Wait…ANOTHER review of a game in the Horrified series? Yes, it’s true, and by now, we know our Horrified stuff around here—check out our reviews of the base game (Horrified: Universal Monsters), Horrified: American Monsters, and Horrified: Greek Monsters for the evidence, as well as an overview of how these games play if you are new to the series.

Horrified: World of Monsters is my first foray into this series, so I unleashed the newest set of monsters—the Yeti, the Sphinx, the zombie Jiangshi, and Cthulhu—on the best and most reliable gamers in my network, my two kids (ages 10 and 8).

Over the course of three plays, I got all four monsters to the table. In reading the rules from the last two games, nothing has really changed with Horrified: World of Monsters—players work together to defeat monsters before those monsters deal enough “terror” to advance the players past the threshold for defeat (deaths by the players, deaths by the villagers and legend non-playable characters, or the monster deck being exhausted when a player needs to draw a new card).

Everything in the game is dictated by running around the map to pick up items (here in one of three colors) that will be used both to advance a monster’s defeat condition, or to defend players…

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Inferno is one of those games that’s difficult to describe. The setting is “hell” or the Divine Comedy version of it. But it’s not really a game that has much to do with anything biblically inflected. If anything, the game is about going to Hell University to get your PhD in moving different colored pieces around. It’s bureaucratic, aesthetically garish, and completely delightful.

Here goes: in the game, you’re a family in Renaissance Florence, and you’re trying to get a primo spot in the hell hierarchy by shepherding souls through a plinko board into the appropriate layer of hell. Each of the circles of hell (excluding the topmost, Limbo) has a track associated with it. At the end of the game, each track can score between 4 and 20 points depending on how populated the circle is. If there aren’t enough souls in the circle, the track is worth fewer points. Additionally, to score, you have to have position on the track(s) and a diploma piece for that track. So, you need to acquire diplomas, move up on the tracks you want to score, and make sure there’s soul pieces in the corresponding circle.

[caption id="attachment_309465" align="alignnone" width="768"] Pictured: Hell as MLM scheme[/caption]

If it sounds bizarre, it’s because it is.…

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Does the third game in the Horrified series, set in ancient Greek mythology live up to the standards set by its older siblings? Check out our review of Horrified: Greek Monsters.

Horrified is a family-weight cooperative game that burst onto the scene back in 2019 to much acclaim, both cementing its place in my collection and establishing design group Prospero Hall as the go-to producers of IP-based games that hold up to gamer scrutiny. In Horrified, players work together to defeat a varied number of movie monsters intent on terrorizing the most unlucky town ever. Horrified: American Monsters, the standalone sequel, swaps out Universal movie monsters for American cryptids. Horrified: Greek Monsters (HGM for short) takes the monster-hunting, town-defending romp to the world of ancient Greek mythology, with such villains as Medusa, Cerberus, the Minotaur, and other mythological entities.

[caption id="attachment_307843" align="aligncenter" width="1500"] What's in the box?[/caption]

Let’s Do That Again

Gameplay for the previous two Horrified games features a pickup and deliver mechanic with the primary variance being the specific conditions required for each monster. (For more on general gameplay, see our review of the original game.)  HGM takes the same approach. If you’ve ever played either the original or American-cryptid based sequel, you will…

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At this point in my reviewer’s life, three years into writing about games, I don’t often find that my first impression of a game is wrong. It may gain nuance, depth, or flavor, maturing like a wine, but the baseline opinion rarely changes. If I like a game at first blush, I will probably still like it four or five plays later. It’s possible I will like it more than I did at first (Arcs), or less (The Field of the Cloth of Gold), but the initial response holds. “Game good,” “game bad.” Whatever I was picking up on in my first play still holds true.

My first play of Kinfire Delve was not promising. The fundamental idea of the game is familiar to co-op and solo players: punch through a bunch of bad guys until you get to the big bad guy, then punch the big bad guy. It seemed like a perfectly competent but otherwise uninspired co-op dungeon diver. Play some cards, do some damage, keep track of cascading effects, nothing we haven’t seen before. I walked away unmoved. Nice cards, though. That spot-foiling on the back of the player decks? Hoo-ee, that is choice.

Then I played it again.

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was my teammate, who was entirely unfamiliar with these types…

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What’s That Sound?

As you slowly regain consciousness, you become aware of a red glow enveloping you. You begin to recollect things. You're on a ship. You're part of a crew. You were in hibernation. But that sound is deafening. Is that the alarm?

