Ancient Terrible Things & The Lost Charter Review

I played this game long ago, when it first came out, and I was immediately enamored with the accessibility and fast gameplay but sadly it was almost immediately unavailable to the public as it was a popular title and had a relatively small print run. Thankfully, the game’s latest printing allowed me to snag a copy along with its expansion, The Lost Charter. The long story made short is that Ancient Terrible Things is a quick, light dice game that blends resource management, set collection and press-your-luck into a really fun little adventure. The expansion, however, adds a bit to the core game’s content while acting mostly as a travel kit with which to play the base game. The art is fun and has a style not unlike old-school comic books, which I really thought helped cement the personality of the game for players.

The premise of the game is that you play one of four adventurers seeking the secrets no man should discover (or five, if you have the expansion). This is accomplished by rolling dice, and rolling a lot. It’s very similar to Yahtzee on the surface, but it’s much deeper and has a lot of decision points that allow it to stand apart from it, and the recent spate of light dice games. There are actually quite a few competing forces which force players to make the “lesser of all evils” decisions, and this is what creates much of the tension in the game. The dice rolling, obviously, does a lot to create tension, but the real excitement comes down to having a plan and being able to execute it, despite your opponents’ best efforts to stymie you.

During play, you will find yourself moving from location to location attempting to accomplish tasks while spending resources on die rolls that allow you to purchase items and to activate special power cards which may either aid you or hurt enemies. There are overarching set collection goals as well which provide players a small point boost by having the largest set of a type, not unlike Catan’s longest road/largest army bonuses. Locations have their own powers which mostly allow players to gain or manipulate resources so sometimes the card objective in a location may actually be less important than moving to the location and activating its ability- even if you don’t believe you can accomplish the objective, which could bear a negative scoring penalty at the end of the game.

Interestingly, the end-game is a dual-timer driven event; the game ends immediately if there aren’t enough objective cards to replenish all the locations on the board, or, if too many objective cards failed to be resolved successfully, the game ends. The setup scales for two to five players, with two game lengths afforded, which is a nice touch because this game can be played in the “short” mode for a filler session, or the “long” mode if you want more meat on the bones and more time to develop your strategy. The expansion adds a fifth player and has solo rules included if you’re so inclined. The solo rules aren’t really “bolted on” per se, and they work fine, but I think you need to play with at least three players to get the most out of the design.

I think that this game is easily better than Elder Sign, which is a good comparison because they share mechanics, setting, and length. Where Elder Sign is a co-op, this is purely competitive. This game is definitely more interesting and fun. I recommend Ancient Terrible Things highly, with its only real weaknesses being that the short version is a little too truncated for my taste and there are simply too few cards in the objective deck, which could limit the replay value a little bit.

Now, the expansion is something I want to touch on before I conclude this review, because the OCD in me made me buy it without really researching it. It is a more-of-the-same expansion in most ways, as it adds a few more set collection objectives, a fifth player, and a very little bit of true expansion content which adds to the base game decks. In addition it adds the ability to trade things with opponents as well as some “obsession” cards which are player-specific special goals that need to be overcome in order to avoid negative scoring at the end of the game. Most of the new cards in the expansion are geared toward new mechanics too, which subtly changes some of the objectives’ effects on players such as avoiding negative scoring tokens upon failure and being able to bid on the opportunity to take on certain objectives. Finally, there’s a new dice type which are called into play by some new cards.

The real purpose of the expansion, however, is to provide players a convenient way to travel with the game. It includes cards which can be used in lieu of the board, and thus instead of traveling with a large box, the entire game can be stuffed comfortably into this new, small expansion box. It’s actually pretty clever, although most gamers are used to lugging around large boxes, so I’m not sure I’m bought into the practicality of it. The box does double as a dice tray, so at least there’s that.

All in all, I’m a big fan of Ancient Terrible Things, and I’m glad I got it. I’m leaning towards regret with regard to the expansion because I was really hoping they’d add a lot more content to bolster the number of objective cards. The new mechanics do add to the game and as a complete package I’m mostly happy with my purchase. It’s a lot of fun and it’s not really crowd-dependent so I think that it fits its role as “filler plus” very well in my library, and I can see it hitting the table quite often for a long time.