By Dustin Hall
Gencon 2015 is next week, that’s the world’s largest tabletop and role-playing game convention, and with it will come a bevy of new offerings to the gaming world, including several fine new horror entries. While the filmic world of Horror may be languishing in a found-footage induced funk at the moment, Horror themed board games are just as powerful as ever. Whether you’re new to tabletop or looking to expand, here’s five favorites that should be in every collection, and with them a few recommendations for further expansion.
1. Arkham Horror
The fiction of H.P. Lovecraft has continued to grow and thrive long beyond the life of the man, thanks to many devoted fans and an open source merchandising license. While there is certainly a glut of mediocre Lovecraft products in the world, his Mythos has done rather well in the gaming world. Arkham Horror has long been the crown jewel in the Cthulhu gaming collection, and remains a fan favorite.
The game takes place in the titular city of Arkham, where Miskatonic University and many cults reside, along with many other beasts that come spewing out of portals. Taking the roles of different investigators, players work together solving mysteries, visiting other worlds, sealing portals and, hopefully, keeping the Great Old One who slumbers beneath the city from waking up. The game and its mechanics are unique, and somewhat obtuse, but the weird happenings and feeling of impending doom only add to the flavor. Town expansions allowing you to add Dunwich, Innsmouth, and more to the board ensure that no corner of Lovecraft’s literary world, or of the apocrypha such as The King in Yellow, is left untouched, as nearly every character, creature, and demonic denizen of the Mythos can be played with or against.
Though Arkham remains a personal favorite of mine, there are many other good Lovecraft games to hunt out, if you want to delve further into the madness. Eldritch Horror is an updated version of this game that sends players globetrotting as opposed to being stuck in town, and Elder Sign is more of a hellish, Lovecraftian Yahtzee. The truly obsessed can hunt down a copy of the recently released Cthulhu Wars, featuring tremendous, statue quality pieces of the Great Old Ones as they battle over a map of the Earth for world domination.
2. Betrayal at the House on the Hill
This old Avalon Hill game was recently brought back from the dead by Wizards of the Coast, and happily so. If you have any love for Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods then this game is screaming for your attention. The sheer variety of horror scenarios that come out of this game is astounding, and draws from dozens of your horror favorites for inspiration.
The game drops players, as a squad of typical horror protagonists, into an old haunted mansion. At first, only the entryway can be seen by the players. As each player moves through the rooms, tiles are flipped, and the house built, creating a fresh, chaotic maze of madness with each playthrough. At first the game is all about exploration, but with a name like Betrayal, that can’t last long. Eventually one of the players will be possessed, and the exact circumstances of that is what determines which of the 50 possible horror scenarios will be used by this betrayer to hunt down his former pals. Was the player secretly a wolfman? Will it be firebats or cenobites today? It all depends on what Macguffin is found where, and when. The remaining players have to think fast before they find themselves axed by their former friend.
Aside from offering a lot of variety, Betrayal at the House on the Hill offers a fairly lighthearted, yet creepy vibe, much like a Halloween spook show, and is mercifully easy to pick up and play. If you want to initiate friends into games that require more than going in circles and building hotels, this is a great place to start.
3. Zombicide
First off, its worth acknowledging that there are, literally, hundreds of zombie games on the market. Zombies have essentially taken over the horror film and merchandise market, and board games offer no exception. Everybody has taken a shot at making the definitive zombie game. While there are definitely other contenders, and often cheaper, Zombicide has my vote as the best.
This squad-based tactical game has lets 1-6 players team up and try to survive in a world already ravaged by the undead. Yes, you can play the game solo, as the zombies run on autopilot, and they are brutal! The game provides dozens of scenarios for teams to fight through, city streets, malls, prisons, and more, as hordes of zombies attack, each one represented by its own delightfully gory miniature. The game has a grisly sense of humor, and throwbacks to not just popular zombie lore, but every aspect of pop culture. To top it all off, this is just one of the most playable, smooth, well designed games you’ll ever play. And if you want a change of scenery, this year Zombicide also unleashes a medieval companion game that lets crews of Knights Templar go dungeon delving to save their township from the hordes of undead that crawl beneath their streets.
