The Night I Lost on Doom and Won Anyway

The last time I sat down across from Black Goat, I was the one playing her, and Abhoth was in the box.

Read Abhoth's faction text sometime. He's an Independent Great Old One, 4 Power to Awaken, once your own Great Old One is on a Controlled Gate, and his Filth ability lets you spend 1 Power to drop a zero-combat Monster token in any area on the map. Zero combat. Free shields. I got Shub out on Turn 2, Awakened Abhoth on Turn 3, and started scattering filth tokens across contested gates across half the board. I had my sixth spellbook unlocked before anyone else at the table had cracked their fourth, and a six-spellbook Shub-Niggurath is not a piece you bring to a fistfight. She's a piece you bring to someone else's fistfight. I Avatared into contested areas where my own filth tokens were already waiting, declared combat, and let those filth tokens absorb every wound that came my way. It was glorious. It was unfair in the way only Black Goat is unfair — the kind where the table looks down at the board and then up at you and silently agrees that you have broken something they did not know was breakable.

I didn't win that game. Not on Doom points. But I won in my heart, and that — as it turns out — is a phrase I'm going to make you sit with for a while.

Because that's what Black Goat is. She's not the faction that wins by stacking Elder Signs in a tidy column. She's the faction that wins by being felt. In every area, on every flank, in the back of every other player's head. And by the time the doom track catches up to what she's actually been doing, the game is already hers, or already lost, and either way the table remembers her.

This is how you play her without losing your mind. Or your Great Old One.

Black Goat Doesn't Fight You. She Moves In Next Door.

Great Cthulhu was the tortoise with teeth. The bruiser who grinds you down face by face. Black Goat is the opposite animal. She doesn't fight you. She moves in next door, plants a garden, and three turns later you realize the garden has eaten your driveway.

Her win condition is omnipresence. She wants units in every area, not stacks, not armies, just bodies. A cultist here. A Dark Young there. A Ghoul that wandered in after a battle three players away. The spellbook unlock conditions tell you everything you need to know about her: have units in 4 areas, then 6, then 8. The game is literally asking you to spread like a fungal infection, and her toolkit is built for it.

Her strengths are the things you'd build a faction around if you were trying to design one: more Power than any other faction, because your most powerful monster, the Dark Young, can both control gates and generate Power under The Red Sign; The Thousand Young spellbook makes Shub's entire unit roster cheaper on top of that; the best long-range repositioning tool in the game with Avatar; a Ritual economy via Blood Sacrifice that quietly out-earns most factions if you let it ride; and, when neutrals are on the table, a parasitic instinct for picking the ones that make her even more everywhere. How is that fair?

Her weaknesses are real. Shub herself is fragile. She doesn't hit like Cthulhu, she doesn't soak hits like Yog-Sothoth, and her combat value is built out of cultists and gates that you keep losing to other people's bad ideas. She has exactly one battle spellbook, Frenzy, and without it her cultists swing combat zero. And worst of all, her wins are invisible to most of the table for most of the game. That's part of the strategy. But it's also why bad Black Goat players feel powerless on turn three: nothing seems to be happening, even though everything is.

The Cthulhu guide called him the tortoise with teeth. Black Goat is the vine with teeth. You don't see her growing. And then one day you can't open your front door.

Seven Ways to Be Everywhere at Once

Black Goat has six spellbooks and an Avatar action, and they all do the same thing in different shapes: they make her more present. Here they are in the order you should care about them, not the order they're printed on the card.

Avatar, the centerpiece. Black Goat almost always has cultists in her hand. Unlike Great Cthulhu, whose Devolve runs dry the second three Deep Ones are on the board, Black Goat's Avatar is a renewable resource. Avatar consumes a cultist on the way in. And she has more cultists. Always.

Here's how it actually plays: an opponent thinks they've protected a gate by parking a cultist and a monster on it. They feel safe. They shouldn't. You spend 1 Power, declare Avatar, and announce the area. Now they have to choose. Swap Shub with the monster? Then Shub Captures the cultist as an Unlimited Action, the gate is abandoned, you Recruit a fresh cultist at the now-abandoned gate, and you walk away with the gate, no combat. Swap Shub with the cultist? Then the cultist relocates to your start area and the monster is still sitting on the spot, but the gate is abandoned the moment the cultist leaves. Monsters don't hold gates, cultists do. You Recruit a fresh cultist into the area. You take the gate. The monster just stares at Shub, wondering if it can handle upwards of a dozen combat dice.

