‘Strange Darling’ Fantastic Fest Review

Five years ago, the co-op board game Horrified set you up against Universal Monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Invisible Man. It mixed clever co-op mechanics reminiscent of classic games like Pandemic with an iconic property to great results. Since then, they released Horrified: American Monsters and Horrified: Greek Monsters, standalone sequels to the original game that brought new enemies into the fold. This year, Horrified: World of Monsters introduced Cthulhu to the Horrified universe, along with three other internationally-renowned monsters, creating the most complex challenge to date, adding a multistage boss fight for the first time in the series history.

In the Horrified series, all players work together to defeat a set of two to four monsters, depending on the difficulty you’ve chosen, by moving around the board, collecting items, and solving specific puzzles to make the monsters vulnerable. While doing so, you’ll also be helping move NPCs around in order to get them to safety before they fall prey to the roaming villains.

Each turn, you’ll get a specific number of actions depending on the character you’re playing as, then you’ll draw a monster card to see how the monsters react. Sometimes the card you draw will have no effect, sometimes it will cause one or more of the monsters to move and attack players or NPCs. A roll of the dice will determine the success of the monster’s attack, and a hit will kill a character, who respawns on their next turn, causing your terror meter to rise. You can block hits by discarding items, but these are the same items you’re using to defeat the monsters, so you’ll need to weigh the consequences of losing items versus raising the terror level, which will eventually result in losing the game entirely.

It’s clear why they’ve continued to leverage the Horrified property, because the mechanical foundation is a solid one. There’s lots of interesting strategic decisions you’ll be making on your path to victory. Is it worth saving the villager, which gets you a one time use perk card, or should you focus solely on collecting the required items to finish off one of the monsters? Is it worth putting myself right in the path of the monster if it means next turn I’ll have the opportunity to finish them off? Choices like these are the backbone of a good co-op experience, and the ever-changing nature of the board forces you into a perfect combination of long-term planning and short-term reacting.

While Pandemic, a classic co-op board game, has been my go to series for this style of co-op game, what really sets Horrified apart is the boss mechanics, and World of Monsters has some extremely clever ones. As I mentioned, you’ll be dealing with multiple bosses at the same time, each with a unique method of taking them off the board, adding another layer of choice to the gameplay. Should we split up and each focus on one boss? Should we all team concentrate on taking out whichever one we’re furthest along on? All of the bosses still ultimately rely on items in the end, but what you do to get there is what makes it shine.

The four bosses in World of Monsters are the Yeti, the Jiangshi, the Sphinx, and the aforementioned Cthulhu. When playing with the Yeti, you attempt to guide its three children around the board to the Yeti’s lair, which leaves him vulnerable for defeat. The Jiangshi, a Chinese vampire-like monster, can only be defeated after you solve a Tetris-like puzzle board to create a sword that will defeat him. To defeat the Sphinx, you need to solve his riddle by placing specific valued items on a grid in arrangements that need to add up to certain totals. The real centerpiece monster here is Cthulhu, who is defeated only after you open a portal to the void by adjusting dials to match specific runes, lure him there, then shackle him in place in the Corpse-City R’Lyeh. It’s fun to not only have to focus on the very mechanical process of getting around the map to collect items, but also to solve a survival horror-esque puzzle while you’re doing it.

While I do love the way all the bosses have methods of defeating them that feel thematic with their lore, I wish there were a bit more of a cohesive theme between them. All previous releases had such a clear and consistent thematic throughline with their creatures that it’s a little disappointing to see this grab bag approach, especially when it’s mixing a fictional monster in among others that are actual international folklore. They’re still all great on their own, it just feels like more of a jumble seeing the Yeti with Cthulhu than it does seeing Dracula and the Wolfman.

Aside from mixing up the gameplay with the different monsters, the characters the player chooses to use also vary things in important ways. Each character is set apart by a different number of actions they can take and a special ability exclusive to them. For example, one allows you to move other players in adjacent spaces as a free action, a key ability for a game that’s so based on moving around the board efficiently. All abilities are useful, giving every player an important role on the team. World of Monsters takes place in a setting that’s a supernatural-steampunk mashup, so these characters all have fun flavor, like the automaton guardian or the undead pirate.

This setting allows the map that you’re moving around on to have a ton of personality as well. The 20+ locations on the map are all gorgeously rendered, ranging from spooky woods to a clockwork village. You’ll be spending each turn placing items on specific locations, so their visual identity helps you tell them apart to keep the game moving. The items themselves are also full of nice art, even if only the numerical value and color matter to the game.

For the most part, the quality of the art extends to the quality of the components. Character mats and standees are printed on a nice, sturdy cardboard that makes the art style pop. The cards, both monster and perk, are very readable, but not quite as sturdy. Each of the monsters also has a great little miniature figurine that looks really great, adding to the overall production. The biggest disappointment component wise for me was the item token bag, which was made of some kind of polyether or plastic that doesn’t feel particularly good. I would have much preferred a cloth bag to elevate the product a little bit.

As with many co-op games, there’s a fair bit of challenge to it. The rules are easy to pick up, and once you get the hang of it, turns move extremely quickly. The first two games I played were two player games on the easiest difficulty (two monsters), and we got pretty thoroughly defeated. Despite the fact that the game says one to five players, it felt to us like you needed more than two players to be able to have the appropriate coverage to be able to control the whole map as a team. When I played the same setup with four players, we were able to win the game without too much sense of danger. Higher difficulties (read: more monsters) definitely scale up the challenge, but sometimes it feels like a string of bad luck can end up tanking your game pretty quickly without much chance to react. Fortunately the game only takes around an hour, so you’ll be able to set up another game quickly to try to get your revenge.

World of Monsters is unique for the series because it introduces rules to mix and match with characters and monsters from other Horrified games. At the moment, the only one compatible with it is Greek Monsters, but I’m assuming all future Horrified releases will be able to be combined with this one. There’s a little bit of fiddliness to it, particularly in correlating item types from one game to another, but it’s a welcome addition to a series like this. One of my qualms about World of Monsters compared to previous releases is that it has fewer monsters (only four compared to the other games six), so this helps alleviate that concern.

The board game world is one full of series and franchises, and I’m glad that Horrified has been one that’s caught on. Playing it five years ago, I was impressed with its combination of easy to learn rules and quick, but challenging gameplay. World of Monsters proves that there’s still plenty of gas left in the Horrified tank, giving us some great new creatures to challenge. While randomness feels like it can sometimes end up slightly too punishing, the wins you do eek out feel all the more sweet. I’m hoping this new release is successful, because it’s a great intro to the game for new players, and has done a good job of future proofing itself to work with any potential sequels.

Horrified: World of Monsters is available now. You can pick it up at Target or on Amazon.