Call of Cthulhu LCG: For the Greater Good: The Agency’s Expansion is on the Horizon

Last week, Fantasy Flight Games posted news of the next Call of Cthulhu box set: featuring the Blackwood Agency in For the Greater Good. I get the sense we’re being deliberately paced, as The Sleeper Below was poised to hit retail stores at the same moment — and, indeed, I found in my local game store that weekend.

Some folks have remarked that a faction-centric box after Cthulhu’s Sleeper Below goes against the “pattern” of the deluxe box releases, to go from the Syndicate to Cthulhu to the Agency. My sense is there has never been a pattern, at least not a discernible one because we’re in the midst of watching the releases unfold one by one. If there’s rhyme or reason to how the schedule is laid out, beyond “the designer had a really good idea for a box theme, can we fit it in the production schedule or get it in stores for the holidays?”, we won’t be able to pick it out until much later, or Fantasy Flight decides to share their thinking.

The previewed cards suggest the Agency’s getting some new tricks, or an expansion of some tricks they’ve had previously. Government characters are getting boosts in the Military Attache and Lt. Wilson Stewart. With Stewart, in fact, all those high cost Agency characters suddenly become a lot more attractive. Yes, let’s play around with T-Men and the Foundation!

One of the Agency’s sub-themes has been attachment cards. James Logan’s notorious for coming into play armed for bear, for instance. This first preview shows a Cthulhu faction card that attaches to a story, so I’m wondering if that will be the sub-theme for all the non-Agency factions, the way everyone got Tactics in Denizens of the Underworld, and Prophecies in Seekers of Knowledge.

And Fantasy Flight can absolutely keep up giving Silver Twilight more cards than the other non-spotlight factions. That was a real delight to see in Sleeper Below. After For the Greater Good, Silver Twilight will be the last human allegiance not to have enjoyed the amount of love this current run of deluxe expansions have showered on the factions to date. Silver Twilight has a box, sure, but they’re latecomers to the midnight struggles, and absolutely deserve the kind of bump everyone else is enjoying. Especially if a new Silver Twilight box focused on making their “no hand” effects more feasible and easier from which to recover.