And here's the thing: if that monster can handle her combat dice, you're Black Goat. Fertility Cult is your faction ability, and summoning monsters is an Unlimited Action. Most players think Fertility Cult is useless. Sandy doesn't give useless abilities. He gives utilities carefully constructed to be overpowered in the right situation, and Black Goat appearing across the map, summoning a Dark Young or two, and suddenly having an army sounds pretty overpowered to me. Combat in Cthulhu Wars gives you nothing. It's just the price you pay to remove someone else's units from somewhere you want to be, and it costs 1 Power on top of whatever you spent getting there. With Avatar, Black Goat usually doesn't pay that price at all. She just shows up, recruits, and takes the gate. There is no version of this with two units on the gate where the defender wins. They needed three. They didn't have three. The gate is yours.

This is the gas pedal. Use it.

But Avatar is also why Black Goat is the faction most reliant on its Great Old One. Take Shub off the board and the entire engine seizes. No more Avatar. Every monster suddenly costs more without Thousand Young supporting it, your Dark Young stop counting toward Shub's combat under Red Sign, and your cultist supply was already running thin because you'd been Avataring all game. Many a Black Goat player never recovers from losing Shub. (I have, on occasion, been Many A Black Goat Player.) Protect her like you mean it. Avatar her out of fights you don't need to be in. Aggressive, never reckless.

The Red Sign. Dark Young create and control gates. And each one provides +1 Power during Gather Power and adds +1 to Shub's combat. Read that again. You're not summoning a monster, you're summoning a gate-controlling, power-generating, combat-buffing Dark Young that opponents can't capture because it isn't a cultist. This is the economic backbone of the BGG-meta opener and the reason you take Red Sign before you take anything else in most games.

The Thousand Young. This is the discount engine, and it is also the spellbook everyone misreads. Most players hear "your monsters cost 1 less" and assume Black Goat's monsters are cheap. But here's the thing: they're not. Let me do the math out loud:

• Ghouls are free with Thousand Young. Free is great. Free is time-marking good. Summon one for zero Power just to occupy a new area while you watch the table.
• Dark Young cost 2 with Thousand Young, and they give you +1 Power, control gates, and buff Shub's combat. That is the best 2-Power spend in the entire game.
• Fungi cost 1 with Thousand Young. And they do nothing. They don't control gates. They don't generate Power. Their entire reason to exist is to enable Ghroth.

So here's the rule, and write it on the inside of your skull: if you are not building a Ghroth strategy, Fungi stay in the box. Every Power you spend on a Fungi is a Power you didn't spend on a Dark Young, and that math never gets better.

Blood Sacrifice. As long as Shub is in play, eliminate one of your cultists during the Doom Phase to gain 1 Elder Sign. That's it. That's the whole spellbook. It is the most quietly broken Ritual economy in the game, a cultist for an Elder Sign, and the cultist comes back to your pool to be Recruited next turn. With two gates and Blood Sacrifice, a normal Ritual nets you two Elder Signs and four Doom (2 doom + 2 doom + Elder Sign for a Great Old One + Elder Sign for Blood Sacrifice). Page 4 will get sentimental about this. For now, just know: Blood Sacrifice is the spellbook that turns Black Goat from an annoyance into a contender.

Frenzy. Your cultists swing 1 die each in combat. Defensively, this turns a "lone cultist" gate from bait into a trap. Someone walks a monster in for a cheap capture, you declare battle, and the dice come up Pain. Offensively, it lets you actually fight with what you have. You'll find out on Page 2 why Frenzy is the spellbook Bubastis forces you to take, three turns earlier than you wanted to.

Necrophagy. After any battle anywhere on the map, even one you weren't part of, you can teleport Ghouls into the battle area, and each one inflicts an additional Pain on both sides. With Thousand Young online your Ghouls cost zero, so you're spending nothing to disrupt other people's fights and end up with a Ghoul somewhere new. It's not the centerpiece of the playbook. It's the interrupt button you press when a battle goes long and you want to wreck both sides.

