[Coughing] Oh hello! It's been a bit of a while hasn't it? Hello spooky people of the internet. Pumpkin Spice8Rack here AKA not a monster
but did used to live in some kind of closet, and welcome back to the channel! On writing horror is considered to be a pretty
instructive text on the topic of, as you may have guessed, horror writing. I certainly remember it coming highly recommended
on the syllabus of my creative writing course. Collated in the mid-2000s by the horror writers
association, this
book contains essays, articles, interviews, and speeches given by some of
the heavyweights in the world of horror literature: Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Harlan Ellison
and Mort Castle… No I didn't make that last one up and just
sneak it in to see if you noticed. That's the actual pen-name of an actual horror
author. Here's a picture of him with his dog. Why did nobody tell me that you could get
away with a moniker as gauche as Mort castle? If I knew that earlier I would have picked
someth
ing slightly more exciting than Spice8Rack wouldn't I? Now, part 7 of this veritable treasure trove
on the topic of horror writing is genre and sub-genre which covers the unique conditions that horror
writing finds itself in throughout various different mediums. Stage plays, graphic novels, audio dramas,
the list goes on. However one medium that is noticeably lacking
from this chapter, even lacking from Richard E danksy's contribution on the topic of writing
horror for role-playing and video gam
es, is any discussion of one of the oldest pieces
of interactive entertainment media known to man: board games. I actually have no idea if board games are
one of the oldest forms of interactive entertainment media known to man. Uh, they certainly feel like they probably
are. But my ambiguous framing there means that
I can still claim accuracy within a pretty abstract margin of error Without actually having done any research
even if what I originally meant by that statement is proved to be incorr
ect… I also learned a lot about journalism on my
University's creative writing cour- My partner and I are both massive horror and
board game fans and, over the years, we've both accrued quite the collection of
spooky tabletop experiences. Hell, I alone have wasted hundreds of British
pounds ruining perfectly good Necron miniatures turning them into an army of Flayed Ones because
I just love gore and body-horror that much. This is a cry for help. I am scared to build The Silent King
because I kno
w what I did to my Lokhust destroyers and I fear what I'll enact upon his body. But I must admit I never really thought it
of any interest to interrogate the combination of this genre and this medium. As someone on my Twitter very eloquently put
it when I announced that I was making this video; horror board games always felt kind of doomed
to fail. Haunted fun houses where the mechanisms were
visible at all times. That was until last year. You see one day I was in my favourite bookstore,
single-
handedly propping up my local post-lockdown economy by purchasing enough Marxist and Anarchist
literature to put me on a list. Uh, thank you to everyone who supports me
on Patreon by the way, that's where your dollars are going! When a box caught my eye. Now, dear viewer, I'm not going to reveal
what this box is yet, much less the content of it. But let me tell you that when I spied this,
literally, in the dustiest, darkest corner of the board game section, the very act of purchasing this game f
elt
like I was accidentally doing the bidding of some deep and dark entity. When I got the game home, unboxed it and started
playing, it did not suck me into the abyss of the board via some cenobite-esque sigil. Much to my disappointment. But it was still grim, existential, oozing
with atmosphere and dread and genuinely has made me consider board games as a potential
medium for horror experiences in a radically new light… Or should I say: new shadow? Christ I can't see shit [Floorboards creaking
] [Crashing sound & a cat screeching] This game. and the fascination it awoke in me like some
elder being, has been festering exorcism free in my head for months at this
point and I am so glad to finally be able to talk
about it with you. So, dear viewer, come with me on a journey
that I myself have been on for many a haunted blood moon. We will explore the horror genre, interrogate
the trials and tribulations that horror board games struggle with when attempting to deliver
horror experiences, a
nd finally talk about a horror board game
that I truly do believe to be a champion of both its medium and its genre… and yes, if you are curious I do already know
what my extravagant horror novelist pen-name would be. It would be Igor Arkham,
attorney at law. [Theme music] I just remembered that I own a Junji Ito shirt
and I have no idea why I decided not to wear it for a video where I'm talking about horror. To begin with we need to define what we mean
by a horror board game. The philosopher No
el Carroll writes in his
work The Philosophy of Horror that “art horror”, horror as entertainment
for simplicity's sake, can be separated from other forms of horror and other media which
provokes similar emotions within us, through the existence and centrality of the monster. We can use this definition to separate art-horror
from real horror. The horror of Freddy Krueger versus the horror
of war. The employment of the monster also goes someways
to explain why we differentiate between horror medi
a and media that just happens to
be horrifying. This is why we consider Shutter Island and
Contagion to be mysteries and thrillers respectively despite containing many horrific ideas and
images. As Carol puts it: Now, anyone who has watched my Mill vs Discard
video knows how I feel about the inconsolable contradictions that arise when attempting to create airtight
accurate and inclusive definitions and categories. However for the purposes of this video Carroll's
definition is a useful one. It he
lps us to determine what games we shouldn't
Consider through the lens of art horror. Unmuddying the waters temporarily to let us
better focus at the root of the design of games that do. This means that we can disregard games like
Pandemic, Mysterium, and Gloom from our analysis of art horror board games. Yes, it is absolutely true that pandemics,
ghosts and close proximity to the aristocracy are all deeply upsetting and unsettling ideas. However at least within the narrative context
of all three
of these games they lack some kind of key component to our definition of
art horror. The first game’s central antagonist is far
from a supernatural violation of nature as we are all very fucking aware of at this point. The ghost in Mysterium is, for sure, supernatural
but it's also true that it's far from dangerous. Indeed it and the player piloting it are your
allies throughout the entire game. And Gloom’s horrible families are but grotesque
toys for you to enact god-like misfortune upon. Moul
ding their pathetic lives like mincemeat
in the hands of a malevolent burger chef. Indeed it could be argued that in Gloom it's
the players who are the real monsters. [Strange voice] Oh that's a fun line… Thank you! [Music stops] Hello..? I hope that you can see why I think that grounding
our definition of art horror, which for ease I will just be referring to as horror from
now on, is important to explain why certain games
that look like they fit right into our analysis aren't being considered.
