Customer Reviews

A Touch of Evil Something Wicked Expansion

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With Something Wicked, Flying Frog delivers a fantastic expansion set to A Touch of Evil, the Supernatural Game. You get more of everything you loved about the base game. There's new Heroes, a new game board (map), new villains and new cards. The new map of Echo Lake links up via the Crossroads to the base game's Shadowbrook Village and offers a secret passage between Shadowbrook Manor and the Echo Lake Monastery. This you can access at a cost 1 investigation and your normal movement for speedier between-board travel. The new heroes are all pretty cool and so are the villains. Now you can fight the Banshee, Bog Fiend, Gargoyle and Unspeakable Horror as well as a hooded cult called The Crimson Hand that can turn up anytime you linger at the Monastery. If you are knocked-out on the new board, you revive at the Monastery instead of the Town Hall.

The Monastery offers mostly safe location cards as well as a chance to buy new Monastery Items (which focus on beefing up your Spirit skill but also offer melee combat, healing and allies). The Inn has a lot of neat items but also many haunted room skill tests and late-night assassins and monsters bursting into your room trying to kill you. You can also heal 1 wound for free there or pick up 2 investigation tokens, your choice, before drawing an Inn location card. The most dangerous new location is The Forgotten Island, difficult to get to and even more difficult to escape. The island offers the threat of extreme danger and curses but some of the best items in the game (including an enchanted pistol that's +3 combat!). There are three new dangerous locations: The Bog, North Docks and South Docks, where you can gain either an Event card (good) or Mystery card (bad) depending on your die roll, just like The Marsh, The Fields, The Covered Bridge and The Crossroads on the base game map. The Echo Lake road continues off-board "to the coast" and so you will be able to expand the game to a third map board in a future expansion (supposedly due out in 2010).

The new villains are tougher than the base set. The Gargoyle forces you to discard cards from location and event decks plus can turn you to stone via the new Curse of Stone card; his gargoyle minions are flying monsters that move to random locations instead of moving normally. The Bog Fiend is a Creature From The Black Lagoon type of slimy primeval reptilian horror. He has really annoying mosquito swarm minions that make you lose 1 investigation token for every wound you do to them. He can also place swamp markers on random locations; if a swamp location gets a second swamp marker, it becomes Sunken and you can't access that location deck or discard pile anymore! He also regenerates wounds every fight round. The Unspeakable Horror is obviously patterned after Cthulhu from Arkham Horror, a tentacled alien-demon god. He works through the Crimson Hand cult to set up summoning circles at random locations that spawn minions; if a second summoning circle would be placed in a space, it instead rips open a void. These voids into the horror's home dimension allow you to teleport between them and you can (if you wish) explore them, but if you do, you might have to prematurely fight the Unspeakable Horror! Like the Bog Fiend, this is another brutal villain to bring down who is constantly messing with the map and has a lot of minions to spawn (demons and cultists). The final villain in this expansion is the Banshee who has some nasty powers of her own and tough barrow shade (ghost) minions. She also gets a unique human minion, The Grounds Keeper, who reappears at a random location if he is defeated but not killed in a fight. I like all the villains in this pack and they are definitely much harder than the ones in the base game. That said, they are more fiddly (more stuff to remember) and we often made serious mistakes (such as failing to spawn minions) while trying to implement them the first time we fought them. You have to pay a lot more attention to the Villain card AND its associated Minion Chart to run these new monsters but I think it adds a lot of fun.

The new heroes are all pretty good and begin with 3-4 Wound points, the standard amount, and varying levels in the four different skills (Combat, Cunning, Honor and Spirit). You get Eliza (Witch Hunter), Brother Marcus (Monk), Valeria The Eternal (Vampire), and Captain Hawkins (Soldier). Brother Marcus can use his Spirit instead of Combat skill to fight without needing one of the rare location cards or expensive Town items that let you do it, but if you want to go Combat with him, there is a +2 Combat Flail at the Monastery you can buy. Captain Hawkins can summon extra Militia markers to the board and can move existing Militia around. Eliza is great at fighting Demons, Ghosts and Vampires and gets rewards for finding out the Town Elder's secrets. Valeria the vampire can regenerate wounds after winning a fight but can't use or carry certain items or cards that are Holy or have a bonus against Vampires. She is immune to Curses, though. Frankly, I found her regeneration power vastly inferior to Isabella von Took, the Noblewoman Hero from the base set or Lucy Hanbrook from A Touch of Evil: Hero Pack One. Valeria also can't use guns. The two best heroes in this expansion are Eliza and Brother Marcus; Captain Hawkins and Valeria are mediocre and nobody's ever excited to play them a second time when we randomly draw for new heroes each game.

Also new in this set are Resolve tokens which you can add to the Town Elders to give them an extra Wound point. This helps keep them alive before and during the Showdown phase with the Villain because you can discard a Resolve token to negate a Wound or Murder of an Elder who has one. There are new optional rules to make the game more challenging, including an expanded Cooperative Mystery Phase Chart (quite challenging!). Solo play rules are also included (for a single Hero or if you want to play several as a team).

As always with Flying Frog games, the map board and components (cards, die-cut counters, miniature Hero figures, etc.) are top-notch: attractive and sturdy. A few homebrew house rule tokens and counters are provided, always a nice touch, such as a pair of boats to get to the Forgotten Island (one for each dock).

There is no doubt in my mind that if you like the base game you will want to get Something Wicked. A Touch of Evil is easier and a bit more broad in its appeal to horror fans and casual gamers than something like Arkham Horror. Arkham is a great game, too, but it's a lot more rules-heavy and unforgiving than A Touch of Evil.

I also recommend purchasing A Touch of Evil: Hero Pack One and there are two Flying Frog web exclusives worth picking up: "The Allies" and "The Madness" promo card sets that add a lot of cool new cards to the game, like Dueling Pistol, a card that allows you to use your Honor instead of your Combat to fight monsters, or Cavalry Horse, which gives you +1 Combat and +1 Movement.

The Something Wicked expansion of A Touch of Evil adds a number of new aspects to the original game, and is well worth acquiring. The additional game board doubles the original, which was a bit small. The new locations and related cards also add a lot of fun to the game.

New characters and new villains bring more options. A variant with characters starting in different locations would be good.