10 Horror-themed Boardgames for Halloween

Halloween is that lovely time of year where the army of skeletons, ghouls, witches, and ghosts are the last line of defence against the ever-encroaching hordes of Christmas elves and reindeer. Face it, without Halloween, Christmas really would be in July. That gives us a good reason to celebrate it, and as usual, our favourite way of celebrating anything—other than with food—is with a good boardgame, and today we’re bringing a list of 10 boardgames that encapsulate the theme of all hallows, at least as far as the horrors and scares go (with a bonus boardgame at the end). The list is in no particular order because we do not discriminate whether you’re green, undead, or covered with ectoplasm. You do you.

Horrified

For some reason, when you say “Ravensburger”, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t scares or even “wonderfully thematic boardgame”; but lately the Ravensburger boardgame company has been doing some amazing things in this department, like the Disney Villainous series and even the Minecraft: Builders & Biomes boardgame. (Unlike the world of video games, boardgames with media tie-ins don’t automatically suck so bad they cause a disturbance in the space-time continuum.)

Horrified – and its newer sibling, Horrified: American Monsters – is a cooperative boardgame where you and up to 4 friends pit your wits against two or more monsters from the classic era of Universal horror movies. The mummy, Frankenstein’s monster and his bride, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon – all are here to terrorize the town and just in general be unpleasant company. The game is highly thematic, and each monster has a unique way it must be dealt with. Of course, it wouldn’t be fun dealing with just one of them at a time, so you’ll face off against several in any one game.

On its default setting it’s surprisingly difficult, but also a wondrous amount of fun if you’re a fan of the monsters supplied with the game. And even if you aren’t, Horrified may give you a new appreciation of them. Of course, you can always follow a game of Horrified with a movie marathon.

(The game and the movie marathon are highly recommended! The game supports up to 5 players, but it can be played in solo mode, and you can set the difficulty and complexity of the monsters, making it perfect for newbies and families. —Ed.)

Arkham Horror/Eldritch Horror

These won’t be the only games on this list that are themed around the Cthulhu mythos (created by H.P. Lovecraft), but there are so many of those that it’s almost cheating to include them in a list of horror-themed games. While both Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror are similar in their theming and broad gameplay strokes, there are enough differences to warrant owning both. Arkham Horror feels a lot more claustrophobic and tense because it takes place in the one town, as you visit various locations and try to close the portals to the other worlds before the whole place succumbs to the Great Old One. Eldritch Horror takes place on a more global scale against the same mythos beings, and while you don’t have the same sense of things closing in, the stakes feel much greater than just the fate of one mid-sized town.

The games are mini-beasts of their own: they require a fair amount of setup and play time is roughly four hours. (The complex rulebooks don’t make it easier to teach or play, either. —Ed.) To complicate things further, Arkham Horror is on its third edition which plays very, very differently to the first (1987) and second (2005). This has created a rift in the fandom, because some people think the second edition is superior, some prefer the third edition, and others think the third edition should have been a different game entirely. The choice is yours, of course, but the second edition is getting harder and harder to obtain. And if you’re new to the world of Arkham Horror, the third edition is your only choice from retail.

I’m not even going to start discussing the Arkham Horror: The Card Game because that’s an entire rabbit hole of its own and probably demands a separate article.

Zombicide

If you enjoyed playing Left 4 Dead or Left 4 Dead 2, then odds are you’ll love Zombicide, a game that tasks you and your friends with facing the oncoming army of undead and hopefully survive. The game was hugely successful and spawned over a dozen add-ons and expansions; there was even a very successful second edition Kickstarter made specifically to be compatible with all the accompanying goodies. People apparently really really love zombies.

The game is mission-based, and players set up the game’s play area using the tiles and tokens as specified on the chosen mission card. Once you get started, it’s pretty much you and your team vs the hordes of zombies. The fun bit is that your chosen characters grow and evolve over the course of the game as you gain experience in fighting the undead, so if you survive long enough to get strong enough, you’ll usually be fine. As long as your team mates don’t accidentally murder you.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Betrayal at House on the Hill, now also in its third edition, is the game that takes the idea of old horror B movies and puts you and your friends in a multitude of ridiculous situations. When you’re playing Betrayal, you’re not there to win or lose, per se – you’re there to experience horror genre tropes; as long as you go in with that attitude, you’re going to have a fantastic time.