The Bloody Inn for example has all the makings
of a horror game on the box. You and your friends play as late 18th century
French landlords, Bribing, killing and burying the corpses of
your guests to steal their francs all whilst evading the capture of the police. Either by keeping your corpse collection nice
and contained, or by ensuring that no cop survives the night
to investigate their curious surroundings. It's a thematic engine builder not unlike
Wingspan or Everdell, except rather than b
uying birds and building forest dwellings, your bribing newsboys to help you build king-sized
beds to hide the corpses of local priests. [Clonk] But, fundamentally, this game never at any
point felt like it existed in the horror genre. It was for sure enjoyable, we had endless
fun play testing it both on and off camera. However it lacks key features that would land
it within our definition of horror. Nowhere in this game could I confidently point
to a central monster or monsters who I would also
label as dangerous. The most likely candidate for the label of
monster would of course be the innkeepers that the players
embody. They are the ones doing all of the murdering
or at least organizing it. However, with all of the deeds aimed at these
little cards and with no way to directly impact another
player's game or threaten them, a sense of danger never really develops. There are characters in this game who do absolutely threaten the players or at least their scores,
these cop cards. Howeve
r these too fall short of our definition
of monster. First and foremost they only appear sporadically
hardly being central to the game and whilst alongside landlords, cops represent
a certain systemic monstrosity they are far from “impure violations of
nature”. At least if we take nature here to mean the
contemporary socio-political hegemony. Um, oh, by the way, if you're new to the channel:
Yes, this is how every video eventually goes. Me using a game as an excuse to propagandize
Gramscian thou
ght. And besides the danger posed by the cops in
The Bloody Inn is pretty easy to avoid, And even if you don't
it is far from a soul-crushing experience. When cops arrive in your inn you have three
options: before they leave and conclude their investigation you can either bury all of your unburied bodies,
or bribe cops to stop them from investigating you, or slay them adding them to your corpse pile,
thus leaving no one around to check your basement. However even if you don't do any of these
thi
ngs and do get detected you don't get sent to prison or executed or
lose the game or anything like that. No you just have to pay 10 francs per unburied
corpse to get a professional gravedigger to take them off your hands. Now this does obviously negatively impact
your points at the end of the game but this is far from a horrifying experience. If anything this tends more towards hilarity,
as greedy players get caught up in Murder spirals. [Spice] Just want to make it clear, for b-roll
purposes, t
hat this can't necessarily be classified as a horror game because they're having too much fun at the
fact that Rohan has gotten himself caught in a murder cycle. [Rohan] I'm in a debt trap! I’m in a fucking debt trap! [Nethmi] You just have to kill each cop you
see. [Rohan] I have to keep killing or I'll go
to prison. [Laughter] Whilst the threat of being discovered by the
cops does add an antagonistic element to the game, they're not presented with the same kind of
fear or revulsion as you migh
t expect from Eldritch monsters or possessed murderers. To summarize, saying that a game like The
Bloody Inn fails as a horror experience first requires the incorrect assumption that
it's trying to be a horror experience in the first place. Now this isn't to say that horror media can't
place a monster in the role of its ostensible protagonist. From Phantom of the Opera and Sweeny Todd,
to every wolfman story ever told, horror media does just that without undermining the genre
that it's a part of
. I mean Phantom of the Opera does undermine
the genre that it's a part of. Uh, but that has nothing to do with the fact
that one of the protagonists is the monster, and far more to do with the fact that Andrew
Lloyd Webber is a posh hack twat bastard. However it is here that we begin to get into
the unique challenges that designers of horror board games need to contend with, that practitioners from other forms of horror
media often don't need to worry about when developing and delivering
on the
ir horror experiences and in order to explore that properly we are
going to have to check out of The Bloody Inn and instead take a delightful bed and breakfast
at the House on the Hill… Shit! If you are a fan of the horror genre or just
enjoy board games there's a pretty decent chance you've already played Betrayal at House
on the Hill. Hell, even if you're not a fan of horror or
tabletop experiences there's a pretty decent chance you've at least heard of it. Betrayal is a game where you and you
r friends
are exploring a classic Americana mansion, complete with all the expected amenities like:
the kitchen, the ballroom, the laboratory, the graveyard, and the chasm. If your house doesn't come with a chasm is
there even any point in living? As you explore the house you'll encounter
events, find items, and stumble upon omens. Each time you find an omen you'll be asked
to roll dice equal to the number of omens you've drawn thus far and when you roll at or above a five:
The Haunt begins! Whe
n this happens you're assigned a Haunt
from the rules based on both what omen you last picked up and your starting scenario, where usually
one of your teammates will be transformed into the villain of the
story. Not unlike how a random call in a game of
Battleship always has the chance of sinking the enemy submarine, you'll never know exactly who's going to betray
you or what they will be revealed to be until after the haunt
begins. Depending on what scenario you get, the rest
of the survivors m
ay need to either slay their erstwhile friend, complete a complex ritual,
or simply blow the front door open with some dynamite and run the fuck away like the coward
you know you are. Remember kids everybody loves a brave lion,
but no one's ever seen a rat skin rug. Now the betrayal, mutation, or otherwise inversion
of an ally is a common trope within horror media. The android supposed to be there to aid the
humans on a ship is working on its own agenda as an alien rips
through the space hulk. O
r a parasite from beyond the stars
has begun infecting your fellow scientists, slowly turning them into mutated versions
of itself who wish to do the exact same thing to you. Just as an aside, I am fully aware that both
Alien and The Thing have tie-in board games that could have potentially been interesting
to you as comparisons to their source material in terms of being effective horror experiences. However I only have so much time for analysis
in this video. I also wanted to focus on board gam
es that
didn't have the unfortunate baggage of already being associated with
world famous horrortexts, and additionally, there are only so many board
games that I can purchase as business expenses before I get audited by the tax office on
the ground that I simply must be taking the piss. In horror media where an ally becomes a villain… Thus represented by me turning a small plastic
child upside down their transformation can be disturbing, revolting,
terrifying even. Can foster a sense of anxiety
paranoia isolation
and even doom. But betrayal never really captures any of
that and, at least in my opinion, it's for two major reasons. The first having to do with how the game itself
tackles the topic of a betrayal, and the second has far more to do with how
competitive board games necessarily function in the moment. On the first point, the titular betrayal in
Betrayal never carries the same kind of narrative weight that a similar betrayal might in other
forms of horror media. Like, for one,
the word “betrayal” is
the biggest word on the box. If you start playing this game
and are surprised when one of your fellow players is outed as a secret baddie then you're
either four years old or don't know how to read English. Either way, congratulations on getting into
such a complicated game. That must have been very scary for you and
you're braver than I ever will be. But suspecting, guessing, or even outright
knowing that a turn is going to come doesn't necessarily stop it from being a s
tomach
dropper when it does eventually happen. How many times have we re-watched the same
movie desperately hoping that this time, magically, we’re watching a version where the protagonist
isn't betrayed by their best friend, and they both make it out of the situation alive? When we read a murder mystery novel we know
that someone is going to get murdered and someone will be their killer. But that doesn't stop deducing the who, what,
when, where, and why of the murder any less thrilling. And it'
s this section that in my opinion betrayal
fumbles the most. Far from being a narrative trapdoor that opens
up under the players, destroying their expectations and leaving
them scrabbling to work out what is possible or even real about the world that
they're in right now. The Betrayal in this game is the only thing
that gives it any kind of expectation or even direction. Before the haunt begins comes the exploration
phase, where pretty much you and your other players are aimlessly wandering arou
nd the
house, opening up new rooms and getting random items that you hope might
be useful later on, many of which that you can't yet
use. You're effectively walking, killing time,
waiting for the haunt to begin. It doesn't matter if you spend 10 minutes
doing this or 40 minutes doing this, you are waiting for 80% of this game's content to
be revealed to you. When that happens, suddenly not only can you
use most of your items, suddenly rooms actually have meanings now. But also you have a way to
win the game and
so it transforms the betrayal from what it needs to be in order to produce a horror effect, something
to be feared, pushed back against, and denied for as long
as possible into the fun bit that players rush to get
to in order to experience 80% of what's in this box. And, frankly, if the expiration stage of this
game undermines any potential for horror that exists before the haunt, then the haunt itself undermines what happens
afterwards. Betrayals in horror media often and most
effectively
occur when our protagonists think that they have the upper hand. They've thought of some way to outsmart, outflank,
or even outright kill the monster, only for someone or something to shatter that illusion leaving both them
and the audience to wonder “well, what is it that we are even able
