
7. Leave the remaining Principal Asset cards in a face-down deck to the right of the Pool space on the track board.
8. Shuffle the Mythos cards and place the deck to the right of its space on the track board, revealing a number of face-up Mythos cards to form the row based on player count: three cards for two or three players, and four cards for four or five players.
9. Each player chooses a color and takes their corresponding player board, Control tokens, stands, and seven Influence cubes, leaving the rest of the cubes in a general supply sorted by color.
10. Each player chooses a Principal Agent, takes their ten Starting Asset cards, their Principal Agent token, and slides it into the stand with the normal face showing.
11. Each player shuffles their Starting Asset cards, draws five cards for their hand, and places the remaining cards face-down in the deck zone of their board.
12. Each player places an Influence cube on the zero space of the Victory Point track.
13. Select the Loyalty cards based on the number of players: one Cultist, one Investigator, and two Dissidents for two or three players; two Cultists, two Investigators, and one random Dissident for four or five players.
14. Shuffle the selected Loyalty cards, deal one face-down to each player to keep secret next to their board, and return the leftovers to the box without revealing them.
15. Assemble the Cthulhu figure into its plastic base and place the recruited Agent tokens, Blockades, Gates, Mi-Go, Deep Ones, Whateleys, and Martial Law tokens near the game board separated by type to form the general supply.
16. Randomly choose the starting player.
17. Starting with the first player and continuing counter-clockwise, each player places their Principal Agent on an empty City space.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of Cthulhu: Dark Providence plays out over an indefinite number of turns alternated by players, beginning with the starting player and continuing clockwise.

On each turn, the active player proceeds as follows:

1. Perform Actions. The player executes 2 actions of their choice, plus any free actions they can and wish to activate at that moment.
2. Discard Used Cards. All cards used to fully resolve actions this turn are placed in the discard pile on the player’s personal board.
3. Replenish Hand. The player draws cards from the top of their personal deck until they reach their hand limit of 5 cards. If their deck runs out during this process, the discard pile is shuffled to form a new deck and drawing continues.
   After this, the turn immediately passes to the next player clockwise.

Following this, the turn passes to the next player.

The main actions available during a turn are the following:

• Add Influence. The player plays one or more cards from their hand displaying the Influence icon to place as many influence cubes from their personal supply as the number of symbols played onto a single location on the board: whether a Principal Asset card, a City space, or a Mythos card. There is no limit to the number of cubes that can accumulate in a single space.
• Claim (only available as the first action of the turn). If a player has more cubes than any other player with cubes in a location (and it is not blockaded), they can spend their first action to claim it. When doing so, they transfer their Influence cubes from that position to Limbo, while rivals recover theirs, placing them back in their personal supplies. Depending on what is claimed, proceed as follows:
• Principal Asset card. The player adds the card directly to their discard pile. If it is a recruited Agent, they take its token, slot it into a stand of their color, and place it in the same City where it was (up to a maximum limit of 6 agents under simultaneous control). Right after, the next card in that city is flipped face-up. If it was the last card in the urban deck, the Ritual track advances 2 spaces and a new Mythos card is added to the row.
• City. The player places a control token of their color in the urban space (displacing the previous owner if there was one). They immediately gain victory points equal to the city’s control value (points that the displaced player loses at that exact moment) and add the corresponding City Asset card to their discard pile.
• Mythos card. The player takes the card from the common row along with its associated components and places it next to their personal board to benefit from its powers. The Mythos row is not replenished immediately.
  At the end of any claim action, if the obtained card shows a Sanity Check icon, that check must be performed by drawing a token from the bag.
• Recover Influence. The player plays cards with the influence icon to rescue that same number of Influence cubes from Cities, Mythos cards, Assets, or the Limbo space, returning them to their personal supply.
• Acquire Influence. The player plays cards with the wealth icon to obtain cubes of their color from the general supply, getting 1 cube for every 2 wealth icons played.
• Travel. The player plays cards with the movement icon to move one or more of their Agents or Deep Ones between City spaces connected by routes, paying the total cost in movement icons required by the most efficient path.
• Manipulate Ritual or Investigation. The player plays cards with the corresponding icons to advance or recede a single track (Ritual or Investigation) by as many spaces as icons provided. If either of these markers reaches the final space of its track, the game ends immediately.
• Card Action. The player can play an Asset card from their hand or activate a previously claimed Mythos card to execute the “Action” or “Free Action” effect described in its text. Among the most common effects via this method are:
  • Assassinate. Allows the elimination of a rival agent in the same city if the player has their own agent present there. An assassination card must be played, and additionally, the player must match or exceed the city’s control value by pooling strength symbols from present friendly agents and extra strength cards played from hand. The liquidated agent goes to the attacker’s crypt, and its original owner removes its card from play. A player’s Principal Agent can only be assassinated if they have no other agents left and hold at least 5 victory points. If this occurs, their secret Loyalty is revealed; if they turn out to be an Investigator or Dissident, the game ends immediately.
  • Close or Open a Gate. With a friendly agent in a city without a gate, a player plays a card that allows it and matches or exceeds the gate value using strength icons. The corresponding gate token is placed with its control token on top, and a sanity check is performed (if an insanity token is drawn and the action was performed by a recruited agent, that agent is annihilated).
  • Place or Remove a Blockade Marker. Allows placing or removing a Blockade token on an Asset, City, or Mythos card, completely preventing it from being claimed by any player until it is removed.
• Discard cards. The player can discard any number of cards from their hand to accelerate their deck cycling.
• Reveal Loyalty. If a player calculates that they have the necessary victory points based on the number of participants and their identity card, they can voluntarily reveal their secret identity card to immediately score their gates and track positions, triggering the end of the game. If they miscalculate the points, they lose everything gained and the game continues.

