I was reading Chris Longs excellent collection of articles from the old CCG at his site and started to think about the role conspiracies play in the LCG compared to the CCG when I read an article about the original release of the Conspiracies of Chaos Asylum Pack at the end of the CCG where the developers clarified how they worked in a short preview. Apparently conspiracies in the CCG clarified conspiracies as belonging to the player who actually played them onto the table (only the player who played a conspiracy could activate its effect if won) while the LCG has taken the stand to not do this and just treat them as regular stories that effect everyone equally unless stated otherwise (from what has been written mostly just because of badly written rules that make it seem like this was how conspiracies should work). This made me a sad panda, why create some really interesting conspiracies that gives more ways of interacting with the basic mechanics of the game and then dilute the effort by not giving any reward whatsoever to players who give slots in their decks to those conspiracies.

Sadly, this makes many conspiracies that boost your own characters much less interesting picks for a deck, which of course is bad for the game. Lately I have begun to play them by the old CCG rules in my centacle-multiplayer games (which also has special rules for placing conspiracies over existing stories to keep the number of stories at a manageable level, which makes them even more interesting) and they have really made an impact on the game.

After reading up on the rulebook online at this site I found another really strange thing about conspiracies, you can have FOUR of each conspiracy in your deck instead of three. I presume this is just a typo of some kind (since you could have 4 of each card in the CCG it would make sense that during playtest this would at one time or another have been true for the LCG as well), especially since the rules for deckbuilding states that you can only have three of any card in your deck (not mentioning any special rules for conspiracies, those are printed earlier in the rulebook under the conspiracies heading). Since I don't have my rulebook with me I can't check if the rulebook online is just an earlier version but I can only presume that the one FFG puts up on their website is up to date. Contradictory rules also makes me a sad panda.

I share in your frustration. I am running a Cthulhu LCG league locally and our current focus is Conspiracies. There is a 'Conspiracy Theorist' effect applied to every game and the non-Conspiracy Story Cards are placed face-down and when won their effect is automatically triggered. Neutral cards are not allowed unless they are Conspiracies or have the Conspirator subtype. We are also playing the Conspiracies with the original CCG rules. The explanation that the 'Yuggoth Contract' designer Nate French was consulted and said the intention of the cards was 'your' meant 'any' is hogwash. James Hatta was the designer of 'Yuggoth Contract' and hasn't been with FFG for what a couple of years? I hope that there is a good explanation of why it has been ruled as such but what ever the true reasons are we haven't heard them yet.

I think one thing that tends to get overlooked is that since Conspiracy cards are in your deck, you always get first shot at them.

That is, when you play a Conspiracy card you usually are planning to grab some success tokens at it immediately so that you've got a lead there. I've always considered this to be an advantage. The number/type/order of icon struggles may favor your deck or faction particularly as well, since I assume you're choosing your Conspiracies for maximum benefit.

Elochim said:

I agree with your sentiment regarding the usefulness of conspiracies under the current ruling. There's hardly ever a point to include them in your deck if your goal is to create a competitive tournament-level deck.

So, sadly, the Cenacle multiplayer game variant is the only opportunity to put them to good use apart from purely casual or draft-style games.

Nate French was lead designer on the game during the switch to LCG and James Hata inherited it from him, in the ssame way that Damon stone inherited from James Hata. If Nate says that was the way they were conceived he would certainly be the one in the know regarding the foundation. Even Eric Lang who created the base game rules would not know how the game had been developed from his concept to the printed product of the LCG better than the guy who was behind it.

Conspiracies are less powerful than we thought, but less powerful and useless are not the same thing. Being the first player to make a run at them is useful, designing your deck to take advantage of whatever effect they have is useful. Hopefully we'll get some new conspiracies at some point which explore greater design space. I want to see conspiracies that play with the struggle icons or have effects that can best be leveraged by specific factions or even subtypes. That would be cool.

I need to perhaps be more clear, James Hatta designed the Yuggoth Contract Conspiracies. Regardless, I too hope that this card type will continue to be developed and made more playable in the aspects of power, theme and flavor.

Wait, when did this happen that conspiracies give both players the benefit? I remember asking this in the past and I was told that 'your' referred to the controller of the conspiracy card. I also don't see this in the FAQ.

Danigral said:

jhaelen said:

Well, that seems to me to be stupid design when you create conspiracy cards (like those in the Yuggoth contract cycle) that give all characters at a story identical icons...what's the point? It would make infinitely better sense to have cards that only give the controller the benefit. And I used to wonder why no one played them.

Though I don't disagree with the general consensus here, I can see situations where the icon bonus still matters even if both players' characters receive it:

1) A player has more characters to commit to the conspiracy.

2) A player can commit to the conspiracy unopposed, and trigger an event card or character ability by winning a particular struggle by X icons.

3) The conspiracy could potentially provide an investigation icon to a deck that doesn't have any in the first place.

Either way the official ruling turns out, I have found conspiracy cards can be quite nasty when paired with the right deck. Like a lot of cards in Cthulhu, few are truly devastating on their own, but can really shine when built around a specific concept. And now that the tournament format is officially 1 game per round, well... it only takes 3 "story" cards to win!

Yipe said:

Unfortunately, the answer is usually no. There are plenty of cards that are more worthwhile to put into your deck.

jhaelen said:

Honestly, the faction-specific conspiracies at least demand that you control the faction to trigger it, so mirror-matches would be more difficult. But if you play a house that isn't deemed competitively viable, you could probably catch a lot of people off guard.

And there is a big difference at times between what is considered tournament viable and what is tournament viable.