If that’s not enough to scratch your zombie itch, or its just out of your price range, consider also Zombies!, the original undead shoot-em-up game (which I personally dislike, but it does have throngs of fans), Last Night on Earth, another beautiful homage to the genre, City of Horror, which is great in that it allows players to stab each other in the back and leave one another for dead to escape the zombies, and lighter fare like Zombie Dice and The Great Brain Robbery.
4. Fury of Dracula
Long has this horror classic been out of print, and long have gamers watched helplessly as copies sold for $150-200 each on ebay. But no more! Happily, Fury will be reprinted this year by Fantasy Flight Games, with new art and revised rules. Much like Christopher Lee’s legendary Drac, this game will be revived again, and again, and again until it rules the Earth!
This game pits one player against all others, as they play the immortal Dracula, and they the hunters. The game is set during Bram Stoker’s novel, at the climactic point where Mina has been bitten, and Van Helsing, having chased Dracula from Carfax, now leads a team to intercept the vampire before he can reach his home, and again take rest in his native soil. Fury of Dracula is a cat and mouse game, where players try to guess the movements of the Dracula player as he maneuvers through Europe, feeding to regain strength, and leaving behind him vampire spawn, wolves, and the occasional false clue. The game includes a sun dial to track when the team finds Dracula. If they guess correctly they can find him in the day and will likely dispatch him, but if they cross the Count at night, they’ll find a truly fearsome foe instead.
Relying more on a game of wits and bluffing than action, Fury of Dracula offers a great cerebral challenge for players, and has a great deal of flavor pulled from Stoker’s original work. For any who aren’t a fan of vampires, or simply can’t wait for the reprint, Letters from Whitechapel offers the same general game mechanics, but pits the players instead against the infamous Jack the Ripper.
5. Vampire: The Masquerade
The only role-playing game to have an entry on this brief list, The Masquerade has become, unfortunately, very hard to find. However the game is legend for its flavor and its rock-solid world building. The rule book’s chapter headings read like prose from a fine novel, and the version of the vampire legend that it created became, for many, the definitive mythology for the creatures, inspiring further pop culture entries such as the Legacy of Kain video game series and the Underworld films, which were sued by the game makers for infringing upon their fictional setting. This game series survived the negative notoriety it received in the 90s for a group of its players creating a vampire cult and killing their parents, and endured to become a powerful gaming icon of the Goth-infused decade. It spawned novels, a collectible card game, a computer game, and a short-lived television series, Kindred, the Embraced. White Wolf, the publisher, essentially ended the series in the early 2000s, but the (expensive but worth it) definitive edition can be special ordered from them, for any who still want to play.
Players will find the game to have an unforgiving combat system that, against another vampire, will quickly kill their characters. But this game was never about the combat. Vampire is a game about story-telling, about living in and adding to the rich setting, and about pushing the personal buttons of your players to craft a living horror story for them to exist in. The game’s focal point is partially about survival, but also about players struggling to maintain their humanity after losing a piece of their soul to their macabre transformation, and struggling to remember that the regular people around them are individuals, not just morsels for them to feast upon. If they lose their humanity, they become feral beasts, and will soon be put down by other vampires who strive to keep their secrecy.
While Vampire: The Masquerade is not a current, featured title by any means, it remains one of the greatest story-telling tools any horror-loving group could ask for. However if the book seems just a little too 90s Goth for your taste, there are other offerings. Look to the Call of Cthulhu RPG for other story-centric, player torturing games, or All Flesh Must be Eaten if you prefer zombies over vamps. You can also never go wrong with the weird world of Deadlands, a radioactive steam punk western, reminiscent of Bioshock and Fallout as far as flavor goes, featuring mutants and zombie gunslingers in a new era of western lawlessness.
We’ve only scratch the surface here. Still out there are hundreds of wonders, like Games Workshop’s paranoid, alien dodging classic Space Hulk, or Panic Station, which is a throw back to The Thing, where one player is infected and threatens to turn all the other players, secretly, into biological terrors. Whatever your taste in horror, there is something out in the gaming world to suit it. Keep an eye on this year’s Gencon reports to see what new monstrosities await your dining room table.