by jcfiala
It's a little confusing.The original game came out as "Cthulhu: Death may Die" and is also referred to as "Season 1". This is all you need to play, full stop. it contains a set of six "episodes" to play.
At the time of the original kickstarter, they also released what is called "Season 2". This does not contain all you need to play, but does give you an extra set of six episodes to play.
With the recent kickstarter, we funded "Cthulhu: death May Die: Fear of the Unknown", which is also a standalone game and also contains "Season 3". it hasn't been produced yet.
As part of the kickstarter, they also created "Season 4", another set of six episodes similar to the Season 2 box, in that all you get is new episodes, but you require one of the core boxes to play it.
There's also "lost episodes" - three of these were in the exclusive kickstarter bonus box for the first kickstarter (The Unspeakable Box) and four are in the kickstarter box for the new kickstarter (but I don't think it has a fancy name yet. It doesn't really matter.) General feelings seem to be that these episodes aren't of as good quality as the ones in the season boxes, but provide more variation if you like it.
The new rules will not make the old rules obsolete. There are some new options to add extra monsters and relics to the episodes if you like, but otherwise, everything works the same as it did before. C:DMD was really quite popular, and there's no glaring problems that needed to be fixed. (well, other than some folks say the tiles should be larger to fit the minis. 🙂 )
Try and play the original C:DMD first, either playing a friend's copy, or possibly buying the original game, which I believe is in retail stores right now. If you like it, you can always consider late-backing the Fear of the Unknown campaign... although you may just want to wait until that reaches retail on it's own, depending on where you live and how you feel about what CMON is likely to charge for shipping.