Matt Thrower: Obligatory Halloween Column #1046

Pity the poor board game designer. Those literary, computer game and cinema types have it easy in their chosen vocations. If they want to create a bit of atmosphere or a moment of suspense, all they have to do is invoke a few time-honoured tropes such as darkness, a character on their own, and a few warning signs for their audience such as a smear of blood. They have it so easy because they’re working in a medium where the audience won’t, on first encounter, have any idea what’s going to happen in the next moment and the author has total control over what they’re going to come up against next. Our benighted board game designers have no such luxury. I’m sure I don’t need to point out that any game in which the next step of play is mapped out before the players get there is anathema to the idea of a game in which players make their own strategic decisions or indeed, of a game you might want to play more than once.

So if you want to make a horror game to appease the hordes of blood-hungry suspense fans out there, what are we to do?

Well, one approach which, sadly, seems to be the favoured route amongst designers so far is to give the game appropriate visual trappings and stop there, presuming the job is going to be too hard. Now make no mistake: Good quality visual and tactile trappings are an essential starting point for conjuring up a scary atmosphere. But an astonishing number of these sorts of games -– Zombies!!!, Doom: the Boardgame, HorrorClix – seem to be just tactical combat board games of variable quality with slightly revolting looking pieces.

When you look around, there are some quite astonishing game mechanisms rejoicing under the label of “horror”: Witness Unspeakable Words which is just a word game (and not a bad one) with mini-Cthulhu miniatures. A word game. This is the genre of games beloved of grandparents everywhere, one of the popular staples of family holiday entertainment. Absolutely not the stuff from which gut-wrenching, sanity-sapping horror is made. Surely we can do better than this collection of oddities which have nothing in common with our favourite scary books and films except a few elements of visual design?

Well happily, yes, there are other avenues available for the budding horror designer to explore. Unfortunately we’re up against it in this battle because as we said in opening the article board gaming just isn’t a good medium through which to set up an atmosphere of dread. A good game should be largely under the control of the actions of the players and that makes a suspenseful atmosphere difficult to achieve. The fact that you’re playing in a social setting where you’ll be exchanging platitudes with other players across the board instead of the faux-isolation of burying your head in a book or the darkness of the cinema doesn’t help. As a result, some of the designs we’re going to explore have rather missed their target – but full marks to the designers for at least trying.

Ironically enough, the first weapon in the arsenal of the horror designer is co-operative gaming. Whilst it may seem counter-intuitive that allowing players greater scope to band together for comfort is a good starting place for an approximation of scares, it’s the closest thing we have to the cinematic trick of predestination. We want our players to make decisions which impact on the outcome of the game, so that means that the closest we can get to keeping them in suspense of the unexpected is to hide as much as possible. The only way we can do this whilst still retaining some semblance of strategy is to play a co-operative or partly co-operative game. After all, the more that the game relies on tactical play being determined by the actions of other players, the more information we have to open up in order to allow the competing players to make sensible choices. So by having a co-operative setup we get the chance to hide as much from the players as we possibly can, hoping that we can scare them by hitting them with something totally unexpected.

This is the basic premise behind how Arkham Horror works. It helps a great deal that there are a lot of different things that can happen to the players; each group of locations has a bunch of different events and there’s even more variety in the Mythos and other world decks. So even a dedicated player is going to have a hard time predicting what the game is going to throw at him – and if you do start to get familiar, then the expansions have plenty more cards to mix in to all the decks until the variety of cards exceeds your capacity for memorising the effects. I don’t doubt this is partly why the expansions have proved so popular amongst fans of the game. For maximum effect there is a small proprotion of cards in each deck (and monsters in the draw cup) which are truly devestating and which are capable of eliciting cries of dismay from the players when they turn up. It helps a lot that the game encourages some role playing with lots of quotes and encounter text because that helps players identify with their characters and feel some genuine regret when bad things happen to them – and this role-playing element is the second thing a good horror designer needs to be aiming for.

While Arkham Horror is a great start, it eventually shoots itself in the foot by focusing on being such a corny action game. Far from the soul-searing, unknowable horror of the Mythos this is a game in which a gangster can wade in with a Tommy gun and a stick of dynamite and give Cthulhu himself a damn good kicking. That doesn’t make it a bad game in my opinion, but it does limit the amount of suspense the game can generate. The horror atmosphere is more like Buffy than Lovecraft, with tooled up-investigators running round everywhere and stomping on the monsters until an unfortunate event or encounter puts paid to their rampage. In fairness the particular brand of horror that Lovecraft was aiming for is impossible to translate into a board game, and setting the sights lower was probably a sensible design decision. So, if we start searching for inspiration amongst B-movies instead, can we do any better?

Yes, as it turns out. Two more games that I feel have gone some way toward capturing a genuine sense of horror are very much inspired by camp haunted house classics. They are Black Morn Manor and Betrayal at House on the Hill, the latter of which was apparently inspired by the former although they both play quite differently. These two – particularly Betrayal with its innovative haunt matrix – still have plenty of variety to offer and encourage simple role-playing.

