Elder Sign (Fantasy Flight Games) turns the sprawling world of Arkham Horror into a tight dice game you can finish in an hour or two. One to several players take the role of investigators working together against the game itself. You explore adventures, collect Elder Sign trophies, and try to seal the portal before the Ancient One awakens. It is pure cooperation — everyone wins together or everyone loses together.
The dice and how you roll
Elder Sign is played with a pool of custom symbol dice rather than numbered ones. The basic green dice show three kinds of results used to complete tasks:
- Investigation results — the workhorse symbol, appearing in different values, used to satisfy most tasks.
- Lore (scroll) — a scarcer, more powerful symbol many tougher tasks demand.
- Terror — a hindering symbol that can lock dice or trigger penalties on certain cards.
Better yellow and red bonus dice exist too, showing stronger results; you earn the right to add them through items, spells and abilities. On your turn you take an adventure card, which lists one or more tasks, each requiring a specific set of symbols. You roll your whole pool, assign dice that match one task, lock those dice aside, and re-roll the rest to attempt the remaining tasks. If a roll can’t complete any open task, you lose a die and roll again; run out of dice and the adventure fails.
How the game plays out
Complete every task on an adventure and you claim its rewards — often Elder Sign trophies, items, allies or spells. Fail, and you suffer the card’s penalty, which frequently means adding doom tokens to the Ancient One’s track and losing sanity or health. A clock advances as play continues; when it strikes midnight, a Mythos card fires, usually worsening your position.
| Outcome | What it means |
|---|---|
| Collect enough Elder Signs | You seal the portal — the team wins |
| Doom track fills | The Ancient One awakens — a final battle, usually a loss |
| Investigator is defeated | Lost to health or sanity — they’re removed, adding doom |
The number of Elder Signs you need, and the doom track’s length, depend on which Ancient One you face — each sets a different difficulty and special rules.
Strategy & the odds
Because it is cooperative, Elder Sign is won by smart collective planning, not individual luck. The core skills:
- Read the task order. Some adventures require tasks to be completed in a fixed sequence; others let you pick. Attack the tasks you are statistically most likely to hit first — usually those asking for plain Investigation over scarce Lore — so an early failure doesn’t cost you the whole card.
- Weigh Lore-heavy adventures carefully. Lore is rare on the basic dice, so cards demanding several scrolls are long shots unless someone has spells or bonus dice to supply them. Sometimes the right move is to take an easier adventure and leave the hard one for a better-equipped investigator.
- Spend items and allies deliberately. Clues let you re-roll dice, spells convert or add symbols, and items grant bonus dice. Hoarding them helps nobody — time them for the roll that clinches a task.
- Mind the Terror symbols. Terror results can freeze dice you badly need. Cards and abilities that cancel or ignore Terror are worth their weight; plan around which tasks are vulnerable.
- Race the clock as a team. Every failed adventure tends to add doom, and midnight brings fresh trouble. Coordinate who tackles what so the party gains Elder Signs faster than the Ancient One gains doom — efficiency, not heroics, wins.
Common mistakes
- Rolling before planning. Look at the task requirements and your available items first — decide which task each roll is aiming at rather than reacting to whatever comes up.
- Chasing Lore-gated adventures unprepared. Without spells or bonus dice, multi-scroll tasks fail far more often than they succeed; don’t feed the doom track chasing them.
- Saving resources for a rainy day that never comes. Unused Clues and spells are wasted if the Ancient One wakes. Spend to secure tasks now.
- Ignoring investigator strengths. Each character has different starting dice and abilities; match the right person to the right adventure.
- Forgetting the clock. Dawdling lets midnight and Mythos cards pile pressure on. Keep the tempo up.
Want to feel the tension of chasing a symbol under pressure? Roll a handful of physics dice in your browser and practise locking the ones you need while re-rolling the rest.
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🎲 Roll dice freeKeep reading: for a duelling, ability-driven dice game, try Dice Throne.