Ghroth. Read this carefully, because most players get it wrong. Ghroth is a situational tool, not a strategy. Here's the test: look at how the other players are arranged. If they're spread thin and their cultists are sitting on isolated gates, then forcing them to eliminate three cultists means three abandoned gates you can walk into. That is when Ghroth wins games. But if the table is stacked, if every player has two or three cultists piled on each gate, they'll shrug, eliminate two off the bottom, Recruit them back next turn, and you've spent two Power to inconvenience nobody. Most of the time, Ghroth is a bad deal. Read the board before you take this spellbook. Most games, you skip it.

Your First Two Turns Depend on the Bag

There are three openers worth knowing. Which one you pick is decided by what's still in the box.

If neutrals are out of the bag, base game, no expansions, or your group plays no-neutrals on principle, you play the safe optimal. If neutrals are in, the most important move of the game happens before turn one. And if you're feeling brave (or stupid, the line is thin), you awaken Shub on turn one and apologize for the rest of the night.

Opener A, "Sacrifice Hour" (the BGG Meta)

The Board Game Geek thread on Black Goat strategy reached rough consensus on this one years ago, and it has aged into the correct default for no-neutrals games. It looks boring on paper. That's the point.

Turn 1 (8 Power, 6 Cultists, 1 Gate):

1. Sacrifice 2 cultists from your start area as your Action (-2 cultists). This fulfills the "eliminate 2 cultists" spellbook requirement. Take The Red Sign.
2. Recruit a cultist (-1 Power → 7).
3. Summon a Dark Young at your gate (-3 Power → 4).
4. Move the Dark Young to an adjacent area (-1 → 3).
5. Build a gate with the Dark Young (-3 → 0). Because of Red Sign, the Dark Young controls the gate.

You end Turn 1 with 2 gates, 5 cultists in play, 1 Dark Young controlling a gate, and 10 Power coming in next round (4 from gates, 5 from cultists, 1 from the Dark Young). One spellbook earned ahead of schedule. Zero exposed positions. Nothing flashy.

Pick this when neutrals are off the table, when the table is aggressive, or when you want to play the entire first half of the game wearing a "boring, optimal" name tag while you set up Blood Sacrifice and dogpile late.

Opener B, "The Real Opener Is Before Turn One"

This is the one every other faction guide is going to skip, because it's specific to Black Goat and most of the action happens off the board.

When neutrals are on the table, the most important ongoing move you make is the First-Player-token metagame. Every round, whichever faction has the most Power at the end of Gather Power gets the First Player token, and the First Player chooses whether play runs clockwise or counter-clockwise, which cascades into the Doom Phase and determines who gets first crack at the Monster and Terror loyalty cards that round. Worms of Ghroth is a Terror loyalty card. Whoever picks first during its Doom Phase takes it. That's the neutral you're fighting for.

Abhoth, the other prize, works differently. Independent Great Old Ones aren't picked from loyalty cards at all, they're raced to. Any faction at the table can Awaken Abhoth by paying 4 Power, but the prerequisite is "your own Great Old One in an Area with a Controlled Gate." Which means the race to Abhoth is a race to get Shub out fast, onto a gate, with 4 Power to spare. Treat Abhoth's prerequisites as your Turn 2 priority, not as an afterthought, and you'll beat everyone else to him unless the table has already figured out what he does for you.

So do two things. First, on Round 1, negotiate. Trade favors. Promise a non-aggression pact you might even keep. Offer to leave somebody alone in a region they wanted anyway. Whatever it takes to get the First Player token on the Doom Phase where Worms of Ghroth is the card you want. Or, short of that, position yourself with enough Power at the end of Gather Power to take the token outright. Second, plan your first two turns backwards from "Shub on Turn 2, Abhoth on Turn 3." Every opener decision should serve that sequence.

And then, because no plan survives contact with the board, remember the rule that I think is the single most important thing in this entire game.

Have an idea how you want to play. Then look at the board and throw your plan out the window if it doesn't make sense.

We're going to come back to this in the next section, because it's the principle that decided one of my favorite Black Goat games.

Opener C, "Goat First, Apologize Later"

The all-in. T1 Shub. Blood Sacrifice on the doom track from the very first round. Lights up everything early at the cost of being broke on Turn 2.

