The High Priests

The High Priests are one of my favorite expansions. My son Arthur thinks that you should ALWAYS play with High Priests. But what do they add, exactly? When you play with High Priests, every faction has one extra unit in their pool – the Priest. He is a Cultist who costs 3 Power. So far, not too impressive. But he also has the special ability that you can sacrifice after any player’s action (or anytime during the Gather or Doom phase) and immediately earn 2 Power.

Some of you are thinking, “He costs 3 Power, and you only get 2 for sacrificing him? What a gyp!” But he is actually really good. I’ll explain in the form of an example:

Let’s say you are playing Great Cthulhu in a normal four player game. You start with 8 Power, as in every game. You spend 1 to move a cultist to the south Atlantic, and then build a gate. You guard the gate with a Deep One, and then recruit a High Priest. That uses up your Power. The next turn begins. Now, in a normal game, you’d start the next game with 10 Power if you had built a Gate (experienced players know not to build TWO gates in the starting turn, lest Crawling Chaos or Black Goat come to visit). But now you start the next turn with 11 Power, because you have 7 Cultists (including the priest), plus two gates. PLUS you can now immediately sacrifice the High Priest for 2 Power more, thus starting the second turn with 3 Power.

In a normal game, if you wanted to awaken Cthulhu on the second turn, that would be all you could do. But with the simple addition of a High Priest, now you can awaken Cthulhu and still have 3 Power left – that’s terrifying to your enemies.

Other factions can perform similar feats – the High Priest adds flexibility and emergency resources to everyone, and makes it much easier to summon your Great Old Ones. Try them out!