5 Horror Board Game Recommendations
by Scott Hardie on August 26, 2022
Someone asked me recently to suggest a few good horror-themed board games. With Halloween coming up, I decided to write out a list in case it gives anyone else ideas for something fun to get and play. These are in order from most kid-friendly to least.
Ghooost! – This is a small card game that can be played in ~15 minutes and has colorful, non-scary art. The rules borrow a lot from Uno and Gin Rummy; I think they're about 25% more complicated than they need to be, but still fairly simple. I've had a lot of fun playing this with various groups. The strategy is just rich enough for adults to enjoy this as a quick palate-cleansing game between other longer titles. I haven't played it with kids but I assume they're the primary audience.
Horrified – A very popular game based on Universal's classic movie monsters. It's a well-polished modern game with lots of attention to detail. Each monster requires such a very different method to defeat that everybody I've played with immediately wants to play again with different monsters to see what the others are like, and I've heard good things about the expansions/sequels for more replay value. The difficulty level is aimed at older kids, so this will not be a serious challenge for adult players, but it's still a lot of fun. My only gripe is the constant need to restock little cardboard pieces all over the board, which slows down the action and robs the game of some excitement.
Mysterium – This is conceptually similar to Clue (solve a murder by identifying the killer, weapon, and location), but with a totally different mechanic borrowed from Dixit: One player is the ghost of the murder victim, who silently gives "dream" cards to the other players who are psychics. From the imaginatively surreal images in their dreams, the psychics must deduce the solution to the crime that the ghost is trying to communicate. The dream artwork is astonishing, the expansions are very good, and I've had a blast playing this with different groups. However, there is one huge caveat: The official rules as printed are way, way too over-complicated, with many extra steps and conditions that drastically diminish the fun in my experience. I was introduced to a homemade variation* and much prefer playing that way; it transforms a mediocre game into a wonderful game.
Betrayal at House on the Hill – Some people loathe this game, and I once did too. For most of the time playing it, you have no real agency; you draw cards that describe events randomly happening to you with zero choice on your part. Then in the endgame, you finally get to make decisions, but you often have incomplete information about how to prevent the bad outcome. So, you'll be frustrated if you want a strategic game experience. But after I played it a few times with some players who thoroughly enjoyed the haunted-house theme of the game and got into the story of what was happening, and I gave up on strategy and focused on just enjoying the scary and spooky events like they did, I enjoyed it so much more. It's very good at its theming; it feels precisely like a fun campy 1970s horror movie. I've heard good things about the legacy spinoff and I'd like to get a group together to play a campaign of that.
Last Night on Earth – This was intended to feel like a zombie movie, so much so that it comes with its own CD soundtrack. The production quality is very high, such as using photographs of actors in-character on all in-game artwork. Some people hate it after the first play (I did) because the zombies seem ridiculously overpowered, but that's intentional; if the humans are diligent about searching for useful items and working together, they gradually overtake the zombies and can win. The different scenarios add plenty of replay variety, and I've enjoyed all of the expansions that I've played. The company published several subsequent games in the same spirit but none have topped the original. There are a few problems with game balance but I've played far worse. (Our group often plays with two house rules to fix some of the imbalance: One player controls all of the zombies while each other player controls one human, and the zombie player's hand of cards is equal in size to the number of humans remaining in play. This change has worked well at every number of players we've tried, from 2 all the way up to 11 with expansions.)
Five more horror games that I can recommend from first-hand experience: Gloom, a story-telling game built on Edward Gorey's unsettling illustrated books; Arkham Horror, a Lovecraftian teamwork game that takes hours and a whole dining room to play; Zombies!!!, a simpler and more action-oriented alternative to Last Night on Earth; The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow, an accusation-and-bluffing game whose fun depends on how good at improv your group is; and Fury of Dracula, a somewhat more complex game for a group looking for a tougher challenge.
And five more games with excellent reputations that I'd love to try if my local group gets around to them: Dead of Winter if you want to cross zombies with The Thing, Legendary Encounters: Alien if you want a really tense deck-building game; Mansions of Madness if you want a huge Lovecraftian game that's supposedly an improvement on Arkham Horror; Nemesis for a paranoid and cinematic-feeling experience; and Machina Arcana for a complex campaign-based steampunk-meets-Lovecraft game.
*Simple Mysterium Variant: Skip the clairvoyancy (predicting the correctness of each other's guesses) entirely. Skip the turn limit and the clock, except as an endgame position for the player tokens to move toward on the table. Skip the 2-minute sand timer and the crows and the ghost tokens and the culprit tokens. Ignore the difficulty variations. For each of the killer/room/weapon stages, set out [number of players + 1] cards. The ghost's hand size is 12 cards. After all guesses are final, the ghost indicates correctness by moving each psychic's token forward to the next stage or back to the start of the current stage. The winner is the first player to reach the clock (their theory of the crime is deemed correct), with multiple players winning in the case of a tie. Optional bonus round: As soon as at least two players have reached the clock, clear the table in front of the screen, spread out those finished players' theories on the table, have the ghost randomly select one theory to be correct, and have the ghost hand out any number of dream cards (at least 1) to all psychics simultaneously to indicate which theory is correct. Each player chooses which theory they think the ghost is indicating by placing their marker on it; the ones who choose correctly win the game. (Besides streamlining out all of the unnecessary extra steps, this variation has the advantage of someone always winning, which is a lot more fun than everyone simultaneously losing because of a clock.)
One Reply to 5 Horror Board Game Recommendations
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
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Evie Totty | August 27, 2022
Very cool, thanks for this!