S-P-O-N-G-E: Fight the Evil (2001)

S-P-O-N-G-E: Fight the Evil is a customizable card game based on the adventures of S-P-O-N-G-E (see http://s-p-o-n-g-e.com), an online role-playing organization devoted to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos (it took me quite a while to find out that "SPONGE" stands for "Stopping Powerful Organisms from N Gulfing Everything"). It is nominally a two-player game but can handle more players quite readily.

In the game, each player is a SPONGE Historian, helping out on an investigation. The Historian position at SPONGE is often a short-lived one, and the "Inactive Files" are full of past Historians that didn’t make it. The object of the game is to last longer than any of your fellow Historians.

Each player also represents the forces of Evil that threaten to thwart SPONGE at every turn. This means that you will be playing cards on your opponents as often as you play them on yourself.

Every Historian has his or her own deck of cards, comprised of seven categories: Locations (where your investigation takes you), Characters (people you encounter), Items (stuff you find), Weapons (stuff you find that will kill Beasts), Beasts (an assortment of creatures bent on killing you), Tomes (knowledge man was not meant to know) and Events (things that just happen to happen).

Each turn you normally get two Action Points. It costs an Action Point to draw a card, play a card or perform certain Special Abilities --discarding is free, however. Some card abilities cost more than one Action Point (some cost more than two!). Unused Action Points are passed on to the next player.

Icons appear on the cards and act to guide play --each card brings icons in play, and each card requires certain icons to be in play before it can be played.

There are numerous ways to lose the game. Basically, any action that would put you into one of the Inactive Files (Known Dead, Presumed Dead, Asylum, Missing, Resigned, Inaccessible or Other) also puts you out of the game. The only exception is the Reanimated file. If you die and get reanimated, you can keep playing the game, but you will suffer certain restrictions, making "winning" more difficult.

This is the game based on the SPONGE website: http://s-p-o-n-g-e.com