Frank Branham: Plea to horror game designers - Monster Mayhem

The plea part is simple: Please stop making bad horror games.

I really like horror movies. I really like games. When I play a game about monsters, I should reasonably expect to enjoy it.

Sadly, this is rarely the case. We get the rare great game. Fantasy Flight has done us horror fans great service in Fury of Dracula and Arkham Horror. (I still contend that Arkham has a big gaping flaw with the Gate location distribution. It should have been flat, with an equal number of gates for each location. I still like it. )

But for every Gothic Game, there are quite a few lame ones. Either we get very light abstract games from Germany. (Dawn Under and Geisterschoss are adorable children's memory games.) or we get....

Monster Mayhem.

The game has potential. A large purple box with some great illustrations on the cover and 5 character cards. There are 5 nicely sculpted plastic figures look great. The poltergeist is particularly great.

And that's about where it stops. The event cards are plain text, and the victims you stalk are slightly thin round tokens. The rules are clunky in the extreme.

The game its pretty basic. The game lasts 5 turns. First you move each of the 15 victims in a random direction by flipping up a card. Then the players move to try and eat one. Eating is rolling a number of dice according to the skills involved, with the highest single die winning.

Add some chrome with event cards, special powers for each monster, a weakness for each monster which is triggered by some of the event cards, and some special spaces.

And just totally not fun. A large part of your 90 minutes is spent moving the victims around. (In the section of rules about moving victims, it fails to explain what happens when the victim encounters the edge of the board. That rule is located instead in the section about capturing victims.) That part contains few actual decisions.

The 5 times you actually get to move your monster are generally to steer it at the most likely target. You do also get to play a few of "Take That" event cards, which can sway the dice. You generally tend to save those to play on your opponents during the 5 times that he gets to try and eat something to make him fail.

We did actually manage to eat most of the victims in our game, but we mostly stopped caring about the second or third turn. Moving all of the victims is just so tedious, that it harkens back to the hobby games of the 80's that made many of us start playing Eurogames.

Classic horror games of the 80's like Chill: Black Morn Manor and Minion Hunter are so much better that this throwback. The tedious monster movement reminds me of the original 80's Arkham Horror, but lacks that game's impending sense of doom.
© 2007 Frank Branham

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Interesting article I’m sure, if it was actually there.  :) Posted by Jonathan Greisz on May 24, 2007 at 08:18 AM | #

Odd. It didn’t post this morning. I finally had to reset the posting date on the article. Posted by Frank Branham on May 24, 2007 at 08:27 AM | #

Also, Michael Barnes posted his impressions of the game as well as a much more interesting article on the difficulties of using horror and fear in boardgames over at the Fortress:AT blog. http://fortressameritrash.blogspot.com/2007/05/horror-in-game-box.html Posted by Frank Branham on May 24, 2007 at 08:38 AM | #

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