A Windfall Arrives in the Mail

The complete set of the new collectible card game Call of Cthulhu.

A couple of weeks ago I got a phone call during a break in a seminar. It was from Game Informer magazine. Evidently, I entered a drawing for a complete set of Fantasy Flight Games' Call of Cthulhu, a collectible card game (CCG) based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. I don't remember doing so. Well, I won and last week the cards arrived, more than 235, neatly arranged in a binder.

I'm not a huge player of CCGs, mainly because of the cost of collecting them, but I like them because they distill a lot of imaginative play into a very limited format. The cards serve a variety of functions, from acting as agents for the player to imposing new rules or modifying existing rules. In Call of Cthulhu, for example, there are no resource cards like the "land" cards in Magic: The Gathering. Instead, any card in one's hand can become a resource by rotating it and placing it under a "Domain" card (simply a place for storing resources), where they normally cannot be retrieved. This forces players to sacrifice potentially useful cards.

This idea works superbly in a non-collectible game called San Juan, the card game version of Puerto Rico (one of the most popular games out of Germany in recent years). Puerto Rico is a fairly complex game about raising, processing and shipping agricultural products. It involves multiple game boards, tons of cardboard tiles, wood bits, money, victory point chips, etc. Miraculously, San Juan reproduces much of mechanics of the original game using only one deck of cards. Any one card can serve as a building (buildings modify the game rules), money or a produced good. It's probably the finest example of economical design I've seen in a non-CCG game.

A CCG is, in a way, a form of the self-modifying game (sometimes called self-amending). These are games in which the rules of the game are created, destroyed and/or modified during play. Usually, the game's central mechanic is the inventing, changing or discarding of the game's rules. I'll write more on this topic in a future post, but I've long been fascinated by self-modifying games. If this sounds intriguing, check out this site about Nomic, a game invented by Peter Suber.

Meanwhile, I hope to find the time and an interested party to play Call of Cthulhu. I have every card, including the rares, but only one of each. Still, I should be able to construct a couple of pretty good decks.