What Order Did the Cthulhu Wars Expansions Actually Release In?
Cthulhu Wars grew in four Kickstarter waves between 2013 and 2019, starting with a four-faction core box and adding factions, maps, and neutral units with each campaign, before the catalog moved to direct sale as an ongoing expansion ecosystem. The short version: 2013 core game, then three more Kickstarter waves through 2019, then a growing direct-sale catalog of faction packs, Great Old One packs, Cosmic Terrors, and the standalone Duel line that continues today.
If you're trying to make sense of a 50-plus-product catalog, this is the backbone to hang it on. Not every single pack has a publicly confirmed release date, so where the record is fuzzy, this guide gives you the sequence and the category, not a guessed-at month.
What Was in the Original 2013 Cthulhu Wars Kickstarter?
The first wave. A single 30-day Kickstarter campaign ran June 7 to July 7, 2013, and funded the core box that everything since has built on: four asymmetric factions, colossal Great Old One miniatures, and a map of a ruined Earth. That's where the game started, full stop.
The four factions in that original box are the same four that ship in the O4 Edition today: Great Cthulhu, Crawling Chaos (Nyarlathotep), the Black Goat (Shub-Niggurath), and the Yellow Sign (Hastur, the King in Yellow). Worth repeating because it trips people up constantly: the Yellow Sign is a core faction. It's never been sold as a separate expansion. Anyone telling you otherwise is wrong, or thinking of a different product entirely.
What Came Out of the Second Kickstarter Wave?
Growth, not a rebuild. The second campaign, generally referred to as Onslaught Two, expanded the young catalog beyond the core four factions and set the pattern the game has followed ever since: a strong base box, plus an ongoing wave of add-on content sold to the same collector base.
This is also roughly where the wider expansion categories most collectors know today, faction expansion packs and the neutral Great Old One packs, started taking shape as an ongoing product line rather than a single funded set. Petersen Games hasn't published a pack-by-pack release calendar tying every individual product to a specific campaign, so rather than assign guesses to a wave, this guide treats "which faction or pack shipped in exactly which year" as unconfirmed where the public record doesn't say. What's solid: the shape of the catalog, faction packs plus Great Old One packs plus map content, was already forming by this point.
What Did Onslaught 3 Add to Cthulhu Wars?
A new faction with a genuinely different design. Onslaught 3 ran July 17 through August 14, 2017, and it's the campaign that funded the Ancients, along with new maps and neutral units. The Ancients are still the only faction in the entire Cthulhu Wars lineup with no Great Old One anchoring it; the faction wins through tricks, traps, and board pressure instead of a big summon moment, which made it a genuinely new kind of expansion rather than another faction built on the same template.
Third time through the Kickstarter cycle, and the pattern held: a similar-sized backer base (over 4,100 people) funding new content for a game they already owned. That consistency across campaigns is a big part of why the expansion ecosystem got as deep as it did.
What Was the Final Onslaught, and How Does It Connect to the O4 Edition?
Cthulhu Wars: the Daemon Sultan closed out the original Kickstarter run in 2019, marketed at the time as the final wave of the campaign sequence. It ran a shorter 14-day window, April 23 to May 8, and it's where the Daemon Sultan faction came from. This is also the campaign the current core game's name traces back to: the "O4" in O4 Edition reflects that fourth and final Onslaught wave.
Four campaigns, 2013 to 2019, funded well over $3.8 million combined. After 2019, the model shifted. Rather than waiting on the next crowdfunded wave, Petersen Games started selling the growing catalog directly through its own store, which is the version of the ecosystem collectors shop today.
Which Faction Packs Rounded Out the Roster After the Kickstarters?
Seven expansion factions currently sit alongside the four core ones: Windwalker, the Daemon Sultan, Opener of the Way, the Ancients, Bubastis, the Sleeper (Tsathoggua, God of Entropy, a separate faction from Great Cthulhu), and the Tcho-Tchos. Each one is sold as its own faction expansion pack, with its own miniatures, spellbook, and win condition.
The Tcho-Tchos deserve a specific flag here because they're one of the most misunderstood entries in the whole catalog. They're their own human cultist faction, not the cultists of the Yellow Sign, and they don't field Hastur's forces at all. Their gimmick runs the other direction: they interfere by worshipping other players' Great Old Ones rather than fielding one of their own. If you see a summary online calling them "Yellow Sign's cultists," that summary is wrong.
