Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins Preview (Gen Con 2026)
Transcript
Hello my My name's Sam Bailey. I am the designer of Old Ones Origins, uh which is a reimagining of a game I did years ago for Fantasy Flight called Forbidden Stars. Um but this is uh set in the Lovecraftian universe where you are the ancient old ones at the dawn of time uh struggling over control of a fledgling creation. So, you have uh Cthulhu, uh you have Hastur, you have Yag-Sothoth, and you have Shub-Niggurath. So, you'll be taking the role of one of these great powerful eldritch entities. The game takes place over the course of three major phases. The first phase is the scheme phase. You have a set of schemes um dependent on your avatar and your faction.
So, you'll all pick a scheme, put it down. The schemes have the initiative, uh which is when you're going to go during the round. So, the lower initiative means that you'll go sooner. Then you have an effect that goes right away, um and then you have something that lasts the entire entire round. So, this allows you to kind of frame what your strategy is going to be for that round. If you want to You're like, "Oh, I really need to shore up a weakness." You can play a card that does that. If you want I want to be more aggressive, you can play something like the Stars Align, which gives all your units flying, which means they can jump through the void and attack from all from all directions. After that, you have the plotting phase where you're going to choose your actions um and put the represented by these markers and put them face down onto the board so your opponents know kind of where you are, but they don't know what you're up to.
Each region has five different slots where you can place your tokens. Uh if you place in the center, that means that you're definitely going to be going in that region. A region is a tile. But, other people can't preempt you. So, you're going to be able to go here effectively resolve your token here before anyone else can. You can also go on these edges here. When you resolve the token on the edges, they can go to any of the regions that are adjacent. But, if someone else is here and you want to resolve this, you have to go underneath them and wait until you go. You can't do that for yourself, though. So, if you're in the center, you're going to have to resolve that before you can resolve this here. You can't go underneath there and just delay.
So, once everyone places five tokens down, that's when you start resolving them one at a time. When you Yeah, as I said, when you resolve a token, you get to choose where it goes. The different actions that you can do are Ascension, which is buying upgrades. You can buy upgrades for your units to make each unit more powerful. You can buy structure upgrades that make each of your structures stronger. And you can buy conflict upgrades, which add new cards to your conflict deck that make you stronger during combat. You have Conjuration, which is how you summon more units onto the board and build structures. Structures, you have an outpost, but you can upgrade an outpost into a Acropolis like so.
And when it takes damage, the first damage would just downgrade it and the second damage would destroy the outpost. Uh then you have the Dominion token. So, Dominion allows you to gather resources, but also allows you to break enemy seals. That's the object of the game cuz that is representative of your opponent's power uh control over the reality. So, if you break a seal, you get a victory point and you release a little of their power back to them in the form of an ancient sign. Ancient signs are powerful resources that you can use to spend as any type of basic resource, but you can also spend three signs to flip over your avatar and add them to the board. And that's how you get your big guy on the board and they start wrecking havoc.
I missed the Kickstarter by one day.
Should they get destroyed, they just go and take a nap and you can re-summon them later. While they are dormant, on the dormant side, you have a special ability that is different for each avatar. Um and whenever you play your empowered token, which is the one that's got this little teeth symbol around it, that's when you would trigger that. For example, the King in Yellow, um he likes having people bow to him. So, if you activate this in a region, uh everyone who has who everyone who's in the region has to exhaust one of their minions in the region, including your yourself, um but everyone gets a resource for doing so. Because, you know, the King in Yellow is a magnanimous leader, you know. He makes everyone bow, but then he gives them a pittance in return.
Lastly, uh you have invasion. Uh invasion allows you to move uh your soul your guys from one region into another and then start a conflict. When you start a conflict, uh it goes like this. You first roll dice, depending on the dice total of all your units there. Um these are all just makeshift um makeshift dice. So, I'm really looking forward to seeing what the final version has with nice big symbols and etching and all that sort of stuff. Um but you add the symbols to your meters, your dials here. Um and then you will play up to two cards from your conflict deck, uh which will add symbols. So, if you want to be more aggressive, you play something that gives you more attack. If you want to be defensive, you play something that gives you more shields.
Then doesn't affect um like Auster has a lot of effects that will exhaust opponents' units. Um and then you, once everyone plays two cards, then everyone has a chance to cast spells. And you cast spells by paying the cost on the card, either by spending magic from your dial or by exhausting guys and the contributing their power to the magic. So, it's them, you know, adding to the ritual. Once everyone's cast spells, you then assign damage by spending damage from your meter to like I'm doing five damage to you, and you can respond by spending shields, um adding the shields that are on your cards, and then by exhausting your guys to add their shield value.
Once that is done, any damage that's left over is one guy removed. So, three damage is dealt, and three people would be removed then. If anyone survives the conflict, each faction who does adds one fracture token to the area, which is a representative of these gods clashing and actually rending reality. At the start of any future conflicts here, you deal one damage for each uh fracture token that's there. So, things get more deadly and dangerous as the game progresses and could wipe off, you know, little guys before the conflict even begins. You continue to play until someone reaches enough victory points to trigger the end of the game. Um if you're playing a short game with four players, for example, it would take four victory points.
Uh a long game would be six victory points. An epic game would be eight victory points. But, the that also determines which schemes you use because you add more and more schemes depending on the length of the game, and they get more and more epic the longer the game. So, this also serves as a turn around clock for the game cuz you can only use each scheme once. So, once you've used up all the schemes, that's, you know, in an epic game, 10 rounds, game over. And then you just see whoever has the most victory points there. Should there be a tie, the tiebreaker is how many seals you have on the board. So, protecting your seals and keeping them intact means that you win the tiebreaker. Should this also tie, um reality doesn't form in a in the right way, and Azathoth wakes up. And as all of reality is Azathoth's dream, and so should he wake up, everything ceases to exist, and everyone loses.
Any questions?
When is this available?
Oh, yes. This is going to come to Gamefound in September. Um so, should should you back it, you get this conflict marker as a backer gift. Um yeah, very excited to get get this game out there. It's been a long road. Seven years.
Jeez.
Yeah.
All right. Thank you so much, Samuel.
Yeah, thank you.