Enjoyed The Traitors on TV? Try this: Temple Of Cthulhu Party Game Review

Temple Of Cthulhu

WBG Score: 8

Player Count: 3-12

You’ll like this if you like: Social deduction party games with hidden traitor roles

Published by: Luckish Entertainment

Designed by: Simon Hessling Oscarson, Erik Nilsson

This is a free review copy. See our review policy here

Some social deduction games make you sit through night phases, close your eyes, wait for an app to tell half the table what to do, and then spend the next ten minutes trying to remember who supposedly murdered whom. Temple of Cthulhu strips almost all of that away. Deal the cards, discover your secret allegiance and start lying to your family.

Temple of Cthulhu is an independently produced social deduction card game for three to 12 players. It comes from a new designer, has launched with a limited first print run, and there are already plans for future expansions if the game finds its audience. You can find out more at TempleOfCthulhu.eu, and I hope it does find that audience because underneath the Lovecraftian artwork is a beautifully simple idea that becomes much better once everyone understands how to exploit it.

Temple of Cthulhu Review: Easy to Learn, Hard to Read

Everyone secretly belongs to one of two teams, the Investigators or the Cultists. Each player receives a hidden role and starts with five cards, which they look at before shuffling and placing face down in front of themselves. Somewhere among those cards are Elder Signs, Cthulhu Idols and, depending on how you build the deck, either harmless junk or various Effect Cards.

The Investigators want every Elder Sign revealed. The Cultists need to prevent that from happening or uncover every Cthulhu Idol instead. If either of these conditions happens, the game immediately ends and one side claims victory. Nobody knows exactly who is on their side, which means every useful claim comes with the immediate question of whether the person making it is telling the truth.

To begin, one player begins with 'The Pick'. They choose another player and select one of their face-down cards, but before doing so everyone is free to talk. You can claim you have three Elder Signs, insist you have nothing useful, accuse someone else of lying, or desperately encourage the table to draw from somebody else instead. None of it has to be true.

4-player set-up

Once a card is chosen, it is revealed and remains visible. The player whose card was selected receives the pick themselves and chooses the next card to reveal from any other player other than themselves. You keep doing this until the same number of cards have been revealed as there are players in the game. It doesn't have to be one card per player; they could all come from just two players. It's simply who the person with the pick chooses each time. All the Idols and Elder Signs revealed are placed into separate groups so they can be tracked. Other cards revealed are put into a separate pile. All other as yet unrevealed cards are shuffled up and redistributed back to each player, now with one fewer card. This continues between rounds unless a win condition is met, otherwise the number held by each player gradually falls until every player has just one card each. That creates a lovely tightening effect because early claims can be vague, but later on, everyone has enough information to start remembering who said what and questioning why somebody made a particular choice. If you get to the later rounds the game really starts to sing.

Junk, Effects and Chaos

The game can be kept remarkably simple. You can use the required Elder Signs and Cthulhu Idols and fill the rest of the deck with junk cards, which literally do nothing. We started this way, and it makes complete sense for your first game because everyone can concentrate on bluffing and deduction without worrying about additional powers.

By our third game, though, we had effectively removed the training wheels. And when I taught other groups later, I always started with zero junk cards. You can replace as much junk as you like with Effect Cards, and I ended up preferring a deck with no junk at all every game, instead using exclusively the effect cards. The powers rarely blow the game apart, instead nudging information around the table, letting you inspect cards, changing who receives The Pick, or interfering with cards that have already been revealed.

The All-Seeing Rabbit, for example, lets you inspect all but one card in another player's hand. That gives you useful private information about whether their previous claims were nonsense without ever providing total certainty. But you can of course share what you learnt with the group. But who do you trust!?

Other effects can redirect The Pick, swap cards or undo progress made during the round. The Gauntlet of Fate lets you draw three times in succession, although its effect immediately ends if you uncover an Elder Sign or Cthulhu Idol. These cards add tactical disruption without overwhelming the actual social deduction, which is exactly how these sorts of powers should work. More importantly, how somebody chooses to use them can reveal just as much about their allegiance as the cards themselves.

There is even an optional Spiritual Bomb card if your group wants something nastier. Reveal it and that player is removed from the card-playing part of future rounds, although they can still talk and accuse everyone else. But before they go, they get a huge final decision over whether their remaining cards are exposed or returned to the deck unrevealed to be used in later rounds, making their departure potentially very important. I often remove this card as I don't love its affect. but it can be fun if it comes at the right time. I am just not a fan of players being eliminated in the earlier rounds.

Learning How to Lie

The actual rules take just a few minutes to understand. However, teaching someone how to play Temple of Cthulhu is considerably easier than teaching them how to play Temple of Cthulhu well. Our biggest hurdle was not understanding The Pick or remembering the win conditions, but figuring out what on earth we should actually say to each other when the game begun, and I think most new players will find this.

That is normal for social deduction games. New players often sit there wondering what they are supposed to bluff about until somebody tells an outrageous lie, gets away with it and suddenly everyone understands the assignment. Temple of Cthulhu improves noticeably as the same group plays repeatedly because you begin learning not just the game, but each other.

Who talks too much when they are lying? Who suddenly becomes quiet when they feel guilty? Why is someone desperately trying to make you choose their card? And why is the person who claimed to have two Elder Signs now doing everything possible to stop anybody drawing from them?