Where Do the Great Old One Packs, Cosmic Terrors, and Duel Fit in the Timeline?
These sit apart from the faction lineup as their own strand of the ecosystem, added to the direct-sale catalog as it matured rather than tied to a single Kickstarter date each. There are four Great Old One packs today. Pack 1 ($39.99) carries the biggest roster with five entities: Abhoth, Chaugnar Faugn, Cthugha, Mother Hydra, and Yig. Yig is neutral, not a faction; any player can recruit him into whichever faction they're already running. Pack 2 ($34.99) adds four more entities, Pack 4 ($29.99) adds three, and Pack 3 is a single-figure release, Gobogeg, a Great Old One Sandy Petersen created specifically for Cthulhu Wars rather than pulling from Lovecraft's own fiction.
Cosmic Terrors ($29.99) came later still, and it introduced something the catalog didn't have yet: a third entity class called Terrors, distinct from both factions and Great Old Ones. The pack holds three miniatures, the Great Race of Yith, the Dhole, and Quachil Uttaus. Quachil Uttaus in particular gets misfiled online as a Great Old One constantly. It isn't one. It's a Terror, and it's also sold on its own as a standalone blister.
Cthulhu Wars Duel arrived as a different kind of release entirely: a standalone two-player game built on the same design language as the main line, not an expansion of the O4 Edition. Duel has its own small expansion pair, Duel: Extinction and Duel: Reunion, and neither one attaches to the multiplayer game. If you're shopping the 2-8 player O4 ecosystem, Duel content isn't part of that shopping list; it's a separate track for a two-player table.
What's the Fastest Way to See the Full Timeline in One Place?
Start with the four Kickstarter waves as your spine: 2013 core box, Onslaught Two's catalog growth, Onslaught 3's Ancients faction in 2017, and the Daemon Sultan closing the run in 2019. Everything since has shipped as an ongoing direct-sale catalog on top of that foundation, faction packs, Great Old One packs, Cosmic Terrors, and the separate Duel line, rather than through another crowdfunding campaign.
For a collector piecing together a full set today, that history mostly matters as context. What matters more for your next purchase is what's currently in stock and what pairs well with what you already own. The Cthulhu Wars Expansions collection at Petersen Games lists the current faction packs, Great Old One packs, Cosmic Terrors, and Duel content side by side, sorted by what's actually available to order right now.
Building from the ground up? The Cthulhu Wars O4 Edition is the current core box, the direct descendant of that original 2013 campaign, and it's the one product every expansion on this list assumes you already own.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Cthulhu Wars Expansion Timeline
What order were the Cthulhu Wars Kickstarter campaigns released in?
Four campaigns, in this order: the original core game (June 7 to July 7, 2013), Onslaught Two (which grew the catalog beyond the core four factions), Onslaught 3 (July 17 to August 14, 2017, which funded the Ancients faction plus new maps and neutral units), and Cthulhu Wars: the Daemon Sultan (April 23 to May 8, 2019, marketed as the final wave and the source of the Daemon Sultan faction).
When did Cthulhu Wars Onslaught 4 come out?
There wasn't a separate "Onslaught 4" Kickstarter under that name. The O4 Edition takes its name from the fourth and final Onslaught wave, the 2019 Daemon Sultan campaign, and represents the current production run of the core game sold directly by Petersen Games rather than through another crowdfunding campaign.
Is the Yellow Sign an expansion or part of the core Cthulhu Wars game?
Core. The Yellow Sign has shipped in the base box since the original 2013 campaign, alongside Great Cthulhu, Crawling Chaos, and the Black Goat. It has never been sold as a separate faction expansion.
How many faction expansion packs are there for Cthulhu Wars?
Seven, on top of the four core factions: Windwalker, the Daemon Sultan, Opener of the Way, the Ancients, Bubastis, the Sleeper, and the Tcho-Tchos. Each is sold separately and adds one complete playable side with its own spellbook and units.
Does the release order matter for what I buy today?
Not much. Every faction pack, Great Old One pack, and the Cosmic Terrors pack works with the current O4 Edition regardless of when it originally released. The one exception is Cthulhu Wars Duel: its expansions only work with the standalone Duel game, not the main multiplayer line.
Sources: Dicebreaker's Cthulhu Wars overview; Cthulhu Wars on BoardGameGeek; the Cthulhu Mythos on Wikipedia.
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