Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker.
Whether it’s on-screen or on the tabletop, the subgenre of horror games based in, on and around the Cthulhu mythos is more crowded than the bottom of the Gardner Farm well.
The pantheon of Old Ones created by horror writer and horrible person HP Lovecraft is likely most familiar to pen-and-paper roleplayers through Call of Cthulhu, the RPG originally published in 1981 that is to tabletop horror what Dungeons & Dragons is to fantasy. (In Japan, the game’s recent resurgence has even seen it replace D&D as the go-to example for tabletop roleplaying as a whole.)
Four decades and seven editions later, the RPG has star-spawned the separate Arkham Horror Files series that includes the likes of Eldritch Horror and Mansions of Madness, multiple video game adaptations, and numerous tabletop successors, including a short-lived Magic: The Gathering-style collectible card game and spin-off RPGs.