Table Pouch: Conspicuous Cultists

Conspicuous Cultists is a Lovecraft inspired, pocket sized, solitaire game of resource management, cult building, and Eldritch secret seeking. You'll shuffle up a deck of randomly selected event cards that will be slightly different every time you play. Will you uncover dark secrets and hidden knowledge, or will your dark obsession get the best of you!

For this, the first installment of Conspicuous Cultists (we hope to bring you more in the future), the 3 dark secrets you can aim towards are inspired by the Lovecraft stories Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Statement of Randolph Carter, and the Chambers story The King In Yellow. We also have 2 additional stories unlocked by the successful Kickstarter funding that are based on The Doom That Came to Sarnath, and At the Mountains of Madness.

The entire game fits in a box the size of a deck of poker cards, which folds open to give you all the rules and tips you need in order to play. Then it quickly folds back up and fits back in your pocket to take on the run.

To set up a game of Conspicuous Cultists you'll make a semi-random deck of 14 cards from the 63 present in the game box. You'll pick a starting resource pool, and then you can begin. The resources are divided into 5 types: Relics, Money, Cultists, Persons of Interest, and Suspicion.

You then will reveal cards from the top of the deck and pick one of the two to three options available on the card. This will cause you to do things like pay or gather resources, remove the card from your deck, add new cards to your deck, or roll a dice to see what might happen. Some of the cards will lead you through a chain of events (by adding new cards to your deck) that will ultimately allow you to unlock a dark secret, such as a pact with the Deep Ones. When you get all the way through your deck, you'll shuffle it and keep going. This means that part of the challenge of the game is remembering which trials and obstacles are in your deck that you haven't come across yet, so you can try to save your resources for them. Or alternatively gambling that you'll be able to replenish your resources before you encounter those trials. You may remember the cards in your deck, but you'll never know what order they'll come up.

You'll also have to balance your resource income and expenditures. Too many resources and the gods may curse you for your gluttony. Too much suspicion and law enforcement may raid your cult. But too little of anything, and you won't be prepared for what comes next. As bad as a curse of greed or a law enforcement raid may be, the wrath that the Old Ones pour out upon those who approach their secrets unprepared can be far worse.