Turn 1 (8 Power):

1. Sacrifice 2 cultists for the spellbook requirement. Take Blood Sacrifice.
2. Awaken Shub-Niggurath (-8 Power → 0). She comes in at your gate. Your two sacrificed cultists are also the cost of the Awakening, since Awakening costs you 2 cultists and 8 Power, which is why this opener is so tight; the cost lines up exactly with your spellbook trigger. Shub is on the board. Blood Sacrifice is unlocked.
3. Doom Phase: Blood Sacrifice fires. Eliminate one cultist, gain 1 Elder Sign.

You enter Turn 2 with around 5 Power (1 gate + 3 cultists), Shub on the board, an Elder Sign already in the bag, and very little else. A weakened Shub with almost no Power and a thin cultist supply is food, specifically, she's food for the factions whose spellbooks unlock through combat kills. Great Cthulhu with Devour. Opener of the Way hunting an enemy Great Old One to tick a book. Crawling Chaos sniffing out a Harbinger payday. These are the factions that will look at a broke, understaffed Shub and see a free meal, and the big BGG-thread complaint about this opener boils down to exactly that: "you'll have a massive scramble on Turn 2 with almost no Power if anyone targets you." That complaint is correct. Take this opener when you trust the table to be distracted. Or when you've already accepted that you're going to spend Turn 2 playing defense and Turn 3 onward riding the Blood Sacrifice drip into a comeback.

These three openers send completely different signals. Sacrifice Hour says "I'm small, I'm boring, leave me be." The Real Opener Is Before Turn One says "I made friends with the right people before the dice came out." Goat First says "I have decided that this game starts on Turn 3 and I am willing to suffer for it." Pick by table, not by taste.

Have a Plan. Then Throw It Away.

Most players hear "be ready to abandon your plan" and assume it means react to disasters. Nyarlathotep just ate your gate, so now you have to do something else. Yellow Sign desecrated your start area, so the plan is in pieces. That's not the hard one. That one is easy. The plan is on fire and you can see the fire.

The hard one is the plan that is working too well in a quiet game.

Here's the game I keep coming back to. Base game, no expansions. I drew Black Goat. I sat down expecting a knife fight, planned a safe Sacrifice Hour opener, and started laying my cultists out for a slow build. Then I noticed something. The rest of the table wasn't coming for me. They weren't coming for each other, either. Everyone was building. Nobody was raiding. The whole table had decided, without saying so, that the first turn was going to be a peaceful one.

So I tentatively built a second gate. Nobody pushed back. So I built a third. A third gate on round one, with Black Goat. Most strategy guides would call that suicide. They'd be right, in a normal game.

But here's the thing, and this is the part most players never internalize, Black Goat building three gates on round one is worse for everyone else than them letting me. Three gates means I'm running away with area control before they're even online. They had to come at me on turn two, and by the time they did I had Red Sign, two Dark Young controlling gates, and a Power lead I never gave back. I would have played it differently if Crawling Chaos had been at the table. I don't want to hand Nyarlathotep an easy Harbinger off my undefended gates, and he farms vulnerable factions for free Doom. But Crawling Chaos wasn't there. So I devastated that game. Not just in my heart, where I normally win. But at the table, with Doom points and everything.

The lesson: read the table for what it actually is, not what you thought it would be. Sometimes the chaos is silence.

A few more principles, faster, all Black Goat-specific:

• Avatar discipline: be aggressive, never reckless. Avatar is the gas pedal, but Shub is the engine block. Every Avatar should cleanly gain you a gate, a spellbook, or a kill. If you're Avataring into a coin-flip fight, you're feeding the table.

• Cultist supply is your real economy. Cthulhu's Devolve runs dry once three Deep Ones are on the board. Your Avatar doesn't. Recruiting cultists is 1 Power at any gate you control, and with Dark Young generating extra Power under Red Sign, you can afford to spend cultists every turn and still come out ahead. Spend them like they're coming back, because, for 1 Power apiece, they are.

• Be loud everywhere. Lead nowhere. Top three of eight on the doom track is the dream. Visible Doom leadership is the trap. The table dogpiles whoever is ahead, and Black Goat's whole shtick is being unobviously ahead. Stay in the pack until the last possible turn, then spike.

Here's how that mindset shapes the arc of an actual Black Goat game.

