Games Like Eldritch Tricks

The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Innsmouth will fix that.

THE SEA HAS A HAND

You know how tricks work. Follow suit, play high, take the pile. Except one suit was removed before the deal, and those cards belong to Dagon. Every trick, he turns one face up: a number you have to beat. Clear it and the trick is yours. Fail, and he takes it — and every investigator at the table loses a point of sanity. Nothing attacks you here. The town simply keeps showing you things, and you keep being unable to stop understanding them.

SOMEONE AT THIS TABLE WANTS THE GATE OPEN

In some missions, one investigator is quietly handed a different objective. Feed the Deep One. Mark of the Void. See the Nine Fall. They still sit at the briefing. They still nod along.

EVERY GOAL. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Win exactly two tricks. Collect four Tomes. Win fewer than anyone else. Make sure Dagon takes a trick with the tide in it. Everyone can see everyone's goal. That's the easy part. They contradict each other, there are eight tricks in the round, and if one investigator misses, the mission is lost — no matter how well the other four played.

THERE IS ALWAYS A WAY OUT. IT IS NEVER FREE.

Six cards sit outside the deck. Rank means nothing to them. Suit means nothing to them. The trick stops being a contest the moment one hits the table. Relics only answer when you have nothing honest left to play. You cannot reach for the black stone while you can still follow suit. It wakes when you're out of your depth. Spells cost you a point of sanity. Always. The trump that saves the table is drawn from the same account the tide is already emptying.

TWENTY-ONE NIGHTS

Arrival. Zadok's Warning. The Esoteric Order. Blood of the Pact. Devil Reef. The Gate Beneath the Reef. A full campaign through the story, and the rules get worse as it goes. Thresholds that stop accepting ties. Trumps that cost double. Nights where Dagon leads the opening trick and you spend the round trying to take control back.

"We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea, and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei." — H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth