"We feel it would be a little unkind to present this game without just a word of friendly warning. You are about to unfold one of the strangest tales ever told. We think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even HORRIFY you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now’s your chance to…well…
WE WARNED YOU!"
- text printed on the underside of the game’s board
If you’re looking for a fun, thematic, family-friendly game to try out this spooky season, then look no further, because Horrified is the game for you.
Horrified has the feeling of a very classical board game, with character pieces moving around on a physical map representing a village filled with quirky and interesting personalities. The components are of solid quality and feel very ergonomic, and the art is cartoonish and appealing. Although most are cardboard, the monsters themselves have colourful plastic figurines which add to the atmosphere of the game, and the monster strategy sheets are glossy and tactile. The characters themselves are diverse and wildly different from one another, allowing you to choose something that fits your personal preference and playstyle. It’s a Ravensburger game, and their outstanding pedigree in creating classic board games shines through in every facet of its quality and gameplay.
The game itself is born of a fairly simple concept: monsters are attacking the village, and the players are trying to pacify or defeat the monsters while saving as many villagers as you can. If the monster deck, which details the actions your enemies take on their turns, runs out, then the sun has come up and you’re out of time; or if too many villagers die in the meantime, the players collectively lose. The monsters themselves, at least in the base version of the game, are classic recognisable villains of cinema and literature.
What’s fun about Horrified is that it has a great atmospheric vibe without being actually scary, so it’s perfect for a chill evening with friends but also for families playing with younger children, who will be able to grasp and enjoy the concept just as much as the adults. On your turn, you choose how your character moves, and what actions they take - whether that’s helping escort a villager to safety, picking up weapons to use later, or taking steps to defeat a monster - and then after each player turn, the monsters take action. If you ‘die’, you don’t actually die; you go to the hospital for your next turn, so there’s no risk of anyone dying early and being left out of the fun; but your death counts on the tracker towards eventually losing the game, so it’s important to balance risk and reward every time you end your turn in a potentially dangerous spot. There is strategy involved in deciding not only which actions you should take, but where you should move; sometimes you’ll want to draw the creatures in a particular direction, and occasionally throwing yourself in the monster’s path on purpose is the only way to save a poor villager’s life!
One of the issues that can plague this style of game is replayability. When the game is the same format every time, especially in groups that play together often, it can become stale very fast. That’s where the beauty in the design of Horrified really shows through. The game comes with six different monsters that you can fight against. In the ‘easy’ version, you only select one of these monsters to defeat, and this scales up to three monsters in ‘hard’ mode. The different creatures each have various requirements that you need to fulfil in order to defeat them, places on the map where they tend to roam, and patterns and attacks that can trip you up. For example, the Creature from the Black Lagoon can travel using the river, which no other character can, so it can catch you by surprise if you aren’t careful to avoid waterways. Frankenstein’s monster and his bride can’t be allowed to be within one square of each other, so you have to constantly lure them away to opposite sides of the map. The Mummy requires you to solve a sliding puzzle at the Museum to make it vulnerable before you can even confront it. Given that the strategies are so diverse, depending on the combination of monsters that you choose the game will always turn out very differently, so the replayability factor is actually excellent, giving you ways to make the game even more interesting for yourselves every time.
Horrified does focus a lot more on strategy than luck, which adds a layer of pre-planning that doesn’t normally happen in family-style games that traditionally run on dice rolls. Your character has a set amount of moves depending on which one you picked, and dice are only used for monster attacks, to see how much damage is dealt and whether the monster will execute its special move. There are weapons of different colours and numbers, and there’s some chance involved in which parts of the map they appear at, but there are enough of them that largely it doesn’t sway the game one way or the other. The only other random elements are card decks which, as mentioned above, dictate enemy movement, but also which give you advantages throughout the game. If you save a villager by getting them to their home before the monster finds them, you’ll receive a very powerful card effect drawn from the villager deck, which can be anything from moving your character at instant speed to skipping the enemy turn entirely. These tantalizing rewards really incentivise escorting villagers around the map, which adds extra complexity to the format without needing to rely too much on chance to make the game interesting.
Of course, no game can be perfect. Honestly, it can be quite difficult to actually lose the game unless you are deliberately making suboptimal decisions or get horribly unlucky with monster turns and weapons. During playtesting, we found that any less than three monsters - ‘hard’ mode in the official rules - really ends up being very simple. Three enemies feels like the right difficulty for a mild challenge, but it’s very front-loaded. At the start of the game it’s very tense because you have three monsters to think about and plan around, and depending how many players you have, it can be very hard to manage. Once you defeat one of them, however, the difficulty drops massively, and by the end you’re basically going through the motions until the game is over, unless you happen to be running out of turns. The difficulty is very much tailored to being accommodating to younger players who may not be thinking strategically or making optimal decisions, so it feels great for first-time players, children, or people who aren’t seriously into board games. However, if you’re a veteran playing with like-minded players, you’ll want to start at the hardest difficulty and potentially even come up with some additional house rules to challenge yourselves for future playthroughs.
Overall, though, I think that Horrified is a fantastic example of a classic board game which can be fun for all kinds of players. It’s thematic and spooky without being actually scary, it has recognisable characters and interesting strategies to employ, and it rewards careful and considered gameplay without being too punishing for those who just want to beat up Dracula without overthinking every turn. A full game can take anywhere from 1-2 hours depending on which enemies you choose, so it’s also fairly easy to set up and play without it taking up an entire afternoon.
There are also now several editions of Horrified out there, so if the standard villains don’t appeal to you, check out the other versions which might tickle your fancy!
Overall, I would score Horrified 85/100. It’s great value for money, easy to understand and get started, and a brilliant option to play with the family or with people who aren’t accustomed to serious or strategic board gaming, while still presenting challenging puzzles.
- Artwork 3/5
- Complexity 2/5
- Replayability 4/5
- Interaction 4/5
- Component Quality 3/5