to do now?” Betrayal obviously revels in this trope, but
totally undermines the narrative impact it could have by immediately presenting the solution to
the betrayal in black and white! The traitor
is given a goal, of course,
usually some variation on ‘kill everyone else in the mansion’ with maybe an alternative win condition that
they need to meet that the other players need to stop them from
completing. The other players, on the other hand, are
also given the exact things that they need to do and collect in order to defeat the foe, immediately as
the foe is revealed! Like imagine if you're watching The Babadook
and the first time The Babadook appeared on screen it was like: “Oh hello Sh
eila, I was just thinking you
should probably deal with the loss of your husband in a more productive
way rather than letting grief lead you to mistreat
your child there just- just a friendly thought!” [To the tune of the Bluey opening theme] “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-baa-ba-ba-ba-Babadook!” That's either the best or the worst joke that
I've ever written. Much like that, any semblance of emotional
depth, any threat or danger posed by the monster is immediately lessened as its reveal is presented simultane
ously
alongside the method for its destruction. But now we need to move on to how Betrayal
struggles to create horror in how it works as a board game. Like most horror video games, Betrayals monsters
are positioned both as sources for fear for one's own personal safety, but also objects
of revulsion by making close proximity to them a dangerous
tactic. You are running away from mad scientists and
zombies because mechanically the way you lose the game is one of your four stats being reduced to ze
ro
which is mainly caused through combat which can usually only start by you being
in the same room as the thing you're fighting. Usually if you're one of the survivors and
not the traitor you'll have some alternative means that you can win the game that
doesn't involve direct confrontation with the traitor. This produces a kind of cat and mouse relationship
between traitor and survivor, where the former chases the latter around
the mansion to at least frustrate their plans to win the
game if no
t simply slay them. Horror video games like Resident Evil utilise
this relationship to amazing results. Placing unkillable, or at least hyper-resilient,
enemies in the game space that follow you around at just slightly slower than your maximum
movement speed, forcing you to solve complicated puzzles that will eventually allow you to defeat that
villain but under massive amounts of duress. It is scary. It's such an effective imbalanced relationship
that even non-horror games like Subnautica that
utilize this can be piss
producingly terrifying. There's little that's more scary to me than
leaving the safety of my underwater house to complete some tasks or do a bit of exploring
whilst an ostensibly undefeatable foe terrorizes me. Or even just announces they're in the area. “The sharks home just don't bother them? Yeah I was kind of getting that vibe.” “A little salvage? I don't need that-“ “OH. FUCK ME.” “Alright, I know when I'm not wanted.” But Betrayal and other board games struggle
to
achieve this same kind of fear and for one quite simple reason: the monster in a video game can be quite easily
viewed as a monster. The monster in a game like betrayal is an
abstract game object being moved about a piece of cardboard by
your mate Rohan. [Nethmi] “And I'll need the Cold War zombies.” [Spice] “The Cold War Zombies?” [Rohan] “Sure, sure. [Spice] “If I'm gonna have to fucking shoot
my way through revisionist Soviet zombie so be it.” This isn't to say that video games, through
their
more realistic graphics and real-time actions somehow convince our brains that their monster
is more real than that of a board game, and that's why they're more scary. Indeed Carroll refutes this as an explanation
as to why art horror works: This is not to say that when a monster is
being controlled or embodied by another actual person that horror is an
unachievable thing. Games of Dead by Daylight, or sessions of
the 10 Candles RPG can be genuinely heart pounding experiences. However it is als
o true that human-controlled
terror is more susceptible to breaking immersion when one or more of
those people let the mask slip. Watching the killer, piloted by one of your
mates, get successfully outmaneuvered by the rest of your friendship group, for
example. Or hearing the GM's Voice break during a supposedly
tense scene in a session of Call of Cthulhu. Or watching the scare maze actor whack their
head on a low door frame as they give chase to you. All of these things betray the fantasy, rev
eal
the monster to be little more than, sometimes literally, a person
in a Halloween mask. And I would argue that board games in comparison
to other forms of playable horror media struggle with this problem a lot more by virtue of
how the players both interact with the game's space and perceive
each other in the moment. For example, a player embodying a digital
monster can effectively cease to exist, becoming totally estranged from the beast
that they're piloting. This means that other players i
n the game
can come to view that monster less as the manipulated game object that it actually is
and far more as the threat that it seeks to represent. In horror RPGs, players are encouraged to
embody characters alongside imagined threats. One of the ways that a horror story can get
us to feel fear is by relying on how the personalities and situations of other people affect us emotionally
and through how those people's reactions to such situations are often instructive of how we should feel. Aga
in I refer back to Carol for this: By embodying a character in an RPG you create
a separation between you the player and the world of the game system
itself. But, in turn, how your character reacts to
the world around them will inform how you feel about the situation. For example there is nothing inherently scary
about the character of Chungle-down Bim in Dimension 20’s 2nd series
of Fantasy High. However if your character has gone through
a traumatic experience with Mr Bim, then potentially his
reappearance in the narrative
may well cause you genuine fear and discomfort. [Brennan to Lou] Chungle-down Bim, uh, turns
to you, uh, and goes “Ye ain't no pirate, and Bill would spit your eye!” uh he's going to cast Eldritch blast on you. “I’m gonna shit in your mouth!” “I'm gonna make a toilet of your mouth,
boy!” [Brennan] You begin to hear a voice behind
you in the woods… “Ha ha ha… I'm gonna shit in that mouth.” [Lou] I full on my spin around. [Brennan] Um, leaping like a monkey from tree
to tree. [Lou] Fuck this! Fuck this dude! [Brennan] “I’m gonna shit in that mouth! I’m gonna shit in your mouth!” Board games exist as an unfortunate worst-of-both-worlds
in comparison to these two other mediums in terms of creating horror experiences. They often lack the immersive character work
of RPGs, but also the hard visual disconnection between player and game object afforded by
video games. Betrayal’s monster flounders, its controller
unable to separate themselves from it or the rest of
the table either visually or emotionally
and frankly the game system itself doesn't go to any particular special length to present
the monster as any form of threat that isn't purely mechanical. Rather than how in other forms of horror media
immersion is lost at the fault of one of the participants letting the mask slip,
with Betrayal a bunch of invented paratext like role-playing elements needs to be imposed
upon it by the players for there to even be a mask to
let slip in the first place. I d
o feel the need to make one thing clear
at this point, however, and that's that a horror board game failing as a horror experience
doesn't necessarily make it a bad board game. Additionally, a horror experience failing
to scare me doesn't necessarily make it a bad horror experience. For example I never jumped out of my skin
at any point whilst listening to Visions of Bodies Being Burnt. But if you told me that, as a result, it's
a bad horror album then I hope you didn't have a big breakfast beca
use I'm gonna make you eat those words
along with a vinyl of There Existed an Addiction to Blood… That's also another horror album by the same
band. That one wasn't as good so I'm quite happy
wasting the vinyl injuring you. I shouldn't ad-lib-
I shouldn't ad-lib these things. On that note, Betrayal, at least the version
of the game that I played, is a rubbish horror experience. But it was a fun board game to crack open
with my friends both on and off camera. Betrayal is absolutely fun, provided
you get
a good haunt. All of the b-roll that we shot for this video
was taken from a game that lasted maybe 20 minutes, if that. Our haunt triggered the earliest I think it
possibly could and then, by virtue of the haunt we got, what items we already had, and what tiles
we ended up flipping over, we managed to escape the mansion in about
2 turns. [Spice] “I paused the recording because
I thought that there's no way the haunting was going to proc
off that early.” [Rohan] “There’s just no way.” Ho
wever the length of a game of Betrayal can
vary wildly and the pacing leaves a lot to be desired. For example, immediately before we started
filming b-roll we played one additional game of Betrayal just to make sure that we all
remembered what the rules were, and that game's exploration phase I think
lasted longer than the entirety of the game that we played for b-roll. But then when the haunt fired in that game
it was over almost immediately because the traitor just so happened to be the player
who'd picked up all of the weapons during exploration, and had about five Omens. So we got our shit pushed in with absolute
ease. It was a pretty unsatisfying way for the game
to end. To summarize what I believe to be the main
lesson we can learn from Betrayal: something that games designers wishing to
develop horror experiences in board game form need to grapple with, if not avoid entirely,
is the reliance of one player being in control of the monster without appropriate ways of
immersing the
rest of the table in that experience. But what if you don't have a rest of the table? What if the only person you need to immerse
is yourself? What if rather than your girlfriend chasing
you around a haunted mansion with a little plastic figurine. You're on your own? Isolated, afraid, and naked? Look it gets hot under the lights, okay? Right so you know how at the start of this
video I had that funny little sight gag that was like ‘Spice8Rack's been ill’
and that's why this video has taken so lo
ng to come out? Well, between the last shot and right now