As you step out of your stasis pod into the hibernatorium, you become even more aware of your surroundings. You're now sure that's the alarm. The red emergency lights bathing everything in crimson are a definite tell. Your crew mates are also emerging from their pods. But, wait. Is that?

One of your crew mates has been removed from their pod, and their body lies cold, lifeless, and mangled on the metal floor. Your mind is suffering from short-term amnesia from the deep sleep, so when one of your crew suggests that you all should investigate, this comes with some pangs of anxiety. You're not even sure you remember these hallways.

The engine room and bridge are simple enough, since one is always in the back, and the other is always in the front. But the locations of the rest of the rooms are fuzzy right now. Everyone else is already going their separate ways, so you pick a dark hallway and move forward.

It was a short trip before you reached the armory. While…

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What is Kingdom Death: Monster?

Kingdom Death: Monster is, more than any other board game I’ve played, difficult to describe. Designed by Adam Poots and published by his miniatures company, Kingdom Death, this game is better described by what it’s not. Kingdom Death: Monster is not a role-playing game, but has some role-playing elements. It isn’t a dungeon crawl, but has some dungeon crawl elements. It’s not a boss battler, but has boss battling elements.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. Kingdom Death: Monster is a little bit of so many things, that it’s sort of a Frankenstein’s Monster. In the game, you’ll be making decisions that affect your character, the group as a whole, and future story events. You’ll be managing resources, crafting and upgrading, fighting, managing your inventory, rolling dice, having random encounters, gathering loot, and much, much more

So what is Kingdom Death: Monster? Let’s dive in and have a bit of a look. DISCLAIMER: This is a campaign-style game. There are some minor spoilers, and some content in this game is definitely for a mature audience. While I’m trying to not mention specifics or get too in depth, just the nature of this game alone makes it difficult to keep everything that follows spoiler free and rated PG, but I’ll do my…

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Spectral is a competitive deduction game, and an unusual one at that. The haunted house you and your fellow players explore, represented by a 4 x 4 grid of semi-randomized facedown cards, is full of gems and curses. You want the gems. Not so much the curses. You figure out where they are by placing any quantity of your explorer pieces in the space between any two rooms and then looking at the contents of one of them.

“The contents” is somewhat misleading. The rooms in this house don’t tell you what they have inside. They tell you about the contents of other rooms. On the face side, each card shows either a curse or, more likely, a gem, and one of four symbols. The symbols tell you where the shown item is located.

This card, for example, tells me that a gem is located on the opposite side of the grid:

This card tells me that a curse is in whichever room is a two-space move diagonally:

You spend most of the game placing pieces around the grid and gathering information, taking notes in the provided notebooks all the while.

Information is not the only purpose for those…

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The connection between board game design and intellectual properties is frequently superficial. The typical approach for such games is to create a generic board game system that can accommodate a variety of themes and then gradually introduce rules to give the illusion of capturing the essence of those IPs. It is uncommon to encounter a game where the IP takes point, and the game designer is trying their utmost to ensure that the rules serve the franchise effectively.

Fortunately, The Thing Boardgame is on the other side of this situation. This is one of the few games where every line of rule makes sense in context while still offering a plateful of systems that one would expect in a well-designed cooperative game. But before I chirp about my praises and concerns, you should probably get to know the game first.

The Thing Boardgame is based on the 1982 film of the same name by John Carpenter. The film, proudly sitting on the horror sci-fi throne, is about a shape-shifting alien life form that can spread like a virus and takes place in a research station in Antarctica. At the start of the game, one of the players starts out as an infected Alien player.

Now, if this sounds like a social deduction game, you are one-third correct. Social deduction…

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At Gen Con 2023, I had the chance to sit down with Jay Cormier, the designer of Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game.” His studio, Off the Page Games, had a couple new games coming to market in the months ahead, so he invited our team to join him at a demo table to run through the new offerings.

Jay talks a lot like I do—fast, excitedly, directly. He also has purple hair, which I might have done were it not for the fact that I don’t have hair any more.

Jay showed me two games that night: Corps of Discovery: A Game Set in the World of Manifest Destiny, and Harrow County: The Game of Gothic Conflict. Both games stand out in the same way Mind MGMT did, because the productions are beautiful and based—like all Off the Page Games products—on existing IP from the world of creator-owned comic books.

