The monsters you grew up fearing are all here, ready to haunt your tabletops. Horrified is a cooperative board game using the licenses of famous horror flick monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and more. The players work together to fend them off and save the city and its villagers from their terror!

We love full figures and we’ll always give points for games that add them with the core game. The villagers and heroes come as cardboard standees, but the star of the show here is obviously the monsters. And while the game itself is quite simple, there are a lot of well-illustrated components that fit the stylized design of the game.

To setup the game, players first select a difficulty to play to determine how many Monsters they will be defending against. There are 7 Monsters in Horrified: Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, The Mummy and Frankenstein & His Bride. Each Monster has its own set of rules for how it is defeated. Players select their Heroes, each with unique abilities and action allotments. The city is randomly filled with items and players are given 1 perk card to begin.

Turns are split into two phases: Hero Phase and Monster Phase. During the Hero Phase, the active player can spend their allotted actions to gather items, help villagers and work toward defeating the Monsters. During the Monster Phase, a card is drawn from the Monster deck and the Monsters activate. Any time a Hero or Villager is defeated, the Terror level is moved up one space. If the Terror level reaches 7, the players are defeated. If the Monster deck runs out, the players have run out of time and are defeated. If the players are able to defeat all of the Monsters before then, the Heroes are victorious!

I am strongly against games where the mechanics and theme feel disconnected. With Horrified, there are no worries in regards to that. The theme compliments the gameplay perfectly! I would even go so far as to say its one of the most immersive cooperative experiences in tabletop gaming. There are a variety of items from each location, and even though they’re essentially just number values it allows players to create a story. The game offers players the ability to make the narrative of each play feel distinct to that experience.

Horrified is similar to other cooperative games like Pandemic and the Forbidden series, where players perform actions and then the game acts against them. In comparison to those games, I think Horrified is better at making that formula easy to understand for new gamers. This makes it the best gateway cooperative experience, opening the door for those other series’ with added mechanics. Horrified takes a proven, winning formula and polishes it down into its most accessible package yet!