Horrified is a cooperative, one to four player game where you and (most likely) your friends are all trying to defeat a bunch of different mythical monsters! It features a lot of different combinations of monsters to battle against, each of which requires different strategies to defeat them.. Some monsters are much more challenging than others and some need quite a lot of actions to defeat.
Once you have selected the monsters you’ll be fighting in Horrified, you will need to place out your characters. Each player gets one character and all of them have their own key action which can be really helpful, especially when the characters start taking damage. Everyone also gets a special action card which can be used at any time. Items are placed all around the board, which need to be collected to defeat monsters!
On a player’s turn, they are able to do a set number of actions (as determined by the number on their card) which primarily look like moving to another room, picking up objects, trading objects, and using objects. After one person takes a turn, the monsters will take their turn next. This is determined by a dice roll and the specific cards the monsters have. They will attack players and NPCs around the board. The death of any of the players or NPCs increases a tracker on the board that ticks along culminating in a monster victory if you’ve not won or lost through other means. If you run out of monster cards from their deck, which they use at the start of their turn and sometimes burn, you will also lose.
NPCs are often placed on the map when drawing from the monster cards. These characters need to make it from a location to a different location, giving a fate card to the person who helped them. These action cards can really help you when you are in a pinch, often freezing the monster’s turn, moving other players around, and otherwise making the game easier.
When it came to defeating the monsters in our game, we had two very different tasks. One task needed us to bring random items to three specific rooms, then trade items to one player so that the item value hit above 30. That player then needed to visit the room the monster was from and fight them, by destroying all of the items they needed to use to equal 30. That felt like the easiest of the two! The second monster needed players to collect items and bring them to a specific room, where they then had to spend these items (of a very specific color) to roll dice. The dice needed to match one of the “locks” on the door. If they didn’t, then the player could spend a specific other color item to re-roll a set number of dice. This was really a lot of luck and we had some trouble! Once the door was open, we had to then spend items and actions to “push” the monster back to the room they were from, so that they could be trapped in the room.
Horrified is a very challenging game and you do need to work together with the other players to make sure you all survive. There is a lot of trading, collecting items for other players, and making group decisions. I do like the variety in gameplay and in the characters you can choose from; one in our group was a horse creature and could move more times than the others, another could teleport to any room with a lair in it!
We ended up winning at the very last second, which always feels really rewarding, and our group were well up for taking on more monsters too! It’s a more complex game than we normally do at our board game night, but it’s one that once you get into it, everything clicks together.
You can get Horrified from Amazon.
Love board games? Check out our list of the top board games we’ve reviewed.
