Ancient Ones
16 Ancient Ones with at least 5 community-logged games. Click any name for a per-AO dossier.
Difficulty
Difficulty ranking
How often each Ancient One beats the community. The bar is the loss rate; the whiskers show the range of uncertainty. Higher = harder.
Modern = standardized to modern expansion-table play (big-box games, 2018+). Expansion Ancient Ones look easier all-time only because they were never played base-only. How this works →
Most-encountered Ancient Ones
The 16 Ancient Ones that show up most often in community games, by share of all games.
Ancient One play concentration
How much of the community's play is concentrated on the most popular Ancient Ones. Walk left-to-right and you see how many games are accounted for by the top N — a steep curve means a few AOs dominate.
Where the Doom track lands
The final doom value at the end of each game, per Ancient One. Two-humped shapes mean the matchup is swingy — some games crawl right to the brink and clinch it on the last turn, others collapse early.
The Blood Price of Victory
Win rate vs. casualties per investigator
A 50% win rate against Cthulhu feels different from a 50% win rate against Yig if one of them leaves the table littered with corpses. Across the bottom: win rate. Up the side: how many investigators the team loses on average. Bottom-right is the dream — you win, nobody dies. Top-left is the nightmare — you lose, and you lose everyone.
Epic Monsters
The Epic Monster Threat Atlas
Each bubble is an Epic Monster. Across the bottom: how much teams' win rate changes when it shows up (right = teams win more). Up the side: how many extra investigators it tends to defeat. Bubble size = total encounters. The bloodiest monsters mostly sit to the right — they tend to turn up in games the team is already winning, so height means 'costly', not 'doomed'. The rarer bubbles to the left are the real bad omens, dragging the win rate down.
Ancient One monster fingerprints
For each Ancient One and Epic Monster: how much more often this monster shows up in this AO's games compared to the average game. Anything above 5× is one of this AO's signature monsters. The Abhoth + Child of Abhoth combo lands at 15.7×.
Pacing
Minutes to Madness
Plan your game night. Across the bottom: win rate. Up the side: average game length in minutes. Top-left = brutal grinds. Bottom-right = quick wins. Bubble size = total games. Hover for minutes-per-player if you want to compare AOs across different team sizes.
Team-size sweet spots
Team-size sweet spot per Ancient One (heatmap)
Win rate by Ancient One and team size. The further a cell is from the community baseline, the darker it gets — red below, green above. Rows are ordered hardest AO at the top. Cells with fewer than 5 games are dimmed.
Preludes against each AO
Most-used preludes
The top 15 preludes among games that use one. "No prelude" is left out of the chart so the real preludes are comparable — about 52.5% of games skip the prelude entirely.
Prelude impact
How much each prelude changes the win rate compared to not using one, holding the Ancient One and expansion set steady. Showing the 15 biggest swings — many rest on only a handful of games, so lean on the whiskers: bars whose whisker crosses zero can't be confidently told apart from random variation.
Prelude × Ancient One signature heatmap
The change in win rate when each prelude is paired with each Ancient One (with the prelude vs. without). Green cells = this prelude helps against this AO; red cells = it hurts. Cells with fewer than 3 games on either side are left blank.
The full roster
All Ancient Ones
Sorted hardest to easiest. Frequency = the share of all games where this Ancient One was the foe.
| Ancient One | Games | Loss rate | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cthulhu | 2,120 | 55.6% [53%, 58%] | 10.0% |
| Yig | 1,656 | 51.6% [49%, 54%] | 7.8% |
| Azathoth | 3,257 | 46.0% [44%, 48%] | 15.4% |
| Shub-Niggurath | 2,222 | 44.1% [42%, 46%] | 10.5% |
| Syzygy | 1,154 | 41.5% [39%, 44%] | 5.5% |
| Shudde M'ell | 825 | 39.8% [36%, 43%] | 3.9% |
| Hastur | 931 | 37.6% [35%, 41%] | 4.4% |
| Atlach-Nacha | 655 | 37.4% [34%, 41%] | 3.1% |
| Yog-Sothoth | 2,369 | 36.6% [35%, 39%] | 11.2% |
| Nyarlathotep | 528 | 36.2% [32%, 40%] | 2.5% |
| Ithaqua | 1,092 | 31.3% [29%, 34%] | 5.2% |
| Nephren-Ka | 1,022 | 29.6% [27%, 33%] | 4.8% |
| Hypnos | 745 | 26.6% [24%, 30%] | 3.5% |
| Abhoth | 963 | 25.3% [23%, 28%] | 4.5% |
| Rise of the Elder Things | 1,115 | 24.2% [22%, 27%] | 5.3% |
| Antediluvium | 516 | 23.8% [20%, 28%] | 2.4% |