Over the past few years, board games based on video games have been becoming increasingly popular. Doom, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Fallout and XCOM have all seen successful board games that take mechanics from the source material and translate them to plastic and cardboard. If you’re interested in diving into the hobby, here are some of the best horror board games for fans of horror video games.
If You Like: Telltale’s The Walking Dead
Try: Dead of Winter
The Walking Dead, particularly the first season, is a masterclass of harrowing choice-based narrative. When I think about my time with that game, I’ll always remember the moment where you are deciding who gets to eat and who doesn’t with the limited resources you have. Dead of Winter manages to capture that same feeling in board game form. The game is a semi-cooperative where you and the other players are trying to survive the winter during the zombie apocalypse. You have an overall objective you are trying to complete, as well as smaller objectives that need to be finished each round. Players take turns sending the various characters they control out to different areas to search for supplies and kill zombies to keep the horde from getting overwhelming.
What sets apart the game is the fact that each player has a secret goal they are trying to achieve by the end of the game. This can range from having a certain amount of characters under your control, ending with a certain amount of supplies in your hand or even betrayal objectives that ask you to sabotage the group. This adds a wonderful wrinkle to the game that immediately makes tension run high. Your friend hasn’t been contributing to any of the missions… have they really had bad luck in finding supplies or are they trying to make sure we fail? It doubles down on the theme of the game and always makes for great stories at the table.
If You Like: Eternal Darkness
Try: Eldritch Horror
When I think of Eternal Darkness, I think of a sweeping epic about a group of people fighting against nearly unbeatable cosmic forces while losing their sanity in the process. Eldritch Horror is another co-op game that puts players in the shoes of investigators trying to fight cultists and monsters across the globe while elder gods are being summoned to our plane of existence. Players take turns moving their character around the board in order to find clues, defeat monsters or close portals. Each of these actions will require the player to draw a story card that will have them making choices and doing stat-based dice rolls to see how they succeed in their struggles.
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The game definitely matches the epic feel of Eternal Darkness, with games running often two to three hours. The struggle of fighting such overwhelming odds is also well simulated, as the game only becomes progressively more oppressive each round. You’re constantly adding more creatures and portals to the board, which forces you to make choices about managing threats in play or trying to work towards the overall win conditions. Eldritch Horror is often complicated in its execution, but that makes it all the more rewarding when you manage to pull off an improbable victory.
If You Like: Prey
Try: Panic Station
Suspicion and mistrust permeate the entire game of Prey as you fight against the shape-shifting Typhon creatures that can mimic everything from coffee cups to office chairs. A sci-fi themed board game that captures this tone is Panic Station. Taking cues from John Carpenter’s classic film The Thing, the board game is a hidden role game that casts players as a team of specialists trying to clear out a research station that was overrun with alien creatures. The catch is that one player starts the game infected and is working against the other players. Anytime two players occupy the same space, they have to trade items, giving infected players the opportunity to spread their infection to others.
Players not only manage the tasks of trying to figure out who to trust, but also the constantly spawning alien creatures that are populating the map as you explore. It’s a smaller scale game that doesn’t have the highest quality components, but it manages to capture the feeling of things like Prey and The Thing in a tight, tense, 45-minute experience.
If You Like: Dead by Daylight/Friday the 13th
Try: Last Friday
Both Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th used an asymmetrical multiplayer concept that distilled the essence of slasher films into a neat gameplay package. Last Friday attempts to do the same thing with a one versus many hidden movement game. One player plays the slasher villain while the rest play the campers hoping to survive a weekend of terror.
The slasher character does not place any figure on the board, but rather keeps his movements hidden from the players as they move around trying to complete different objectives. Each of the different rounds plays out differently, with changing power dynamics between the two sides. One round the campers will be more vulnerable, while others will see the hunter becoming the hunted. The pursuit and evasion dynamic works very well and captures does the same job of capturing the slasher vibe that the video games do.
If You Like: Resident Evil
Try: Betrayal at House on the Hill
The first Resident Evil is a classic among the survival horror genre, and it pairs nicely with Betrayal at House on the Hill, a game that’s considered one of the absolute classics of horror board games. Much like the original RE, Betrayal casts you as a group of characters exploring a creepy old house. As you explore the house, you draw new tiles to build the maps as you go, ensuring that you have a different layout each time you play. Every turn, characters will either find items or having encounters that require dice rolls to determine what creepy things befall your character. Some of the items that you find are designated as “omens” and have extra special properties. But with omens, the player has to make a special dice check, and if that fails the game takes a turn as it enters “the Haunt.”
At this stage the game can run players through any one of 50 different scenarios. These haunts run the gamut of horror tropes, from demons to zombies and everything in between. Most often, the player who failed the dice check will become the villain, maybe through werewolf bite or ancient curse, while all the others try to go around the house completing objectives to defeat them. Sometimes it will become entirely cooperative and others it will be every person for themselves. While not every haunt is perfectly balanced, the unpredictability makes for an always memorable experience that you will talk about every time you get the game to the table.