My son found the deduction difficult initially because the game gives you very little hard information about people's allegiance. In something like Werewolf, certain roles can generate concrete clues. Some players can math out the game with this limited information if you can correctly piece it altogether. Here you are primarily reading claims, actions, behaviour, and the cards gradually becoming visible. This takes a round or two to come into play. Round one, you are all going off pretty much nothing!

That will not suit everyone, but it is also one of the game's strengths. There is no role that suddenly solves half the table for you. You have to watch people, remember what they said and decide whether their behaviour matches the story they are trying to sell.

Five Minutes Later... Again?

What surprised me most was how naturally Temple of Cthulhu encouraged immediate rematches. Individual games can be incredibly quick, often around five minutes, and the first time I played with my family we played four games consecutively. The next time, with five, we immediately played another six games over the next two days. We were all hooked.

Nobody needed persuading into one more game because resetting takes almost no time. More importantly, everyone wanted another chance to prove they could read the table better. That repeated play is where Temple of Cthulhu really starts showing what it can do.

Our games actually became more tense as we gained experience. Players became better at bluffing and much more careful about which cards they encouraged others to reveal. Several games eventually reached situations where the entire result effectively rested on one remaining card, with one draw handing victory to the Cultists and another winning it for the Investigators.

Those endings are excellent. Everyone understands exactly what is at stake, yet nobody

knows who is telling the truth.

Better With More

The game worked across the smaller player counts we tried, although I would unquestionably rather play with more people. Four players worked well and five was better. We even tried three just to see whether the system survived, and it did, but at that count somebody inevitably feels more isolated because of the team structure. But there is a clever way to set up so you never know if it is two Cultists or one.

Temple of Cthulhu plays up to 12, and that is the player count range I am most curious to explore next. More people should mean more claims, more conflicting information, more questionable alliances and considerably more opportunity for people to talk themselves into trouble. Based on my games so far, this feels like a design that benefits from having more personalities colliding around the table.

You can technically play it in a relaxed setting around the sofa, but I think a table works better. Having everyone's face-down cards clearly visible makes the information easier to follow and gives the game more of a communal focal point. The physical footprint is tiny, though, so there is plenty of flexibility in how and where you play.

The Yellow Brother

Once everyone knows the basic game, there is another lovely wrinkle available in the Yellow Brother. This optional role replaces a standard Cultist and introduces the Yellow Sign card. If that card is revealed during the game, the Yellow Brother remains loyal to the Cultists.

If the Yellow Sign survives hidden until the final stage, however, the Yellow Brother changes allegiance and becomes an Investigator. Suddenly somebody who may have spent most of the game helping the Cultists has reason to want the opposite result. That uncertainty gives everyone another behaviour to watch and another card whose appearance matters.

You can technically use the Yellow Brother without adding the Yellow Sign, or even when it may be in, or maybe not. No one knows! Then the Yellow Brother might actually end up being an Investigator for certain in the final round, but won’t know for sure beforehand, since the Yellow Sign hasn’t been revealed before the final round. The fun comes from watching players mysteriously encourage or discourage the discovery of one particular card while nobody is completely certain why. It adds another layer without making an already simple game difficult to follow.

Simpler Than Werewolf, and Better for It

Temple of Cthulhu reminded me of a simplified Werewolf, but I actually found its immediacy refreshing. There is no app required, nobody needs to close their eyes, there is no lengthy night phase and nobody spends half the game waiting for their special role to become relevant. Everyone is involved almost immediately.

That accessibility made it easy to put in front of my entire family, and they all enjoyed it. The mechanics rarely get in the way of the conversation, which means the game becomes about the people rather than the rules. That is exactly what I want from social deduction.

The bigger consideration is personality. Temple of Cthulhu needs people willing to talk, accuse, bluff and occasionally lie directly to somebody they love. Quiet players or people who dislike deception games may never completely click with it because the cards deliberately do not create all of the entertainment for you.

Pros

• Extremely quick to learn, teach, reset and replay.

• Gets noticeably better as players learn how to bluff and read each other.

• Flexible deck construction lets you choose between pure deduction and more chaotic effects.

• Excellent tension when games come down to the final few hidden cards.

  
  

Cons

• Players wanting concrete deduction clues may find the information too behavioural.

• Three players works, but the team structure feels stronger with a bigger group.

• Very dependent on the personalities around the table.

• First-time players may initially struggle to understand what useful table talk looks like.

  
  

Final Thoughts

Temple of Cthulhu is one of those games where the first play teaches you the rules and the next few teach you the actual game. Mechanically, almost nothing is difficult. The skill comes from learning how much information to reveal, when to lie, who to trust and whether somebody's behaviour matches the role they appear to be playing.

That simplicity made it incredibly easy to put in front of my family and friends, and the fact we repeatedly played several games back-to-back says more than any complicated analysis could. We enjoyed it immediately, but I enjoyed it more once the junk cards disappeared, the Effect Cards arrived and everyone became comfortable enough to start properly deceiving each other.

It will not suit everybody. Temple of Cthulhu asks the players to create much of the entertainment themselves, and anyone wanting deduction generated through hard evidence may find it too loose. Give it a table full of people willing to bluff, argue and remember exactly what you claimed a few minutes earlier, though, and this small independent card game becomes wonderfully tense, very funny and dangerously easy to play again and again!