Game End

The game ends immediately once the action triggering any of the following conditions is fully resolved:

• A player reaches the required victory points based on player count (33 for 2 players, 30 for 3 players, 26 for 4 players, or 22 for 5 players).
• An Investigator or Dissident draws their third Insanity token and reveals their identity.
• A player’s Principal Agent is assassinated.
• The Ritual or Investigation marker reaches the last space of its track.
• The action on the Deep Ones Principal Asset card is played while all 8 Deep Ones are in play.

Following this, a general scoring takes place, in which each player scores:

• 3 Victory points if their loyalty card is still hidden.
• Victory points indicated by blue icons on acquired cards and agents.
• Points according to the end-of-game effects of the Mythos cards the player has obtained.

Now, each player with a hidden loyalty card reveals it and scores according to it:

• Investigator Scoring:
  • Investigation Track. Scores as many points as indicated by the interval where the Investigation marker stands.
  • Closed Gates. Scores as many points as the value of each closed Gate under their control.
  • Recruited Agents. The victory points of each living recruited agent with Investigator victory point icons (pink).
• Cultist Scoring:
  • Ritual Track. Scores as many points as indicated by the interval where the Ritual marker stands.
  • Open Gates. Scores as many points as the value of each open gate under their control.
  • Assassinated Agents. 1 Victory point for each agent in their Crypt.
  • Points for each claimed Mythos card with Cultist victory point icons (green).
  • Resurrected Agents. As many points as the number of Resurrected Agents under their control.
  • Deep Ones. 8 victory points if the Deep Ones card has been claimed and all 8 Deep Ones are in play.
• Dissident Scoring:
  • Revelation Penalty. -3 Victory points if the Loyalty card was revealed before final scoring.
  • Track: Scores as many points as indicated by the interval of the Investigation marker (if they are a Dissident Investigator) or the Ritual marker (if they are a Dissident Cultist).
  • Gates and Crypt. Scores as many points as the value of each of their own gates (open or closed).
  • Assassinated Agents. 1 Victory point for each agent in their Crypt.
  • They do not score for specific Investigator or Cultist VP icons.

Finally, the player with the lowest amount of victory points is identified, and all players who share their same Loyalty are eliminated from the game (dissidents do not belong to the same loyalty as cultists or investigators). Of the remaining players who have not been eliminated, the one with the highest amount of victory points is proclaimed the winner. In case of a tie, the following tiebreakers are applied in order:

• The player with the most Mythos cards;
• If the player is an Investigator;
• If the player is a Cultist;
• If the player is a Dissident.

If the tie persists, players share the victory.