it turns out that I'd accidentally eaten a little bit of gluten and was then sick free
week and a half. You know, when I was 17 years old I thought
I'd be one of the few people to survive the zombie apocalypse. But I'm 27 now and contaminated oat milk can
put me out of commission for a fucking fortnite. If the undead ever learned how to weaponize
baguettes I'm fucked mate. Final Girl is a bit of a contemporary oddity. A runaway Kickstarte
r board game success story
whose major selling point wasn't three dozen unique plastic miniatures, and whose game-time
can be measured in minutes rather than in equivalent commitments
to sessions of jury duty. An explicitly solo experience, Final Girl
seeks to immerse the player in their very own horror movie with “box-set” expansions
required to play alongside the base game. Even the way that this game comes packaged
contributes to this sense of immersion. The games designers and artists are cr
edited
on the box but not as such. Instead they are credited as directors and
directors of photography. The antagonist of the game space is given
a starring role. Even the way that the magnets on the box ‘clack’
shut- it's very reminiscent to me of those bastard
sharp plastic teeth in old cassette boxes that hold it closed. Additionally, and this has nothing to do with
how this game produces a horror atmosphere or anything like that I just think it's really
cool, the box is the game this is not
just a means
by which you keep all of the little meeples and cards secure in a box. This is a detachable thing that becomes a
board! This board is how you represent the killer
in the game. But it's- but it's also the lid of the box! But it's also the board! I get this game off my shelf all the time
to show my friends, not because I think it's any good, in fact I think it's a bit naff,
but just because the- it's the- the box is the board,
and the board is the box! I just think that's neat! There
are maybe a dozen different expansions
you can get for this game. Many of them directly pastiching classic horror
movies such as Friday the 13th or the Birds. Many others still simply revelling in classic
horror settings and imagery such as a haunted mansion or a
fucked up carnival. But how does the game actually work? Well like most slasher movies the final girl,
who you control, has to defeat the villain. To do this you'll be traveling around your
chosen map, searching for useful items and res
cuing survivors to both limit the bloodlust
of your enemies and to gain useful bonuses. You play cards to take actions and roll horror
dice to accomplish them. You'll either succeed in your task with two
stars, partially succeed with one, or fail with none. The dice also have this symbol on them meaning
they're considered a failure unless you discard two cards
from your hand to make it a success. You'll need to keep track of your health for
obvious reasons as well as the level of horror you're c
urrently experiencing which can have
a positive or negative effect on your dice rolls. You'll also need to keep track of how much
time you're spending whilst performing actions because once you're
done with that portion of the turn you'll be spending any remaining time you have
to purchase or prepare more powerful actions for future turns. Once future turns have been prepared for it's
the villains go. Either they'll move closer to you or the large
gluts of delicious, vulnerable victims and attac
k. Increasing their bloodlust for everyone they
kill, gaining stronger stats potentially unleashing special effects or dark powers
which are random and permanent buffs to their abilities, and causing all the surviving victims
present to panic and either scatter to adjacent zones or stay
petrified with fear. Each turn they'll also unleash a unique form
of terror from their Terror Deck which could be anything from rampaging into
the next available space, to springing a trap on you, to unleashing
a
new dark power. Eventually this Terror Deck will run dry,
at which point you'll flip over your killer's finale card, revealing both new actions for
them to do each turn and special powerful rules that'll make defeating
them all the more difficult. Once your turn is done it's time to start
again with you using any actions you didn't use or discard last turn plus any that you
bought in the last buy phase, refreshing what you did use last turn at the
end of the next buy phase and so on and so fort
h until
either you or the killer is dead. Now if you think that sounds like a lot of
stuff for one person to control and keep track of, uh, then you're right. It- it really is. I have played games of Scythe that have taken
up less table and mental real estate than games of Final Girl. But all of that aside, how well does this
game capture that elusive horror experience? Well if we were marking on flavour alone then
this game would score big. It's in everything that you'd expect:
the killers, the
events, the final girls themselves. But also in very little ways, like how you
can fail your walk action if you roll poorly, either not moving at all or moving but injuring
yourself in the process. Very much hearkening back to that classic
horror movie image of people tripping over nothing during life
or death chases. Or how when either you or the killer lose
their last point of health there's a chance that they'll stand back up
again for either a glorious second wind or one final jump scare
de
pending on who gets it. It's completely random as to whether or not
you or the killer will get that opportunity to have a second wind and, indeed,
there is variance baked into almost every aspect of this game. Allowing for radically different challenges
to present themselves to you for each playthrough. You'll never know what you're going to draw
from the event or Terror Deck until you do. All of the items, the killer’s finale and
their dark power are randomly designated before the game begins.
Even the starting location of the killer,
the final girl, and the survivors is determined by which of the many setup cards that you
draw as you set up the game. And of course even the stuff that you do have
control over, which of these cards you buy, all of the effectiveness of them is determined
by the role of a dice. Meaning that pretty much at no point in this
game are you ever 100% certain of what's going to happen next. Unfortunately this buffet of variance is naught
but a poor disguise, in
my opinion, for just how rigid and on-the-rails
this game can be. It's true that final goal can present innumerable
unique challenges to the player. But very rarely do the solutions to those
challenges look any different from one another. This not only frustrates the ability for the
game to develop a sense of horror. But also can produce some real feels bad losses
or ridiculously easy wins. An example of this on-the-rails feel can be
seen in how the game's core rules function. When the horror l
evel gets low enough
you start rolling three dice rather than two whenever you want to complete any of the actions
that you buy cards for. This means that you're far more likely to
achieve at least a partial success in any of the actions that
you take. So prioritizing getting the horror level down
early is actively a good thing. Additionally spending cards which don't lose
you time or even ones that gain you time is a great idea, as the more time that you
go into the buy phase with the more powe
rful cards that you can purchase in comparison to the ones
that you start the game with. However you start the game with two cards
that let you do both of those things. I found myself spending almost all of my first
turns using my two focus cards whose full successes both decrease the horror score
and gains me time, discarding any cards I could to achieve full successes and using
any remaining cards to ferry victims towards an exit. I played a Fair few games of Final Girl and,
by the time I twig
ged onto this as an opening strategy, I rarely did anything else on my first turn. If you've ever glitched out in a horror video
game and had to restart from a save point or had to rewind a horror movie a couple of
minutes because somebody's phone went off, then you know that the process of getting
back to the point in the piece of media where you no longer know what's going to happen
next is far more tedious than it is terrifying and, frankly, that's how the first 10 minutes of every single
gam
e of Final Girl felt to me. Additionally, how well I performed in those
first 10 minutes had a drastic impact on How likely it was
I was going to succeed in the game overall. If I rolled poorly on my first two focuses
it was almost like I might as well mulligan the whole experience. Like restarting a stealth section in a video
game because you got spotted by the first guard
you needed to pass. On the other side of it, by the time I was
rolling three dice a turn I was almost guaranteed either vic
tory no
matter what I ended up rolling or what the Terror Deck spat out… Almost. And this brings me on to my second point,
which is that variance can be distractingly unfair. Either producing easy victories that you don't
really feel like you aren't or unavoidable defeats then you had no way of realistically
preparing for. Sure it is absolutely exciting to have a wide
range of random events and scenarios for your players to find
themselves in. It certainly does contribute to an increased
shelf l
ife and replayability. However, with dozens of cards in multiple
decks, interacting with each other at random points, with dice rolling thrown in for good measure,
and then the developers encouraging you to mix and match expansions there is no way that,
even if you spent the rest of your life play testing Final Girl, could you safely say that
it has been balanced for every eventuality. It's very difficult to buy into a horror experience
when you feel less pursued by a killer and more fucked over
by a random number generator. There were multiple times in my games of Final
Girl, with just one expansion mind you, where an unfortunate combo of cards
meant that I pretty much lost the game without having any real way to claw it back, and here
is just, like, one example of that happening. You draw one event card at the start of each
game of Final Girl and, on this fateful day, mine was this: an event which spawns a deadly trap in the
Haunted Wood space that also populates the Hall of Mirrors
space
with four fresh survivors. Because of the setup card I was using three
survivors began the game on the Haunted Wood space. Now, traps instantaneously kill all survivors
who are on a space where they're sprung or who move onto that space. So, before play had even properly begun,
everyone in the Haunted Woods died. Because a Killer's bloodlust increases by
