Call of Cthulhu Friday: Mythos Card Game

In the early 90’s I decided I wanted to do some Call of Cthulhu with my regular D&D group. It had been a few years, and I was just chomping at the bit to do a new campaign. But most of my regular players, including my two long-time female players Terry and Planet Janet, did not have much interest. Pretty much none of my players at the time were even aware of the great works of Mr. Lovecraft.

But like other genres I would introduce to this group (the main other one being Champions), it only took one game to win them over. Both Terry and Janet came up with great characters, and often when we had a D&D session planned they would request I make it CoC instead. I remember one great game where only the three girls in my group showed up, so I just let them wander the map of Arkham, poking their heads into antique shops and bookstores, shopping at various clothing boutiques, and having lunch in a diner, all the while being stalked by agents of the evil they were then facing.

When I discovered the Mythos Card game and began collecting them, Terry and Janet got on that boat as well. Soon we all had enough cards for various theme decks, and for a couple of years we spent many a Saturday or Sunday afternoon doing tequila shots and playing session after session. We seemed obsessed with the game at one point (although I think it was only I who managed an almost complete set of all the releases).

In Mythos, you selected one of various Lovecraftian heroes, such as professors, students, journalists, and doctors to be your character de jour (one of my faves was The Pragmatic Hobo). The deck consisted of location cards, event cards, phobia cards, and monsters. In a nutshell, you would place various location cards to indicate your current spot (or that you were travelling there or leaving there), and use its resources to be able to lay out artifact and tome cards, allies, and use the gate at that location (if it had one) to summon monsters to your “threat” that would attack another player at the end of a full round of playing. Both damage and sanity losses were what could take you out of the game. Ultimately, you had a variety of “story cards” that you held on to, because there were various conditions you had to fulfill in order to get the points off that adventure. Get enough points, and you won. Or you could just say “screw the story” and try to take out the other characters exclusively with your threats and phobias. Sanitarium locations existed as places you could go rest and recover some sanity. Appropriately for a Lovecraft themed game, some asylums had a risk of monster attack or some kind of botched medical procedure.

According to Wikipedia, In 1999 Pyramid magazine named Mythos as one of The Millennium's Best Card Games.[3] Editor Scott Haring said "Mythos was a very deserving game, with great art and gameplay that involved more than just monsters fighting each other."

In the end our sessions sort of petered out as we did other things, such as focus more on actual rpg games rather than a card game. I actually think Planet Janet stopped playing because I kicked her ass so thoroughly in almost every game. She claimed it was because I had more cards than her, but that wasn’t really the case. I was damn good at the game. Terry was a good player, but she just made her decks too big, restricting access of cards she really needed to get to in order to fulfill her stories.

Last year Terry came over to play Mythos a couple of times, but then she got hooked on my Champions of Norrath and Baldur’s Gates Playstation games, and ended up preferring those to anything else we might do whenever she stopped by.

But I have fond memories of this card game, in a way I don’t really for Magic the Gathering, which I think I have outgrown. I’ll always be up for more Mythos down the line. Do you have a deck?