Variants

Solo Mode. The player takes on the identity of the Investigator and faces off alternately against a Great Old One controlled automatically by the game. Unlike the player, the deity has no hand, deck, or discard pile. Instead, the enemy’s turn is managed by revealing cards from a behavior deck that dictate the specific actions of two cultist agents on the board, who move through cities adding influence, opening gates, claiming assets, or attempting assassinations. Each Great Old One has a unique objective that, if met, grants it immediate victory. Insanity tokens accumulated by the bot do not drive it mad; instead, along with its successes, they increase its score in real-time. The game concludes under various conditions, such as if anyone reaches 35 victory points, if the player falls into madness, or if the rival gathers five insanity tokens. Finally, the player calculates their points as an Investigator to determine if they have beaten their dark opponent’s total score.

Personal Opinion

It is highly likely that on more than one occasion you have read or heard me praise A Study in Emerald (here is its tocho-review) as one of my favorite designs. To me, along with Brass: Lancashire (here is its tocho-review) and Age of Steam (here is its tocho-review), it is Martin Wallace’s best design. The problem? It was a game published through a crowdfunding campaign, and the copies in circulation sell for the price of unicorn blood.

A few years later, good old Martin tried to milk the cash cow in a somewhat erratic way. Instead of publishing a version more or less similar to the first edition, he decided to launch a heavily streamlined second edition which, while not a bad design, failed to generate the extraordinary dynamics that the first edition was capable of.

More than ten years had to pass for Martin to give in, allowing the publication of a new edition much closer to the first. Thus arrives Cthulhu: Dark Providence, whose adjustments have been implemented by Travis R. Chance. Let’s see how it behaves on the table, but not before thanking Asmodee for providing the review copy that makes this long piece of writing possible.

In Cthulhu: Dark Providence, we become agents immersed in a world under the yoke of the Great Old Ones, but this time the map abandons Victorian London and the global board of A Study in Emerald to transport us to a United States ruined by the Great Depression.

Players are divided into secret factions: on one side, the Investigators, who seek to avoid catastrophe by closing gates to dark dimensions; and on the other, the Cultists, dedicated to the task of opening those gates and worshiping the ancients. And, as a novelty in this new implementation, a third faction: the Dissidents, “lone wolves” (former investigators or resentful cultists) who score according to the progression of their old sides but play for themselves. They suffer penalties if discovered ahead of time, but they are not tied to the fate of their former loyalty. The fundamental objective, therefore, remains to cooperate in the shadows so that no one on your team finishes last, while competing individually to be the one who accumulates the most victory points.

For the original design, Martin Wallace threw every mechanic he could think of into a blender. Thus, we find deck-building, hand management, secret information, area control/majority, point-to-point movement, drafting, and a few more. The main engine is still deck-building, where each player manages a hand of five cards to execute two actions on their turn, either by taking advantage of their direct text effects or spending the resources printed on them.

However, the path to getting new cards stands apart from the typical linearity of a standard deck-builder. The Principal Asset cards are laid out across a map showing twelve iconic interconnected cities (such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, or Arkham), forming small local supplies. To add them to the deck, players do not pay a direct cost; instead, they must maneuver by placing Influence cubes on the desired city or card.

This area majority management in the purest style of El Grande (here is its tocho-review) repeats the same scheme of reserves: a personal supply from which cubes go to the main board, a general supply from which more cubes can be obtained beyond those a player starts with (cubes will never return to this pool), and limbo, the place where your cubes end up after a successful action to claim a card, where they will remain until the player recovers them through another action.

To give weight to this system, the restriction of only being able to claim a card or a city as the first action of the turn is maintained. By requiring an absolute majority of influence and preventing players from placing cubes and claiming in the same instant, it forces a full round of buffer so the rest of the table can react and counter the player’s moves. It is that blurred boundary between majorities and auctions so characteristic of Taj Mahal that forces us to play with turn tempo meticulously.

Through this trickle, players shape their decks with a varied offer of options where agents are once again paramount. Starting with a principal agent on the board, recruiting new characters allows expanding tactical options, providing virtual influence and activating special abilities at locations.

Nevertheless, their operational objectives have been restructured to suit the new setting. Instead of assassinating or protecting members of the alien royalty like in A Study in Emerald, agents in Cthulhu: Dark Providence are deployed to open or close interdimensional gates, while retaining the classic task of assassinating other players’ agents to reduce their tactical options.

Dynamic control of cities also retains its immense, fundamental weight. Claiming a city grants immediate victory points on the general track and concedes access to a valuable City Asset card. But nothing is permanent: if a rival introduces more influence on later turns and snatches control from you, those points are immediately deducted from your score and pass to the new owner, who also takes the card from your deck, discard pile, or hand. This constant tug-of-war across the American geography generates a delightful volatility, being one of the few ways to actively score before final accounting.