The Three Acts of a Black Goat Game

Early Game (Turns 1-2): Plant the Garden

• Goal: Neutrals selected (or skipped, depending on the game), opener executed cleanly, 2 gates secured by end of Turn 1, decision made about whether Shub comes out on Turn 2 or Turn 3.

• Playbook:

  • Build area count via Dark Young gate creation under Red Sign. They're the most efficient piece in your kit and they don't get captured.
  • Take The Thousand Young as soon as you reasonably can if you're playing a long game. The discount compounds for the rest of the game.
  • Shub on Turn 2 is the standard line. Turn 3 is acceptable. Turn 4 is late and means you're behind on combat for every spellbook involving Shub being in play.

• Example: Sacrifice Hour opener resolves on Turn 1 with Red Sign in hand. Turn 2, you Awaken Shub (-8), Recruit a cultist (-1), summon a second Dark Young with Thousand Young pending (-3 or -2), and move pieces to set up your fourth area for the next spellbook trigger. End of Turn 2: Shub on board, 2 gates plus a Dark Young gate, units in 4 areas, three spellbooks, and a Doom Phase that just earned you Power and progress.

• Risk: Single-cultist gates. Bubastis and Crawling Chaos both eat lone cultists for breakfast. If your area-spread leaves any gate guarded by exactly one cultist with no monster backup, you've drawn a target on it.

Mid Game (Turns 3-4): Spread Like the Infection You Are

• Goal: Units in 6 to 8 areas, Blood Sacrifice unlocked and firing every Doom Phase, Avatar active and disciplined, four to five spellbooks in hand.

• Playbook:

  • Avatar onto weak enemy gates, anywhere a defender has only one cultist plus one monster, that gate is yours for the price of an Action.
  • Use The Red Sign aggressively to expand the Dark Young footprint. Every new Dark Young gate is +1 Power and +1 Shub combat and an uncapturable area presence.
  • Keep at least 2 cultists in your reserve pool at all times. Avatar consumes them. Recruit replenishes them. The loop only works if there's slack in it.

• Example: An opponent has parked a Fire Vampire and a single cultist on a gate two areas over from where Shub is sitting. You spend 1 Power on Avatar. Doesn't matter which unit they swap, either way, the gate gets abandoned (swap the cultist, it leaves; swap the monster, Shub Captures the lone cultist) and you Recruit in to take it. No combat. The whole exchange cost you one Power and one Action, and their forward position just evaporated.

• Risk: Becoming the visible leader. If your Doom is top-2 going into Turn 4, the table will turn on you and your fragile Great Old One will be the first thing they target. Stay in the middle of the pack. Let someone louder draw the heat.

Late Game (Turn 5+): Rituals, Avatar Steals, and the Quiet Win

• Goal: Blood Sacrifice every Doom Phase, opportunistic Avatar steals into anyone running away with the game, survive the dogpile that isn't coming because you were never the visible leader.

• Playbook:

  • Ritual every Doom Phase. With two or more controlled gates plus Blood Sacrifice, you're netting two Elder Signs plus the doom from the Ritual itself, and one of those Elder Signs costs you a cultist that comes right back.
  • Avatar onto whichever gate is closest to whoever's leading the doom track. Even a failed steal forces them to commit defense they didn't want to commit.
  • Necrophagy Ghoul-bombs into other people's battles to disrupt the player who's about to spike, both sides take an extra Pain, and your Ghoul ends up in a new area for spellbook progress.
  • If you don't already have it, and the player count is high enough to make it worthwhile, this is the turn you go for the "Share Areas with all enemies" spellbook. Look at your existing pieces, Ghouls left behind from Necrophagy, filth tokens scattered by Abhoth, Cultists from old Avatar steals, and figure out how few units you actually need to Move to satisfy the condition. At 7-8 players the spellbook pays 1 Power per enemy player on top of the unlock, so the Move Action is usually free or net-positive. Page 3 does the full math. Run the check every late-game turn.

• Risk: Sometimes the dogpile does come, or sometimes another player runs away with the game so hard that quiet accumulation isn't going to catch them. In those games you have to break the "stay invisible" rule and spike hard. Knowing when to break it is the difference between fourth place and first.

And every one of those late-game Rituals, every Cultist eliminated, every Elder Sign added, is going to come back to that Abhoth game from the cold open. But that's a story for Page 4.