one each time a Survivor dies, regardless of if they were killed by the killer or not,
this instantaneously raised the Killer's bloodlust
to three. Granting them and their minions extra movement
speed and increasing the horror Track by one. Not the end of the world. A difficult start for sure! But I could feasibly recover from this. Then, after a turn spent moving to the new
group of survivors and trying to decrease the horror meter, the killer took their turn
and drew a card called Razer Puppet Strings which instantaneously killed all survivors
in spaces adjacent to them. Now, by a fun quirk of the setup card, the
killer happene
d to begin the game right next to the Hall of Mirrors. So they killed all four of the new survivors
there, plus two in another space, and dealt two damage to me. This increased their bloodlust by a further
six, causing two more awful events to pop off, plus activating their dark power
and increasing both their range and their damage to their maximum! All of this before I'd even gotten the opportunity
to try and succeed with the card that might have let me search for a weapon if there happened
to
be one in one of the item piles. Obviously this was a very unfortunate combination
of cards and not every game of Final Girl shook out this way. However this was also far from the only time
that I stopped playing this game not because I won or because I lost, but because winning
had become impossible… Uh, also I am currently sat in the corner
of my living room and not up at the table where I used to be because… This is an artistic decision on my part. Yeah! I am trying to keep you engaged and o
n your
toes when it comes to watching my content and a bit of a change of scenery will foster
that. Yeah, that's why I'm doing this… It has nothing to do with the fact that I
might have,- halfway through filming on the day that I shot the rest of this section… My foot unplugged my microphone and I didn't
notice until a week after whilst I was trying to edit all the footage together
and now I'm three days away from when I'm supposed to be releasing this video
and this is the fastest way that I co
uld get the rest of that section recorded with usable
audio. It's not that. It's not that it was the first thing- it was
the first thing I said, I- accidents don't happen over here in the Spice8Rack. Everything on this video is 100% intentional… Everything IN this video is one hund- FUC- The coin of variance does, of course, have
a second face. Some games of Final Girl will be absolute
walks in the cake. Survivors, for example, may randomly panic
their way onto exit spaces, doing the hard job of
ferrying them to those spaces for you
and so all you need to do is walk onto that space and *boom* all of those survivors are
out of the game now! You get all your bonuses and you've denied
the killer a bunch of bloodlust. Sometimes you'll just roll hot. The first item that you find is a kick-ass
weapon and you end up beating the Killer's bottom bloody
within a handful of turns. But as I said not every game of Final Girl
ends up this way. There were a fair few sessions of this game
that I playe
d where victory was only one dice roll away,
but so is defeat if things went wrong. However, clever preparation on my part,
such as purchasing cards which let me improve or alter dice rolls the turm before was absolutely
rewarded by the game system in those moments. What's good about this being a solo game as
well is that if something seems to crop up that looks like it's going to destroy your
ability to win the game, or at least enjoy the experience, then there's
nothing and no one stopping you
from resetting the board
for another go. I've never felt particularly comfortable or
confident with the idea of voicing my discontent if I find that I'm playing a game with multiple
people and I'm not enjoying myself. Like, if everyone else at the table seems
to be having fun, can't I just shut up for 40 minutes and let them have that moment and then we
can move on to something else? With a solo game, however,
if you experience a turn one hyper fucking like I did in Final Girl then, well bada b
ing
bada boom! Shuffle up a couple of decks, reset a few
meeples and hey presto baby, you're re-upped for round two and you didn't even know it! Wowie zowie I am so glad that I do not give
a fuck about continuity in this section of the video, because my love I can't get comfortable
to save my life here! And solo play is an interesting thing to consider
in regards to creating horror. We all know that engaging with horror media
on your own, in a dark room, or with headphones on to isolate
yourself
within whatever media you're engaging with can absolutely enhance the terror that
you feel. I remember, for example, one of my scariest
video game memories- of which I'm sure we will have many- was in a gaming bar in London. Somebody had bought a
VR headset with Skyrim loaded onto it. I'd never played VR before then but I immediately
understood the appeal. My ears were no longer ringing with the frivolity
of the bar around me instead they were soothed with pseudo
Nordic ambience. My field of vi
ew was flooded, not with neon
and fun drinks, but with late 2011 levels of Bethesda visual fidelity. As I moved throughout the village that I started
in I truly felt like I was walking across dirt and cobble. I forgot that I was in a basement in Dalston,
I was in Skyrim… And it felt especially real to me when I was
fiddling about with the controller to find out what all the buttons did
and accidentally pressed the one that unsheathed your weapon and, for a moment in my head,
had a very real batt
le axe about two inches away from my right eyeball. I fell over on the ground and was not allowed
back on the headset for the rest of the evening. And that wasn't even a horror game I don't
want to even think about how petrified I would be if I played something
like Resident Evil. There are three reasons why I refuse to stream
Subnautica in VR. One is the money, one is the space, and the last one is my desire not to cack
my pants live on the internet. Theoretically playing a horror board game
on
your own could aid in your immersion and connection
to the world and the horror. After all one of the major issues with Betrayal
at House on the Hill’s haunt was that how effective if it was as a horror experience
totally depended on how effective the antagonistic player was at embodying evil, if they even
chose to play that role in the first place. Solo games, in contrast, have fewer human
“filters” as it were for their experience to be transmitted through
before it reaches you. So, much like
self-hypnosis, provided you're
willing to buy into the experience of a solo game, they can be great mediums for the genre that
they're attempting to embody… and I maintain that they absolutely can
and could be a brilliant medium for horror. Unfortunately, I couldn't have felt any lesser
immersed in the horror of Final Girl, because the game of Final Girl kept getting in the
way. First and foremost with Final Girl is an issue
with its monster. Knowing the position of the antagonist at
all times,
as well as at least one move they're guaranteed
to make every single turn, lessens a lot of the anxiety and tension that their presence
ought to represent. It'd be like playing Outlast, except you've
installed a mod with a mini-map that lets you detect the location of NPCs
or you're playing a game of Battleship except your opponent happens to be sitting in front
of a mirror. It's great for planning movement and strategy
not so good for producing spookums. Next as I just alluded to, whilst playin
g
a game on your own does leave you isolated in the experience that game is trying to convey
it also leaves you isolated with the rules and mechanics of that game itself Final Girl
is a reasonably complicated game. We're not talking Pipeline or Keyflower levels
here, but there's certainly enough going on to leave your brain
ticking over. To get you focusing on the strategy of future
turns and the potentiality of random chance as opposed to appreciating the hunt and the
chase in of itself. Additi
onally whilst a lot of the time the
Killer is going to move based on how the rules say the killer moves, sometimes the game actively
asks you to choose how your antagonist is going to
act. For example each turn the Killer, and sometimes
their minions, will usually target either the closest group of survivors or the Final
Girl, move towards their space, and attack. However, sometimes there'll be a tie as to
who the closest target is and you need to decide yourself where the
killer or their minion
s will end up. This is a pretty common occurrence,
cropping up at least once or twice in every single game of Final Girl that I played, and
whilst it might seem like a small thing I just want to stress that being given even
a degree of control a temporary moment of agency over how your antagonists acts in a
horror scenario completely demolishes any sense of fear that
may have remained in the core of this game. Even if you consistently make the call, like
I did, that the Killer will always act in
a way that's worse for the player
in moments where multiple mutually exclusive options exist for its movement, it still takes
you out of the experience. Asks you to view the game through a purely
strategic lens and determine what's gonna fuck you over the
most. It's the meme where someone's riding a bicycle
and shoves a stick through their front wheel. It's difficult to feel anything other than
frustration when you knowingly put yourself in a bad situation. On top of all of this, in a solo boar
d game
you are both the only moving part, but also the only person keeping yourself accountable
to the rules. As a result I often found myself breaking
what little immersion I was getting whilst playing Final Girl to move numerous very small
and fiddly wooden and cardboard tokens around a very small map, and also just to check rules on the fly to
make sure that I'd done each phase correctly. And talking about accountability: When you're
the only person in a room playing a game that often becomes
impossibly hard in ways that feel very unfair, the urge to
just cheat a little bit becomes almost overwhelming. Maybe I'll just pretend that I didn't draw
that trap card when I went searching for an item. Oh, or I could take that bad roll back because
I just realized I could play my cards more efficiently. I never did cheat because what's the point
of playing a game with rules if you're just going to ignore them. But, again, it's very difficult to feel horror
in a situation that you know you ha
ve full control over and are actively and repeatedly dismissing
the urge to make easier and nicer for yourself. I know for an absolute fact that a solo board
game can be a great conduit for the horror genre. However it is very difficult to make one that