Harrow County’s world was unknown to me prior to playing the game. According to this Wikipedia page, the stories of Harrow County were first told by creators Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crookborn in 2015, first via prose on Bunn’s personal website before turning into a comic around the same time. The game world is rich, so one must assume that the comic source material…

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Doing another series for Final Girl was a no-brainer. The first set of modules in this endlessly customizable survival horror game was a massive success, taking the world of solo board gaming by storm. Our own Justin Bell had nothing but glowing praise when he reviewed the Final Girl base set, and I’m no different.

But a second series brings with it risks. There’s the dreaded sophomore slump, buckling under the pressures of expectations. Could Final Girl add extensions to the house without creating cracks in the foundations?

The Root of All Evil

If you’re looking for a more exhaustive description of Final Girl, I’ll direct you to Justin’s review, but here’s the quick pitch: the entire series is premised around the horror trope of the Final Girl, a female protagonist who manages to survive everything and lead the baddie to their ultimate demise. The roots of the Final Girl can be traced at least as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), but the trope wasn’t identified until the late 1980’s.

Final Girl the game puts you in…

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"If you're going to make a sequel, do it right and make the same damn movie all over again."
-- Joe Bob Briggs, King of the Drive-In Movie

In 2019, Prospero Hall released Horrified, a cooperative game (co-op) that made Meeple Mountain’s Most Anticipated Games of GenCon 2019 list and won two of our Diamond Climber Awards of 2019 (Best Coop Game and Best Thematic Game). In her review, my former Meeple Mountain colleague, Ashley Gariepy, (Hi Smash!) said Horrified was “an incredible cooperative game that is easy to learn and teach and can be enjoyed by gamers and non-gamers alike.”

Let’s see how 2021’s Horrified: American Monsters stacks up against its predecessor, shall we?.

[caption id="attachment_295159" align="aligncenter" width="558"] Horrified: American Monsters[/caption]

How to Play

When I re-read Ashley’s review of Horrified for this review, I realized her descriptions of the setup, gameplay, and challenges were interchangeable with Horrified: American Monsters. If you’re unfamiliar with how Horrified games play, check out Ashley’s very well-written review of the original game and come back to find out more about the American Monsters edition.

The American Monsters

As you may already know (or have just learned from Ashley’s review), the original Horrified featured monsters who appeared…

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The board game industry loves to fixate on popular trends. Whenever a TV show, movie, or book becomes a breakout hit, publishers quickly push out board games trying to cash in on the craze. For example, The Walking Dead sparked a glut of zombie-themed games for a time. Similarly, Game of Thrones led to many backstabbing political games about scheming nobles. Even entire mechanics and genres will get a spotlight, like social deduction games proliferating after The Resistance grew popular. Which is why I’m so surprised that, despite the highly popular Among Us video game, only one board game attempted to translate that experience into tabletop: the topic of today’s review.

Among Cultists—because subtlety is for the weak—sounds like your typical social deduction game at first glance. The bad team, the cultists in this one, know each other and want to kill the other team or hit the round limit. The good team, the investigators, either want to vote out the cultists or score enough points to win.

Investigators earn points by playing cards to location decks, then flipping those cards over hoping to reveal success symbols. It shares similarities to Among Us - players move their character tokens around a map to colored room spaces as indicated on their route cards to take actions. However, the cultists aren't…

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When I was a kid, pop-up books were rather rudimentary, but even then I was enthralled by the possibilities. Today I am thankful for names like Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda, creatives whose efforts have produced some of the pop-up books that grace our kids’ shelves. Few of these intricate productions survive intact, but that is only due to the vigor with which they are engaged and enjoyed in our home. They are popped until they drop.

It should come as no surprise, then, that The Shivers drew my attention. Described as a “Pop-up Tabletop Mystery Adventure” by the folks at Pop Fiction, this inaugural design from Andy Logan is the sort of box that begs investigation—both of the product itself and within the story it aims to tell. Players work together to solve a mystery via the clues dropped all over the pop-up rooms representing the Shivers family house in Fogmoor. 

Before I ever cracked the shrink on the box, though, I trembled at the other side of the coin. The Shivers is also something of a role playing game. One player assumes the responsibilities of the Storyteller, sitting behind the pop-ups leading and guiding the others through the scenario. The intended experience, then, also involves the other players loosely “becoming" the characters represented on their standees in…

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