Hey, all! Travis here: one of the senior designers over at CMON and the co-designer on Cthulhu: Dark Providence--the other of which is the insanely talented Martin Wallace! Martin designed and published a game many of ya’ll may have heard of way back in 2013 called ‘A Study in Emerald.’ Dark Providence is a new take on that game system set in the world of Cthulhu: Death May Die. And I can’t wait to tell everyone all about it!
Since the first time I played it in 2014, Study has been one of my very favorite games of all time. It’s beyond creative. It’s beyond audacious. Each session was memorable and packed with theme. Even ten years later, I haven’t quite seen or played a game like it. It’s a deck-builder (with a board) where there are no printed costs on the cards you acquire. It’s a hidden identity game focused on factions, but there’s only ever one winner. There are cards in the game with so much flavor and impact that their text boxes cannot contain all that they are intended to do. A player can be driven to the brink of Lovecraftian insanity, yet still win the game. There’s a smidge of area control, a dash of engine-building, and a lot of multi-use cards. It’s a sandbox of cosmic horror and historical and literary references that has been out of print for quite some time.
But Dark Providence is not about a reprint. It’s an opportunity to take a decade of community feedback and reflections from Martin and apply them to something new. We wanted to improve where possible: make the game hum at lower player counts (including a solo game module), deepen the suspicion and suspense, as well as simplifying rules where possible. We also wanted to steer into the skid of the design: doubling the Mythos card count, providing players with more means to score individual points, and increasing the power level of agents and other cards. Lastly, we wanted to explore a different and darker angle of the world of Death May Die, weaving it together with historical figures and locales in early 20th Century America.