also has frequent rule ambiguity and also general rules complexity. Each time you have to fiddle about with a
dozen different meeples, or look up the FAQ in a rules booklet,
it's the equivalent of having to search for an unfamiliar word when you
come across it
in your reading of Edgar Allan Poe. Or pausing your playthrough of Dead Space
for the PS5 to look up the location of a sidequest objective you swear you're searching in the
right place for. “This game, games console, and television
were all purchased exclusively to use in this shot in this video and I have no intention
of using them for any non-business related activity…” “Please ignore the fact that this is clearly
New Game Plus.” Overall as a game Final Girl is just “Fine-al
Gir
l-“ Jesus Christ maybe I shouldn't have re-shot
the section, that was shit. I had some fun playing it and I will absolutely
concede that I only played with one expansion and this could just be a bit of a dud. The others might be brilliant. There are, like, two dozen of them. Not all of them can be great! But I haven't seen anything, at least in my
opinion, in the game's core rules that have encouraged me to go out and try a different
one. Uh, shout out however, one more time to how this game's b
ox works. I think that's the coolest shit ever. I've discovered a lot of cool stuff whilst
doing this project and researching different board games. How this game's expansion’s box works is
by far one of the dopest things I've seen! Mwah! Fuckin’ nice! As a horror experience, however baby I didn't
even get fuckin’ close. Outside of the general board game anxieties
of hoping you roll good dice and draw good cards I felt nothing even close to fear whilst
playing this game. There are so many issues
with it that stop
it from being a successful horror experience. But in my opinion it's the wild swings between
absolute player control and total player helplessness that really thwarts this game's ability to
deliver on horror. If on one turn you're able to precisely control
the movement and action of your antagonist, and then on the next turn you are tombstoned
by a series of cards that you have no way of preventing,
you don't feel like you're in a horror situation. You feel like you're trapped
in a fucked up
dice tray that keeps cocking the D20. Knowing where the monster is at all times. The game so often falling into imbalance through variance, and the general rules complexity
held within these boxes. All of these things and more hold Final Girl
back from being a brilliant horror experience… So what if there was a board game that sought
to be the antithesis of all of that? What if there was a game where neither monster
nor victim could be seen? A game whose controlled and contained
variance
becomes hidden information to be bluffed with by all players? A game which is so simple that its core components
can be boiled down to a single deck of cards a whiteboard and a marker? What was that? That game exists? Thank God otherwise this video was going nowhere! I really talked myself into a dead end there. Huh? Behind me? Wha- [Scream] Don't be put off by its campy name, hyper-minimalistic
design, simplistic rules, or the gun that I'm currently aiming at you from
under this table.
Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is a
deliciously elegant and anxiety-inducing hidden information game with some fantastic horror
sci-fi theming. So how does it work? [Gun Cocks] When the game begins you will be dealt one
card at random from the role deck. Either designating you an astronaut, meaning
that your job is to escape the aliens by reaching one of your
levels escape pods. Or an alien, where your job is to hunt down
the rest of the astronauts before they leave the ship. To take you
r turn you'll select the coordinates
of a space adjacent to the one you're on and move there. If it's one of these white spaces you'll not
have to do anything further, simply saying “silence in all sectors” and passing the
turn. If it's one of these grey or ‘dangerous’
spaces then you'll have to draw a card from the noise deck. The noise deck is used by all players and
your drawn card will either be an item or silence card, meaning you make no noise moving into that
space and simply say ‘silence
in all sectors’, or it'll be a noise card. Either green, meaning you could announce noise
in any coordinate on the map that you wish, or it'll be red, meaning that you must
announce noise at the sector you are in. No one is allowed to see what cards you draw
from the noise deck, and so even if you do have to end up announcing
coordinates no one really knows whether or not that was a distracting green noise card
or an unfortunate red noise card. You can take this opportunity to bluff with
your f
ellow players. Double Bluff. Triple Bluff even! But never quadruple bluff. Never quadruple bluff! Are you sick? Astronauts and aliens play the same except
for a few major differences. The first is that aliens are faster than astronauts,
being able to move two spaces rather than one each turn. Additionally aliens may choose to attack on
a coordinate they end their turn on whenever they like, meaning that any unfortunate astronaut or
fellow alien that shares that space with them is immediately
kil
led. The aliens are fully out of the game the astronauts
respawn as aliens in the alien starting space. Now if you do choose to attack you forego
drawing a noise card from the noise deck even if you entered a hazardous space
however you have, in effect, announced the exact coordinates you are in when you attack,
but also announced to the rest of the table that you are an alien as astronauts can only
attack with the use of a specific item. On the flip side of this astronauts are slower
than the a
liens, however only they are allowed to use any of
the items found in the noise deck. Some of these items are incredibly useful
as well! Like a card which lets you forego drawing
a noise card when you enter a hazardous space, or the cat, which lets you announce noise
in two different sectors regardless of whatever noise card
you drew from the deck. However because astronauts are the only ones
who can use item cards, in using one you announce your role to the rest of the table much in
the same wa
y that aliens announce what they are when they
attack. This produces a delightful “who’ll blink
first” style relationship between these two sides,
with astronauts trying to obfuscate both their position and their role for as long as possible
and aliens trying to work out who is who before they reveal their hand and start attacking
in spaces. It's oh- it's morto bene! And that's it that is how Escape from the
Aliens in Outer Space works. What results is a game experience that's part
werewolf part
Manhunt and all very tense. You'll never know exactly where every other
player is on the map at any given time and even if you think you know, well in a couple
of turns they could be bloody anywhere. Additionally it doesn't matter if you're an
alien or an astronaut, you're still actively encouraged to engage in the guessing game of every other player's
role regardless of what team they're on. If you're an astronaut you're, of course,
trying to guess who the aliens are so you can avoid them, and
if you're an alien you're trying to guess
who the crewmates are so you can pursue them. However, if you're an alien you're also trying
to guess who the other aliens are because if you start randomly attacking in spaces
that a player happens to be in, well, if you don't know whether or not they're on your
team you could inflict collateral damage or if someone else does the exact same thing
you could become it. Additionally crewmates need to identify their
teammates because they're all heading to
these escape pods. Escape pods can only be used once. So that means, if you haven't been paying close attention to where the rest of
your team are going and you're the second person to arrive at
an escape pod… Well then you my friend are like a leprechaun's
urethra: piss out of luck. That's so shit. That's worse than the Babadook one. Anxiety is absolutely the name of the game
here, and Escape the Aliens induces it in so many delicious ways. This game only ends for example when there
are no mor
e astronauts on the ship, regardless of how that happens. What this means in practice is that, if you're
an astronaut, the more your teammates succeed, the harder
the game becomes for you. If you are the last astronaut left on the
ship heading towards one of only a couple of as yet unused escape pods
you become acutely aware that you are now the sole gaze of all the remaining aliens
on the ship who are either trying desperately to guess
at your location, or who know your location and are current
ly barreling towards you
and you have no idea if those aliens are where they say they are it. Is ludicrously thrilling. Additionally, escape pods
aren't even guaranteed exits for astronauts. When you get to an escape pod space
you will announce which pod you're at and then flip over a card from the escape pod
deck. This deck only contains five cards and four
of them are green. You flip over a green card? Congratulations! Escape pod works and you get to leave the
spaceship! You win. If you flip o
ver a red card, however, then
the escape pod's broken, makes a loud beeping noise, and no other player can use that escape pod
for the rest of the game. You have to go and use another one. Now it's more likely than not that your escape
pod will work. However when that red card does crop up: Christ
on a bike there is no feeling of dread greater. Remember you have to announce the exact escape
pod that you are using before you flip that card. Meaning that if it's non-functional: Congratulations! Yo
u have just announced the exact coordinate of the dead end you have unwittingly buggered
yourself into to every single alien at the table. Let's not horse around the bush any further. Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is a
fucking marvelous game. It is endlessly replayable, with a dozen maps
to choose from and additional complexity to be found in the optional roles that each crew
and alien card come attached with. You could play as the ‘psychologist’ whose
special action allows them to start
in the alien section
rather than the crew’s. Or you could be the ‘psychic alien’ who
gets to announce noise in multiple sectors regardless of whatever noise card they draw,
echoing uncertainty throughout the entire game. Whenever I've introduced this to any of my
board game play-groups they have always immediately asked me to bring it back for the next session. It is a tour de force. Players revel in the tense scenarios this
game can create for you… but that's just it. They're tense scenarios.
