Editorials
The Best Horror Board Games for Video Game Horror Fans
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.
The Five Horror Board Games Should be Resurrected
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.
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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