Forum Overview :: Overboard!

Cthulhu: Dark Providence- Dominion with a theme and player interaction by Nick Spaz 01/30/2026, 1:50pm PST Dominion is the grandfather of (non collectable) deck building board games. I've always hated it. Themeless games put me to sleep, and it's the most "multiplayer solitaire" game I can think of. Showing up for a game of Dominion feels like accepting a Netflix n' chill invite only for you both to settle for jacking off to porn instead. Dark Providence is a deck builder that solves that. Part area control. Part auction. Part hidden loyalty. The setting is one faction of Cthulhu cultists trying to summon their gods to destroy the world and one faction of investigators trying to thwart them. Face up cards on the table are for purchase, each spot being a U.S. city to fight for control over. You place your main currency of influence cubes on cards. Then on your next turn, if you have the most influence on that card you can claim it, giving everyone else a turn to respond and place their own influence on it. Parking your "agent" pieces on a spot grants you passive influence bonuses so recruiting, moving, and assassinating them becomes a thing. So already you have more player interaction and theme than Dominion. An additional twist is the hidden loyalties. Everyone at the start gets dealt a hidden cultist, investigator, or in-between "dissident" loyalty. The majority of victory points are awarded by controlling cities and are always open information. But there are a bunch of actions (opening or sealing gates, assassinations) that anyone can do, but only score points if you belong to a certain faction. This stuff is not scored until the end when everyone reveals their loyalty. But there's another interesting twist on THAT. First, same loyalties doesn't mean same team. Only one player can win. Second, the spread is unpredictable. There very well might not be evenly matched loyalties. 2 cultist 2 investigator? 2 cultist, 1 investigator, 1 dissident? Could be anything. "Wouldn't that be unfair?" The final cool twist is that the player with the fewest victory points at the end automatically eliminates anyone with the same faction loyalty. A cultist with a billion points will lose if the last place player also happens to be a cultist. This means while there might be 2 players trying to do cultist-scoring things against only 1 investigator, the investigator doesn't have to outscore them both; just make sure one of them comes in last. The closest the game ever comes to cooperation is a point leader begrudgingly trying to prop up a loser of the same faction. I call it the "annoying kid brother" factor. Another interesting aspect is also its only real downside. There are about half a dozen triggers that end the game, leaving it largely up to the players to end when one thinks he can win. It's interesting there are so many ways to end, but it gets confusing for new players. I'd say it's mandatory to print out multiple copies of the manual backside that summarizes all these and pass them out to every player. One shame is the altered theme. It's is a reimagining of an older game, A Study in Emerald, based on the Neil Gaiman story. Set in the late 19th century, a world where the great old ones are the monarchs of Europe and have been ruling for hundreds of years. The Restorationists want to bring them down, the Loyalists want to prop them up. Instead of opening and closing gates, you're traveling Europe assassinating or protecting the GOO royals. Sherlock Holmes as Gavrilo Princip and Moriarty as a bootlicker? Blowing up the 1% with dynamite? Fuck yeah! I dunno if it was a licensing issue or "too real" chickening out after the Brian Thompson killing, but the generic cultists vs investigators is less interesting. Fuck it, this was a great opportunity to modernize it and have the billionaires of the world as the objectives! If you wanted Dominion with a theme, player interaction, and using J. Edgar Hoover's connections to send Harry Houdini on an assassination mission against Wyatt Earp, this is your game.

Cthulhu: Dark Providence- Dominion with a theme and player interaction by Nick Spaz 01/30/2026, 1:50pm PST