Horrified - An Introduction

 

Horrified - An Introduction

Game Specs

• Advertised Player Count: 1-5
• *Actual* Player Count: It works fine at any player count, honestly!
• Playing Time: 60 minutes (I think that's pretty close to accurate? It never felt that long when I played it, but maybe it was and I just didn't notice)
• Age: 10+
• Premise: This is a cooperative game in which the players are a team that are trying to stop some classic movie monsters from terrorizing a town.

Honestly, I just figured between the theme and the publisher being Ravensburger, this couldn't miss. Look at that enticing cover!

This is best described, I think, as a cooperative pick-up & delivery game. You're going around the board, picking up items you will use to first advance a monster's task, and then defeat said monster. The items and tasks needed to advance and defeat against the monsters are unique depending on which monster you're facing. If it's the Creature from the Black Lagoon, you are trying to advance a little boat token to the creature's hiding place before you use force to drive him away. But if you're battling against The Mummy, you need to solve a puzzle in order to break the curse before you can entomb him once more.

I won't lie: after really loving the components and feel of Disney's Villainous (also produced by Ravensburger), I was disappointed with Horrified. As you can see above, they're *fine*, but I just don't love them.

As in any co-op game, you're playing against the board instead of one another. Each of the monsters has their own specific board (seen on the right of the above picture) which prescribes their behavior and tells you what their special abilities are, as well as how the players defeat them. The monsters are controlled by a deck of cards that basically says how many item tokens to pull from the bag and place on the board, if a Villager is placed on the board, and which monsters move, how far they move, and how many dice to roll for their attack.

Players each control a character with a special ability, and can do a couple of things on their turn: Move, Guide (a Villager), take their special action/ability, Pick Up items, Share items with other characters, Advance a monster's task, or Defeat a monster. The players win when they've defeated all the monsters. The players lose when they need to draw from the deck of monster actions and cannot because the deck is empty, or if enough casualties mount up between the Heroes and the Villagers that the Terror Level hits the end of its track (featured on the top left of the game board seen above).

I'll be honest: it comes across as more bland than I anticipated. There are three different colored Item tokens, and each serve different purposes as prescribed by monster needs. They spawn in different places, have different strenghts, etc., but there's nothing different about any of them. You want more tokens, and you want tokens with higher value. Sometimes the value doesn't matter, but you might as well get the best ones you can. Additionally, you pick everything up with one action, and you have no limit to how many Items you can carry, so it's not really like you have to pick and choose what you keep most of the time. Even advancing different monster tasks mostly feels like the same drag: spend items to Advance (just make sure they're the right ones), then spend items to beat a monster when you're in their space. It just gets kind of repetitive and I never really got excited about winning or frustrated about losing. You're picking up and delivering Items to where they need to be, or Villagers to safety in order to draw Perk cards that give you just that: perks. The perks can sometimes be clutch, but I rarely got excited about anything in this game.

I was genuinely bummed that I did not much care for this game.

Bottom line: The game is *fine* overall, and it's easy enough to learn, teach, and play. But with so many other games that can hit the table, I doubt I'll be playing Horrified again any time soon. The best thing I learned from playing it, honestly, is probably some of the things I want to make sure I do when I design my own Pick Up & Delivery game.