They're brilliant scenarios. Masterfully designed scenarios. But not ones of horror. Very rarely whilst you're playing this game
will you ever experience any of the kinds of emotions that you would readily associate
with the horror medium and, from my perspective, that's because of
two reasons: the first is how Escape from the Aliens and Outerspace uses the turn structure
and the second has more to do with how the game uses abstraction. In literature, film, and video games, seeing
a monster in c
lose proximity to our protagonist but not yet attacking produces a special kind
of tension and dread that's distinct from non-monster threats. Seeing a creature pause by our protagonists
hiding space, or hearing the GM's dice clatter as they decide whether or not the Beastman smells your fear
can be stomach churning. In part because of the nature of the monster,
but also because the only way for the tension to break is through either the monster acting:
attacking or moving on, or by taking yours
elf out of the media hitting pause on a remote,
dog-earing a page, or asking for a break in game. Now obviously it's good that horror media
comes with these kinds of emergency release valves in case the fiction gets a bit too
intense or even triggering. However provided you want to feel that horror
the ‘how’ and ‘when’ of it occurring being A) totally out of your control
and B) inexorably approaching are both incredibly key components
to the success of that sensation. Unlike Final Girl, your foe
s in Escape From
the Aliens are beings acting completely outside of your
realm of agency. Hell you can't even physically see a representation
of them in the gamespace. However the turn-based nature of most board
games allow for a natural, so to speak, break from the fiction. Your turn is your turn and, outside of one
or two items, you can't do anything during anyone else's turn. This means that whilst sure of the creeping
inclination that four aliens are getting closer and closer to your positio
n,
when your to comes around you can spend as long as you want considering the best tactical
move. For as long as the patience of the table holds
out, the danger of the monster ceases to exist: rendering
any potential fear of it inert. As an astronaut you cease to exist for all
other players up until the point where either you are attacked, you use the attack card,
or you use the spotlight card which is brilliant and
I'll talk about it a little bit later. But it is entirely possible for you to p
lay
this game as an astronaut and, if you're good enough at bluffing,
survive all the way to one of the escape pods whilst occupying the same space as an alien,
multiple turns in a row. Hell, neither of you may even realize that
you did just that until the game concludes and you reveal your movement and your board
to everybody else at the table. The terror that comes from the dramatic irony
of seeing either the monster or the victim from the other's perspective,
where one goes unnoticed or unnot
icing in the background, relies on an imbalance of
perception and information that unfortunately Escape from the Aliens
in Outer Space never really achieves for anything more than
a fleeting moment. However, when it does achieve it, it achieves
it spectacularly. And here is where I'm going to talk about
the spotlight card. Spotlight is one of the 10 items you can pick
up during this game and it's a tool that provides information. You select a coordinate on the map and any
players that are in tha
t sector or any of the adjacent six spaces to that sector have
to announce their exact coordinates. Astronauts can, of course, use this to scout
out nearby escape pods they're unsure about approaching. However it can also be used to confirm the
locations of aliens by shining it on, or adjacent to, where you
think they are. The trouble is, even if you've been paying
really close attention, you'll never be 100% certain of your teammates
locations. Meaning that there is a significant chance
that yo
u could turn on the spotlight and reveal another astronaut. Or worse yet, an astronaut and an alien only
a couple of tiles away. In the moments where something like this happens
Escape from the Aliens becomes a horror experience. All of a sudden any astronaut caught in the
spotlight knows that, in maybe as few as one turn later, the room or corridor they're in
will be swarming with foes. Suddenly that ghost-like quality that all
players enjoyed disappears. Your non-existence between tons evapora
tes. Hell, even the solid turn structure of the
game momentarily goes away as at least most of the table begins to mentally scrabble
to readjust their plans to come and get you. There's nothing inherently scary about a light
being turned on in a dark room. It is, however, a trouser browning experience
when you know that that light means that whilst you can't see anybody else,
they all can see you. For the first time in this video, this corner
case happenstance is what I would describe as a genui
ne horror experience that can be
found in a board game. However this moment is as fleeting as the
spotlight itself as, within a turn or two, all the players either reposition in the dark
or the astronaut that got caught gets killed. Rendering all of the information and tension
gained in that moment meaningless. The game transitions back into what it used
to be: Less Tale of Terror and more Slasher Comedy. And, yes, Escape from the Aliens in Outer
Space can be a hilarious game to play. For exampl
e you could have an overzealous
player on the aliens team, attacking haphazardly and at random,
trying to kill as many astronauts as possible using scatter shot technique making an awful
racket but not actually harming anyone in the process other
than their own ego. Conjuring images of idiot xenomorphs crashing
accidentally into space age vending machines. [Nethmi] “I’m attacking in K8” [Spice] “I’m not there!” [Nethmi] “Dammit. Where are you?” [Spice] “I'm not gonna tell you. You stinky alien c
an eat my spacing ass.” It is true that in the opening of this game
where you don't know exactly where everybody stands and are trying to give out as little
information as possible the game is tense. However, by the time that everybody's roles
have been revealed, all of that anxiety has been replaced with pithy taunting
as astronauts slink around the map, successfully dodging attacks and mocking their opponents
for poor positioning. And here is where Escape the Alien's abstraction
really works a
gainst it in terms of creating horror. Without any kind of physical manifestation
or representation of the monster in the gamespace, by the time the game progresses to the point
where you're all having a bit of a laugh it's impossible to view the player piloting
an alien as anything other than your silly mate who can't keep track of coordinates to
save her life. Additionally, in most of the games of this
that I have played, it's the aliens who end up being the mechanical
underdogs. Sure the they
can move faster and attack whenever
they want. However they have the far harder end of the
guessing game stick- “The harder end of the stick” is not a
fucking expression. The shorter end of the stick, or the harder
end of the bargain. Not the harder end of the St-
You see, once everybody's roles have been revealed,
astronauts don't necessarily need to even pay attention to where the aliens
are on the map. They just need to pick an escape pod that
another astronaut isn't going towards and succes
sfully bluff their way into b-lining
for it. Aliens, on the other hand, have to deduce
the exact location and coordinate of each astronaut. Coordinates which change every turn, which
can only be gleaned from imperfect information given out by unreliable
narrators. Information that can be obfuscated and changed
by incredibly powerful items that are hardly rare to draw. There is absolutely asymmetry in this game,
as asymmetry exists in most horror media, however unlike most horror media:
the asymm
etry in Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space clearly favours the astronauts
over the aliens. And so with that we have now talked about
three horror board games in, hopefully, an entertaining
amount of depth. I also feel that we have drilled down into
some of the major issues that board games designers need to contend with when they want
to create horror experiences within this medium. Number one: there needs to be a separation
between player and monster. Number two: there needs to be a correct
handling
of player agency or a symmetry between the hero and the villain. And number three: something needs to be done
about the sanctity and safety of the turn structure. Of course you need to consider other things
when you want to make a successful piece of horror media, such as creating a good tempo between promising
threat and delivering upon harm in your narrative. However in terms of things that I believe
that board games naturally struggle with by virtue of how their medium works, these t
hree
things are the major ones to consider when attempting to make a horror
board game. Which is why I am so unbelievably excited
to introduce you to a board game that I feel tackles all three of these things with the
