Designed by: Prospero Hall
In Horrified players work collaboratively to see off various monsters in a variety of methods. In some kind of luckless B-Movie hellworld, tow or three monsters (or four, if you feel ambitious) terrify the hapless villagers: you need to both stop the monsters themselves, and save the public where possible. Some monsters have to be vanquished, but others have different fates. With the Invisible Man you simply have to prove he exists to the cops. Frankenstein and his Bride must be set up on a date – but only once they’ve embraced their human side, otherwise they go crazy. Every monster has an initial task players must complete in this way, before they can be defeated/saved in a kind of final showdown.
Each player takes on a particular character – scientist, archeologist, and so on – so every character has a number of actions. On your turn, you spend your actions in a variety of ways. Move around the board – from one building to an adjacent one. Pick up items from the building you’re in. Share items with your fellow players if and when you share the same space. Guide a villager to you from an adjacent space. Advance or Defeat a Monster – more on these in a moment – or use your character’s special action.
Defeating monsters is the point of this adventure, so let’s talk about how you do that. At the start of the game a number of items are placed at various locations on the board – there might be a pistol, a tablet, a microscope and so on. The item itself isn’t so important as the number and colour: they come in red, yellow and blue, and provide a kind of currency system for the game: stopping monsters involves collecting items of a particular colour, going to a specific location and then cashing them in. For example: Dracula needs to have four coffins destroyed before you can take on the Count himself, so to destroy a coffin (an Advance action) you collect red items and take them to a coffin location. Then to stop Dracula once and for all (a Defeat action) you need to go to Dracula’s location with a number of yellow items: it’s actually a very simple game: although there’s variation in how the monsters are defeated, it always involves this grab-stuff-and-take-it-somewhere process.
In the meantime you’re interfered with on a regular basis by the monsters themselves, who keep on looming up and knocking test tubes etc out of your feeble hands, before occasionally scurrying off somewhere else. These movements are decided by a monster card flipping at the end of your turn (these cards also prompt the villagers to appear as well). If a monster ever shares a space with a villager or a player – that’s not good. Dice are rolled to determine what damage the monster deals out – although players can avoid damage by dropping items, Villagers cannot – and if the attack is successful, the Terror Level will rise: if it reaches it’s maximum, the players collectively lose the game. You can also lose if the Monster Cards run out.
If, however, you avoid those fates and defeat the Monsters – you win!
None from the other players. A fairly hefty amount from the game.
Low to moderate. The rules are pretty light, although each monster has it's own specific criteria of defeat. But planning and co-ordinating your movements as a team is important, and might sometimes require a bit of forethought.
Nothing too overwhelming.
You can try different monsters, try different combinations of monsters, and the items and monster cards and perks are all randomized - Horrified might be repeat itself in an overarching narrative sense, but turn by turn it's far from predictable.
1-5
Players
8+
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
The daddy of the co-op genre is Pandemic, and though you can certainly recognise elements of that ancestry here, Horrified stands up very well on its own two cloven hooves. It's a classic horror movie conceit that's been well-realised in game form, both in terms of the lightish rules (-get stuff to do stuff), the variable implementation (different monsters defeated in different ways) the sense of story (mounting tension as the Terror Track rises...) and the presentaion, which manages to look both deliberately old-school but also kind of lushly modern at the same time. It's not totally without caveats: like a lot of co-operative games (including Pandemic) it can suffer from the issue of the alpha player: one person deciding what to do for everyone, and other players ending up feeling like spectators. But if your family or your group doesn't skew in that direction, Horrified comes with a recommend from me.