Where they go beyond AH is to take some of the hidden information away from the game and put them in the hands of the other players, which is a minor stroke of genius. Suddenly you’re no longer reliant on mixing a ton of variety into the game and hoping that random card draws or dice rolls will create some sort of horror atmosphere. Now, by making some information available to some players but not others, you can retain that feeling of the unknown but in a game where the strategy of one group can be played against the other in a genuinely competitive game with all the advantages for fun and interaction and longevity that it offers. There’s a price, of course – the privileged gamers in possession of the hidden information might use it to cheat. But assuming that you’re not playing with the sort of feeble scoundrels who will put their chances of victory above the entertainment of the whole group, you’ve got a powerful tool for board game horror in your hands.

So bearing this in mind it’s a great shame that BaHotH completely bypasses any sort of strategic play in favour of lots of atmosphere. The capacity is there, but it’s been wasted and Betrayal is a lesser game than it ought to be as a result. I think it’s still a pretty entertaining game because of its short play time, and it can certainly generate some shocks, but its long term amusement value is suspect and it fairly frequently throws up tedious, unbalanced or flabbily-paced endgames.

Black Morn Manor has the opposite problem. It has a fairly unique mechanism which allows players to flip-flop from being on the side of the good guys to the side of the bad guys, and while this is often fun, in an unfortunate minority of games it stops the game from ending as each group continues to grow in strength, then wane before a resolution can be achieved. Thankfully this ability can also provide its share of shocks, as any player who has wandered into the Furnace Room and found a Zombie Lord waiting for them can attest. So in the final reckoning, although both titles have better horror elements than AH, their game play is weaker. Will it always be a case that upping the atmosphere in a game has to come at the expense of other play elements like strategic choice or play time?

If the answer were yes, then I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this column. But there is one game I’ve come across – just one – which not only manages to be both atmospheric and demanding but which invokes the theme of one of the greatest horror classics of all time. I’m talking, of course, about Fury of Dracula.

If FoD took the recipe we’ve concocted so far of simple role-playing elements, quality components, variety, hidden information and part co-operative play and implemented it in such a manner as to allow real strategy and interaction to emerge it’d be a winner. But it does all that and then goes further. In the Games Workshop edition of Fury of Dracula you don’t just have a player with some hidden information to leverage over the others. You have a player who has almost godlike powers of control over the game state and the other players. The Dracula player can see where everyone else is, but he alone remains hidden. He can seed the board with horrible monsters, deranged servitors and terrifying supernatural events and all the hunters can do is blunder around in shock from one catastrophe to the next. If the hunters actually find the Count, he has the capacity to rend them limb from limb while they scrabble about, desperate for a chance to escape.

Of course the differential isn’t quite as big as I’ve made out, especially later in the game when the hunters have had the chance to acquire some cards and equipment, else there wouldn’t be much of a game left to play. But it is very significant. And the effect is twofold. For the hunters the design makes it look as though they are taking on a truly scary adversary and it makes every move around the game board a moment of suspense as they wait to find what diabolical encounter awaits them in their latest destination. It helps that this is a player elimination game, bringing up about the only real-life worry that a game can inflict on the players – that they’ll be faced with a humiliating early exit. At the start of the game it feels to those poor hunters like the only way they can survive is to effectively team up and work together, thus adding to the co-operative and role-playing elements of the game. For the Dracula player, he gets the opportunity to feel like a genuine evil genius, spreading discord and strife across all of Europe as you lord it over the pitiful, struggling mortals who are arranged against you. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the potential horror psychology of a presumably pleasant and law-abiding person being forced in to such a role.

The power differential is such an important part of the atmosphere and appeal of FoD that I still prefer the old-school GW printing over the Fantasy Flight Games version precisely because FFG toned down Dracula in the misguided belief that they needed to tackle the potential problem of hidden information offering the potential to cheat. If you’ve got a cheating Dracula player, then you ought to find yourself a new gaming friend, not change the mechanisms of the game to restrict his play. So although the FFG version is fun and feels quite different, being more of a chase than a hunt, I’ll stick with my battered old original, thanks. It’s not perfect – in particular it offers the Dracula player the opportunity to take a legitimate minor win by turtling, which he must pass and play aggressively in search of a major victory – but it remains one of my top ten games.

It’s interesting that this best of horror games predates the others that I’ve listed. The lessons were there for other designers to learn if they looked hard enough. So considering that all the concepts we need are out there, is the fact that we have so few creepy games to choose from evidence that we’re on a hiding to nothing in trying to design scary games? No, all it shows is that within the limitations of traditional designs, deploying the right ingredients effectively is a very difficult task – which means that the only places to go from here are to keep on trying to recombine those critical ingredients until you make the Philosophers Stone, or to do something different.

One game which looks like it might have managed to hit on another winning combination of the essential elements is the upcoming Ghost Stories from Repos Production and Asmodée. I don’t know a whole lot about this game beyond the fact that it’s gotten some rave reviews from people who’ve tried it and that the mechanisms conform nicely to the recipe for horror games that I’ve elucidated in this article.

In terms of something different, we’re still waiting for a daring designer who can pull it off. It strikes me that perhaps what we need to start including are bigger and bigger role-playing elements in the games to really give them a scary edge. But this is a difficult mechanism to work into a board game – witness When Darkness Comes, a rather forgettable horror board game/RPG combination. Perhaps a better starting point is something like Tales of the Arabian Nights with its paragraph-driven game play. Unless ... of course ... you lot have any better ideas?

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