And at this point, we bump into the master stroke that gives meaning to this fascinating mishmash of mechanics: the final scoring system. When the game ends, the player with the lowest individual score automatically dooms all members sharing their same Loyalty, leaving them completely eliminated from the running. Only among the surviving factions will the winner be the one who holds the most individual points.

Experiencing this mechanic again under the cloak of secret identities is an absolute blast. Not knowing if the player in last place is a lagging ally you must rescue or an enemy you must sink generates a state of paranoia, suspicion, and psychological tension that very few hidden-role games can even dream of matching.

Here is where we find the main change compared to the original game. Now there is the possibility that some players do not belong to either of the two main factions (the only ones that can cause a player to lose despite having the most victory points, if a teammate finishes last). Personally, it leaves me with mixed feelings.

On one hand, it seems like an interesting addition, since it resolves some details seen in A Study in Emerald—such as resolving actions that won’t give the player victory points in the final scoring just to mislead others. For instance, a Restorationist player (who would be an investigator here) could try to confuse the rest of the players by protecting royalty (the equivalent of opening a gate), implying they belong to the other faction.

But of course, we are looking at a game where matches develop at a fast pace and there isn’t that much room to waste on fruitless actions, so in the end, players sought to mislead in other ways—like claiming cities whose cards provide symbols to manipulate tracks in opposition to their actual goals, but using said card very rarely (or never).

Now, dissidents are capable of generating paranoia by scoring for gates regardless of their state. Thus, if a player opens a gate, they might be a cultist, but they could also be a dissident (from any faction), as they will also score for them at the end of the game. In this sense, they seem like an interesting addition.

The problem? It slightly dilutes what made A Study in Emerald great. By reducing the number of members in each faction, the struggle not to finish last no longer feels as crucial, since at most you will have a single companion in your faction. It’s true that detecting them is hard, and with a dissident around it gets trickier. But my feeling is that without dissidents, the tension over who was last was much higher. Those who miss that feeling just need to ignore the dissident label on the card, treat themselves as the primary color of the faction, and set up the factions like in the original game.

Since dissidents play both sides, an additional scorable element has been added that didn’t exist in the original game: having managed to keep your faction hidden, which rewards you with three points at the end of the game. Dissidents will also be penalized with a loss of three points if they have revealed their faction card before final scoring—either due to reaching madness (which ends the game) or by revealing the card to trigger the endgame when they have enough virtual points that would be consolidated upon revealing that identity.

There is also an important change here, since in A Study in Emerald, when a player’s faction was revealed, their victory point marker adjusted immediately. Usually, this meant the end of the game, but a particular case existed when a Loyalist player revealed their identity by going mad; the game didn’t end right away, but it could trigger the end if, after adjusting points, they reached the threshold corresponding to the player count.

In Cthulhu: Dark Providence, no score adjustment is made unless the end of the game is triggered. Thus, if a cultist player goes mad, besides losing the three victory points for keeping their faction hidden, they lose the chance to update their victory point marker with elements specific to their faction, even if doing so would trigger the end of the game by reaching the target score. I don’t know, it’s a strange situation, because although everyone knows how many points that player has at all times, they cannot end the game since they cannot add their gates (something that was done in the original game). Here, we only score for cities during the game.

Another major change is the setting. While in A Study in Emerald Martin Wallace went wild mixing Lovecraftian mythos with Sherlock Holmes, vampires, zombies, and Victorian folklore, in Cthulhu: Dark Providence the tone is unified in a much more sober and pure way around cosmic horror set in the 1930s. Characters like Herbert West, Randolph Carter, or locations like the Danvers State Hospital replace Conan Doyle’s heroes, losing that chaotic and fun original amalgama in favor of a much more immersive, coherent setting close to a noir tale. I preferred the madness of the original using Neil Gaiman’s short story setting, but it’s true that now everything is more cohesive.

And as a third relevant change, the removal of the double agent tiles that caused so many moments of surprise and frustration in the first edition. Granted, it was an element that required a significant alignment of the stars. First, an agent with a player’s double agent token had to show up in one of the decks. Second, a rival had to buy it. And third, that rival had to execute an action we wanted to halt in order to reveal them as a double agent. It happened rarely, but it’s true that those were epic moments when the circumstances met. To reintroduce them in this new version, it would be enough to create a deck of cards with the names of the double agents and deal two to each player at the start of the game.