The game starts off with all the players exploring a haunted house until a fateful roll of the dice causes the “haunt” to happen: at this point, the game makes an abrupt heel-turn and one of the players becomes the opponent. The players are now caught firmly inside a story which they have to unravel, and the objectives are as varied as simply escape, defeat the opponent, find a particular object, or even defeat Death. The second edition of the game came with some 50-odd scenarios, and the third edition also has its own unique stories, so you could conceivably play over 100 games of Betrayal and not (nearly) have the same experience twice. In theory, at least; some of the stories and scenarios are similar enough that you could easily confuse one for the other, but it’s not that big a deal because the game is still a great deal of thematic and atmospheric fun.

Ghost Stories

Players who enjoy a nice, chilled game where you defeat ghosts while taking in the sights of a small Buddhist monastery town should look elsewhere for their jollies because Ghost Stories is the exact opposite of a relaxing jaunt against the forces of evil. The basic premise is that the vile and definitely very evil Wu-Feng, card-carrying Lord of Hell, is out to destroy the world because someone didn’t share their popcorn. (Or some other reason. One’s never too sure why lords of hell keep wanting to destroy the world, but I’m sure it has something to do with popcorn.) It’s up to four intrepid shaolin monks to stand against the hordes of the demon dimension, kicking ectoplasmic butt and exorcising everything in sight.

In practice the game takes place on a 3×3 grid of tiles that represents the town, with ghosts and goblins and ghoulies and gremlins assailing from all sides. It’s quite overwhelming very quickly and you’re at the mercy of some surprisingly unwilling dice. For most games, you’re simply seeing how long it takes before the inevitable happens. But every now and again you can somehow coerce the dice into cooperating and that’s when the magic of the game shines through – those nail-biting moments at the end of your resources when you simply must roll a particular result and it just happens. You live for that adrenalin rush. And maybe you’ll come back and fight Wu-Feng another day.

Nemesis

If you ever wanted to stalk the halls of the Nostromo in search of the xenomorph queen like Sigourney Weaver in the movie Aliens, then boy do I have good news for you! Nemesis, while not a licensed Alien game, is pretty much this down to the design of the enemies.

Nemesis, which has a solo mode, pits you and your team against a bunch of xenomorph-inspired aliens trying desperately to bury their progeny in your chests kill you. You move around the inside of the ship, represented by spaces on the board, and every player has their own role that encourages particular styles of play. You must stay alive long enough for the ship to return to Earth – the usual “or die trying” goes without saying. The game looks amazing on a table, but note that the aesthetic comes at a price: the game is not a cheap purchase. But it’s definitely one that’s well worth it for the atmosphere alone.

There’s even a hotly-anticipated standalone expansion called Nemesis: Lockdown which takes place on Mars, in case the inside of the ship wasn’t enough space to kill aliens.

Fury of Dracula

Hidden movement games are a “hunt or be hunted” affair for the most part, and Fury of Dracula is no different. Now in its fourth edition, the game pits one player as Dracula against the other characters from the book – the ones who survived past the middle anyhow. (Oh … spoiler alert for a book that’s over 100 years old, I guess.) Dracula’s movement through Europe is done on the sly while everyone else has a miniature figurine on the board. Drac has his own machinations and plots in play to try and prevent the other players from staking their claim in the most literal sense, and players meanwhile are trouncing about trying to figure out if the Count has just been or if he’s wandered out to sea for a bit.

Like many games on this list, Fury of Dracula is best experienced by going full-tilt at the theme, just as long as no one does any sparkling. Vampires. Don’t. Sparkle.

