Cthulhu Wars: The Ancients Faction Explained — The Only Faction With No Great Old One

What Makes the Ancients Different From Every Other Cthulhu Wars Faction?

The Ancients are the only faction in Cthulhu Wars with no Great Old One. No Cthulhu sleeping under the map. No Hastur waiting to flip the table. The Ancients win through tricks, traps, and board pressure, and they carry more of those tools than almost any other faction in the game.

Every other Cthulhu Wars faction builds toward a climax. You summon your Great Old One, you exploit what it can do, and the board reshapes around that moment. The Ancients skip that entirely. Their power doesn't come from one enormous entity; it comes from constant pressure, forcing opponents to play defense when they expected to race you to power.

That design decision is intentional, and it makes the Ancients one of the most genuinely distinct expansions in the game's lineup. Cthulhu Wars designer Sandy Petersen (whose design history runs from Call of Cthulhu to Doom) has always built faction expansions around a core mechanical philosophy, not just a theme. The Ancients' philosophy is interference. You're there to make every other player's plan harder to execute.

What Is the Ancients Faction Expansion Pack for Cthulhu Wars?

It's a complete faction add-on that puts one new player on the board. The Ancients Faction Expansion Pack includes everything needed to run the Ancients in a full Cthulhu Wars session: miniatures, spellbook, faction sheet, and the full complement of faction components.

This is an expansion. You'll need the base game to play. The current base game is the Cthulhu Wars O4 Edition ($249), and that's the version this faction is built to play alongside. If you're new to Cthulhu Wars, start there first. The Ancients are at their best when you already know what the base factions are doing, because their whole game is about getting in the way of it.

The expansion is priced at $59.99. Check the product page for current availability and to add it to your order.

How Do the Ancients Play Without a Great Old One?

Differently than you'd expect. Most factions in Cthulhu Wars follow a pattern: build up your forces, activate your spellbook abilities, summon your Great Old One, and convert that entity's unique power into points. The Ancients don't have that escalation path. What they have is the deepest bag of tricks in the faction lineup.

The core identity is disruption. The Ancients don't try to outrace other factions to power. They slow everyone else down. Tricks and traps that interfere with opponent plans, deny expected plays, and make the table hostile for everyone else. In a game where most factions telegraph their strategy by which Great Old One they're building toward, the Ancients telegraph nothing. That ambiguity alone is worth something.

Because there's no Great Old One anchoring their identity, the Ancients spread their power across multiple smaller tools rather than stacking everything on one win condition. A seasoned Cthulhu Wars player going up against Cthulhu knows what Cthulhu wants to do. Going up against the Ancients, they don't have the same shortcut. Every opponent at the table has to do more work to read what you're building toward.

That makes the Ancients a genuinely multiplayer faction. In three-, four-, and five-player games, your ability to be an inconvenient nuisance to multiple players at once is far more valuable than in a two-player game. You're not trying to outrun one person. You're slowing a whole table down.

Are the Ancients Right for You?

Depends on your play style. If you love the dramatic Great Old One moment, the Ancients won't give you that. There's no centerpiece summon, no single massive entity to control a region. If that's what you want from Cthulhu Wars, other faction expansions are a better fit.

But if you're the kind of player who watches the table, finds the moment when two opponents are committed to the same region, and knows exactly when to make someone's plan fall apart? The Ancients are built for you. They reward players who think reactively and tactically rather than through a fixed escalation script.

Experienced Cthulhu Wars collectors should note: the Ancients represent a faction that genuinely doesn't exist elsewhere in the game's ecosystem. No Great Old One is a design choice, not a gap. Every other faction expansion gives you a variation on the "summon something enormous" template. The Ancients' absence of that template is what makes them worth adding to a serious collection.

The Cthulhu Wars community on BoardGameGeek has discussed faction depth and the Ancients' place in the lineup at length. The faction has a reputation for rewarding players who put time into understanding the board from everyone else's perspective. That reputation is earned.

H.P. Lovecraft's fiction is the foundation the whole game draws from. The cosmic horror framework, where entities old enough to predate human comprehension treat our existence as irrelevant, maps well onto what the Ancients bring to the table mechanically. Lovecraft's mythos gave Sandy Petersen the raw material. The Ancients faction takes the idea of ancient, patient, unknowable threat and turns it into board mechanics.

Is the Ancients Expansion Worth the Price?

For the right player: yes. The $59.99 price puts it in line with other major Cthulhu Wars faction packs, and what you get for that price is a faction that no other expansion replicates. One complete player slot, a full set of premium Petersen Games miniatures, and a play style that will change how everyone at your table thinks about threat assessment.

For collectors building out the Cthulhu Wars ecosystem, the Ancients slot is a specific gap. You can have the full base game lineup plus a dozen other faction expansions and still feel the table playing out predictably. The Ancients break that. That's genuinely worth a slot in a serious collection.

If your Cthulhu Wars setup is built on the O4 Edition and you want the faction that will generate the most table talk, the most "wait, what just happened" moments, and the most genuine surprise? Pick up the Ancients Faction Expansion Pack from the Petersen Games store and check the product page for current availability.