My feeling is that, although there are major changes, they manage to maintain the essence of the first edition. Given the difficulty of getting a copy of the original game, this new edition more than delivers on expectations. I still think it’s a design that any hidden-role lover should have in their collection, as we are dealing with a highly interactive design that turns every session into an epic and unique experience, packed with dramatic and unexpected twists in the final moments. The game unfolds its full potential when participants know how to camouflage their true intentions, preventing anyone from guessing the color of their secret faction from the first few turns.

The social component, the cross-arguments, and mutual persuasion attempts to forge alliances remain the vibrant core of the experience. It is fascinating to see how a game with so much eurogame management weight triggers the same dynamics of heated debate and veiled accusations that we would see in Secret Hitler (here is its tocho-review) or The Resistance: Avalon (here is its tocho-review). You constantly find yourself second-guessing others’ motives, trying to help those you think share your interests, and subtly sabotaging your apparent enemies. Keeping a cool head while successfully manipulating the perception of the rest of the players remains a priceless feeling.

It was a risky formula that in the hands of any other designer would have resulted in an incomprehensible and unplayable monster, but the British designer proves once again to be touched by a magic wand when structuring this system. The big advantage of this new release is that it solves a historical problem: while getting a copy of the first edition of A Study in Emerald had become a pipe dream that required shelling out obscene three-digit figures on the second-hand market, Cthulhu: Dark Providence presents itself as a fully accessible product that democratizes this brilliant game structure without losing an ounce of its original essence.

It is necessary to point out that, due to the enormous number of unique effects and exceptions handled by the different types of cards, first games can occasionally stall over rules questions. Having at least one player at the table who masters the interaction of effects is highly recommended to maintain a fluid pace and resolve any doubts on the fly.

You probably have an idea by now, but this is a game that works best at four or five players, as it generates that cooperative dynamic between players when they don’t know which faction they belong to. It is true that this new version works better at three players, but the reality is that in this configuration, the hidden-role experience is diluted too much.

The replayability is spectacular. delegating the weight of the game’s development to player psychology and mutual distrust already gives it a massive lifespan, but if we add a variable card market and cross-loyalties, we get a title you can play dozens of times without showing signs of exhaustion.

Let’s talk about production. We find cardboard elements of a good thickness, though the punchboard quality could be improved (you have to be careful when punching out the stands). The stands for the agents stand out negatively. They are highly impractical and obstruct visibility on the main board, plus they don’t disassemble easily. In the end, you leave the bases aside and just use the standee tokens (an option for people with a 3D printer to manufacture alternative supports). The cards, however, are of very high quality, with a nice thickness, linen texture, and great snap. The influence cubes are translucent, with a color selection that is perhaps not the most suitable (I would have used green instead of orange). The rulebook is well-structured and includes enough examples to resolve potential doubts.

Regarding the visuals, we find Lovecraftian cosmic horror combined with the sophisticated elegance of 1920s Art Deco. The cover stands out for its gloomy atmosphere and touches of pulp noir style, where electric lights and deep shadows frame historical figures of an American alternate history facing the threat of ancient monstrosities. In the game components, this aesthetic is refined notably: agent cards show period portraits wrapped in the iconic golden and geometric filigrees of the Jazz Age, while the main board adopts a melancholic sepia tone that evokes old postcards and criminal investigation archives. It is true that the baroque style and contrasts of the original game board were more stimulating, but we cannot say this is a bad job.

And let’s wrap this up. Cthulhu: Dark Providence is a fascinating design that combines deck-building with interactive area majority control and hidden roles that take over the gameplay dynamics. The millimetric management of turn tempo, the subtle placement of influence, and constant bluffing to protect our secret identity allow for matches of brutal psychological tension, where paranoia and suspicion completely take over the table. Although the massive number of unique effects and exceptions on the cards can initially stall the pace over doubts, and the new faction system subtly dilutes the agonizing pressure of not finishing last, its tactical depth and overwhelming interaction make it an irresistible proposition. A brilliant title that manages to transform a management eurogame into a vibrant and dark exercise in cunning, betrayal, and survival in the shadows. For all this, I give it a…