Ghoulishly Good Horrified from Ravensburger

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My Halloween edition is here and I'm talking about the wonderfully fun and challenging Horrified from Ravensburger. This is a light but still challenging co-op game for 1 to 5 players and takes about an hour to play. I'd been hearing a lot about it from multiple sources and decided to pick it up a couple of days prior to Halloween. I tried out the 2-player starting scenario with Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon plus a couple of solo plays.

First off, you should know that I do NOT look at How-to-Play videos before I try a a game. I need to know if the rulebook is clear enough for those who may or may not know about video play-throughs. This game was easy to learn and easy to teach. I read the rulebook once, referenced it when explaining the rules and had just 1 thing I had to look up mid-game. That's an A+ from me!

But easy to learn and easy to teach does not necessarily mean fun to play. So, what do I think about gameplay? I loved it. It is challenging and fun and unpredictable. At no point did we think the game was totally in-hand. Granted, first time through probably had something to do with that, but subsequent plays have not changed it. And it's one of those games that scales well in difficulty and player count without artificially requiring you to play multiple characters. In one game, we lost by a SINGLE action. One more action and we could have beat the Creature, but we ran out of Monster cards which meant we took too much time.

That is another positive for the game, there are 2 different ways to lose. If you run out of Monster cards (as above) then you have taken too much time and the monsters win. The other way is a Terror track that advances every time a Monster wins combat. Both these options force you to make hard choices throughout the game. Do you save villagers, give up items to keep from losing combat or lose combat and get sent to the Hospital location.

Now I have said a lot of positive things about the game, do I have any negatives? Only one minor one in my opinion. There are a fixed number of Monster cards to control the length of game. But I wish there were more card options to choose from. We kept hoping to read something new and instead got some repeated cards. Even if you didn't use all during a game, having some more options could provide more variability and interest for repeat plays. Who knows, maybe we will see an expansion of it in the future.

I could probably write a lot more about how much I love this game, but I have to stick close to my 500 word limit. In closing, there are enough player character choices and creature combinations to make repeat plays interesting and new. I recommend this for new players or as a great distraction from heavier fare.

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