Reiner Knizia's Cthulhu Rising

By Fishy

From the box rear: In this deceptively simple game, players compete with their summoning and investigation tiles to complete rows and columns for valuable lines and points.

First Impressions.
The first thing that struck me about Cthulhu Rising was that it really has nothing to do with the Cthulhu Mythos at all. You do not need any prior knowledge of HPL's works to enjoy it and it you are looking for a very Cthulhu-centric game then it might be rather a disappointment. The Cthulhu name has simply been used as a way of hooking players into a simple but enjoyable game of tile placement.
Cthulhu Rising's concept is indeed very simple. Players take it in turns to place numbered tiles onto a pair of grids which make up the game board. When a player completes a line (row or column) on either grid then he or she "scores" that line, earning points formatching tiles on the grid. This could have been done with images, shapes or anything else which can be matched up but was actually done using numbers. It might, for example, have been nice to see some Mythos related images being matched rather than the numbers but this isn't important to the gameplay at all.

Gameplay.
As has been explained already, play progresses by means of tile placment. After the first two tiles have been placed the players may then place their next tile in any open space on the board and are aiming to do two things: Firstly they are trying to set up good scoring lines; Secondly they are trying to ensure that their opponent does not score those lines first. In this respect the gameplays a lot like the old favourite of Boxes, Dots, Lines or whatever it was that they called it in your childhood.
The game is therefore extremely simple and the challenge and depth comes from your opponent's mind. It is a game of wits, played against another human being, wherein the board and rules are just the media used for the contest. This may or may not appeal to a given gamer, based on their own preferences. Myself, I rather liked it.
Play continues until the board has been filled, at which point a winner is self-evident. The scoring mechanism moves a marker back and forth along a track and there is no need to compare scores at any given time, only one player will ever have one. If a player ever reaches the end of the track, at 10pts, then they instantly win the game.
Having spent an evening playing the game with a roughly evenly matched opponent I can confirm that there are some very hairy moments towards to end of any game. When all of the "safe" moves have been made and you are looking to place tiles not so much for what they gain you but for the minimum possible next-turn gain for your opponent.

Production Quality. Quite happy with this. The board is nice and solid, with brightly coloured printing, and the tiles are a decent thickness of card. I would be a bit happier with the board if the tinted background images were clearer but since they are clearly designed not to interfere with play I can't complain too much.
What I will complain about is the tile images. While each number/colour combination has it's own Mythos-themed image, they are not very clear and the font on the numbers makes it hard to tell the difference between a 6 and a 9. The first thing I did with my copy was to put each set of tiles into a dice bag so that I could draw randomly form there instead of shuffling and the second is going to be to dot the 6s and 9s so I can tell them apart.
It might have been nice to make the pictures, rather than the numbers, the primary focus of the tile-matching, adding the numbers into the corner for backup. This would also have improved the Mythos feel of the game. That minor complaint aside I was happy with what I got for my money.

Conclusion. Cthulhu Rising is fun little tile-matching game which fills a few minutes when you have nothing better to do. It plays swiftly and is good for when your attention is partly on something else, since it doesn't require full concentration all of the time.
It does seem awfully expensive at an RRP of GBP15.99 (apparently) but since you can find the game for around a tenner that's not such a big problem. My own copy was nicely discounted and I was very happy with what I paid for it. I think I would still have been happy had the paid the GBP9.99 or so that I have since seen it for elsewhere.
This is a game that all the family can play. The Cthulhu aspect can be played down for those parents, siblings and cousins who don't worship... er... I mean know about Cthulhu while the monster aspect can be played up to get kids interested. the actual mechanics are simple enough to be universal, literally anyone who can see the tiles can play this game and enjoy doing so.