The Bloody Inn

I’ve heard from friends in the hospitality industry that sometimes they just want to murder a client and bury them under the floor. Good news! The Bloody Inn is a card-driven game that allows you to do just that. You and your fellow players work at an inn and you’ve decided that guests need to pay a more permanent visit. You can kill off guests and make money off their corpses with the aid of other guests you recruit into your grisly fraternity, but you should be careful in case the law comes sniffing about. Oh, and also you should be careful not to leave any corpses just…laying around for anybody to find.

The game can be a little bit tricky to get right, expecially with regards to the timing of when to murder a guest and when to just leave them be, but it’s great backstabbing fun when you get into the swing of it. And the artwork is pretty to look at too, in a dark and disturbing way.

Unfathomable

I was reluctant to add this game to the list because it’s another Cthulhu mythos game, but in the end Unfathomable made the cut because it started life as Battlestar Galactica and is different enough from the other mythos games to deserve a mention. The players are on the doomed steamer the SS Atlantica when some Great Old Ones, like they do, decide that it needs a tour of the bottom of the ocean. (The abyss is lovely this time of year, apparently.) The humans on board clearly have no taste, however, and would rather see the ship safely to Boston, so Dagon and Hydra send some human/deep-one hybrid creatures to try and subtly convince everyone to join in the fun.

In practice, this hidden-role game sees humans pit their wits against the hybrids. Every round, events occur that players must deal with by contributing skills in the form of cards. The cards are shuffled before being revealed, and if the hybrid players time things right by contributing Not Enough Skills, then it’s all aboard, destination Davy Jones.

What makes this game an utterly fantastic experience is that you’ve no idea who contributed the wrong cards, and if you can figure out whose roles are to sink the ship and whose are to float it, then it’s plain sailing instead of pain sailing. But it’s never quite that easy, is it?

Campy Creatures

Our last game is another game featuring classic-era monsters: in Campy Creatures, players are all trying to capture the choicest morsels mortals upon which to experiment. Everyone starts with the same bevy of creatures they can send out to do their dark bidding. As the game progresses you’ll have perfect knowledge of what’s left in everyone else’s hands, but playing successfully means knowing which of their monsters they’ll be sending out next. The catch, of course, is that although the monsters are numbered, the higher numbered played monster gets first choice of mortals but the lower numbered monsters have far superior abilities and powers.

Campy Creatures is just one of those “one more round” games that sucks you in. Of course, it’s not always a simple affair of playing first if you can, because those powers can really mess with what’s available. The playtime is not obnoxious either (a single game is over within around half an hour), so you can quite conceivably spend an entire evening playing round after round of it, trying to outwit your friends and make new enemies.

Bonus: Sub Terra

Sub Terra fell into the bonus section because it’s one of those games that is incredibly difficult to obtain, but very satisfying. That said, the game is available online, so it’s not completely out of reach.

(The same is true for most of the boardgames on this list, by the way. It’s worth looking for physical copies, but there are pretty decent versions of Fury of Dracula and Zombicide online. —Ed.)

In Sub Terra, players are a group of spelunkers, most likely of the intrepid variety (although some trepidness comes during the course of the game). The caves, naturally, are not of the Happy Friendly Rainbows and Bunnies variety, and so are filled to overflowing with Things That Go Chomp in the Night.

Sub Terra is a tile placement game, and it’s up to the players to find the exit before time runs out. Every round there’s some nasty stuff happening from flooding, poison gas, rockfalls, and bitey beasties. Like many of these games, it’s a great experience if you enjoy watching mishaps befalling your party every round. The experience of finding the exit and knowing you simply don’t have enough time or moves to get there because through your own poor choices you’ve wandered miles and miles from the rest of the party, well … the hubris hits hard. But on the other hand, if you’re the one who found the exit and you’re just one tile and one card from exit and not knowing whether you’re going to get a fatal cave-in or just a breeze from outside … that kind of tension is hard to beat. Unless, of course, you’ve played just about every other game on this list.

And that’s our run of some of our favourite games to get stuck into during the month of Shocktober – just in time for the ghosts of your ancestors to tut disapprovingly at your life choices. Do let us know if you have any favourites we haven’t covered, or if you’ve played any of these, what you think of them. Until next time!