utmost elegance. Ladies, gentlemen, and people like myself
who are resolute in our ambiguity, let me now introduce you to the thing that started
me on this wild journey. A genuinely cursed item: The Night Cage. Welcome to The Night Cage! Oooh! Have I come dressed as a goth? Or have
I accidentally cosplayed as an early
2000s Tumblr sex pest? You'll never know… Unless I have a crow in my pocket! AAAAAH! Now if you've if you've already heard about
The Night Cage then you've probably seen this reveal coming since before you even clicked
on the thumbnail of this video. But, not to belabour the mystique of this
game for those who have never come across it before; imagine that the first time you see this box
it is in the dusty corner of a bookshop. Imagine taking this box home,
ripping off
the cellophane that contains it, and opening it up out of frantic curiosity
only to find dozens upon dozens of these punch out cardboard pieces with artwork on them
that looks like charcoal sketch drawings of an 18th century creepypasta. One of these pieces being a six inch wide
set of empty eyes with an abyss on the other side of it. Are you telling me that all of these pieces
make up a game and not some kind of lost to time Danish nightmare
ritual? You're telling me that I'm suppos
ed to willingly
subject myself to the set of rules that will end with The
Dirge coming into play? That's the name of the piece this is called
the dirge you know I have seen a horror movie before, right? I'm not ready to lose my soul to whatever
demon or devil is obviously being trapped in this box. I have stuff on dickhead. Hilarious hyperbole that you pay good money
for aside, however, how does one actually play The Night Cage? Well to start with, you and up to four other
friends sit around an
empty board. You each have a candle representing your character,
a starting tile, a nerve token, and a card which reminds you of all the moves you're
allowed to make in the game. The only other game pieces you'll need to
concern yourself with are the keys which begin out of play,
and the tile stack made up of different kinds of connecting passageways key rooms gate rooms
and nasty, nasty men. This stack is randomized with a small number
of generic passageways shuffled to the top and play begins
with each player placing down
their starting tile at any point on the board with their
candle in it. Congratulations you're now playing the Night
Cage! What the fuck did you do something like that
for you daft twa- You see, or rather you don't, in The Night
Cage you only have a candle to guide you. This candle is piss
and can only illuminate the tiles immediately adjacent to you and connected to you via a
passageway. As you move you'll draw new tiles to represent
the path you've just lit and dis
card old ones representing the paths that you can't see
anymore. However because The Night Cage is a ‘cage
without walls’ as the game menacingly puts it, returning the way you just came won't
put back that lost tile. An entirely new passageway will instead be
illuminated or, if you're deeply unlucky, that space will be replaced with a hateful
bit of abstract art. These monsters are the immediate threat of
The Night Cage but they won't attack you straight away. They're sensitive to movement and w
ill only
come for you, and your piss candle, if something moves in their path. Unless the way you plan to move next takes
you immediately out of their path, however, they are going to get you. You don't die, however, after being attacked
by a wax eater. Oh no! No, no, no, no, no, that would be frankly
too kind of them. Instead your candle is extinguished and you
go ‘lights out’, meaning that all tiles your candle illuminated disappear
except for the one you are currently on and you don't know wh
at tile you're moving on
to next until you're already on it. The goal of the game is to collect one key
per candle in-game, that can be found at key rooms that will crop up randomly,
and then assemble all players at the same gate tile. At which point you will be able to win the
game by leaving The Night Cage. Not by defeating it. Just simply by not being there anymore. However as simple as that may sound, there
is so much mechanical and aesthetic depth to this game that makes it one of the most
claustrophobic and dread inspiring experiences that I have
ever sat down to play. Firstly players can't occupy the same space
unless it's a room tile. Meaning that you can very easily run into
situations where multiple players are trapped in the
same corridor, with a monster threatening to Wii bowling their asses back
into the void. To clarify, these wax eater monsters don't
just attack one player immediately adjacent to them. They attack down the full length of every
illuminated path connected
to them at the same time, hitting any and all players in
the way. Secondly players can't carry more than one
key at a time. Now, keys can be passed and candles can be
re-lit but only by players immediately adjacent to one another. Meaning that if you do need to take a key
off of someone so that they can go into a fresh key room, or someone needs their candle
relit desperately then you always run the risk of setting up a strike for a monster if you end up in the
same corridor. Also ‘a cage withou
t walls’ isn't just
some Foucaltian epithet. It's a mechanic of the game. Did you think that you'd be safe at the edge,
so that you couldn't get surrounded by monsters on all sides? Well guess what space works differently down
here, and each edge space connects with its opposite counterpart to form an infinite loop
of fucking misery. And let's just add on some extra stuff! All starting and key room tiles and some hallway
tiles are crumbling. Meaning that if you move on to them they'll
break into
a pit at the end of the turn. If you fall into a pit then next turn you
get to play Battleship! Except instead of having family fun for the
low low price of some plastic pins, you pick an unoccupied space in either the same row
or column as the pit that you fell into and fall into
that space immediately illuminating it and all of the space is connected to it
and you can bet your ass four ways to Sunday that you're gonna land in a pit of fucking
night vipers. Sometimes you won't even be given th
e opportunity
to try and outmaneuver the monsters. You might just if you fall into a pit land
directly on one. In which case you go ‘lights out’ immediately. Oh, and I completely forgot to mention, but
each time a monster hits you, they don't deal damage to you per se. But they do deal damage to the tile stack,
which is where you draw tiles from to navigate to The Night Cage. Each time you get hit by a monster you have
to discard three tiles from the tile stack. Uh, and if you get hit by multipl
e monsters,
or if multiple players get hit by the same monster, then you have to discard three tiles
from the tile stack per hit. Oh, and if you end up discarding too many
key rooms or gate room tiles before you have all your keys and have a gate to get to
then, well, you can't leave the night cage anymore. It's impossible, and the game ends. Oh, and if you did have all of your keys and do have a gate tile ready, but you get to
the end of the stack, then you enter the final flickers. Which means
that, not only can you not draw
new tiles to light your path, but also every single turn when someone moves
or even if they don't, they have to discard one currently lit tile as the darkness slowly
swallows you all. Oh, and if someone was falling, or falls into
a pit during the final flickers then, because you can't draw a new tile for them to land
on, the game says that they're trapped falling
forever and the game ends. Did I mention this game is fucking sick? I love The Night Cage! It's like
‘updog’. I will casually mention it around my friend
who have yet to experience the torment of it and when they inevitably eventually
say “what's The Night Cage?” I will grin at them as if they've said my
name in a mirror three times and go and fetch the box to torture
them with. Is it a fun game? [In a creepy tone] I don't know. why don't you come over and find out? I didn't mean to read the line like that. That came out in a really weird way. Wow maybe I am dressed as a Tumblr sex pest. Now I'
ve bigged up this game a lot. Both for how it plays, but also how it makes
me feel. So let's now address those three major hurdles
we talked about just a little bit ago and see how The Night Cage deals with them. The first being a proper separation between
player and monster. Unlike every game that we've talked about
in this video so far, The Night Cage is a cooperative experience. No one player controls or pilots the monsters. They are revealed onto the board, have one specific mode of operatio
n depending
on what monster that they are and then afterwards
they go away into the discard pile. The amount of time that any one player will
spend actually touching these monster pieces is incredibly minimal. They are taken from the tile stack face down
and is only revealed to be a monster as they are placed in one of only a handful of potential
spaces, only to be touched again when they either attack or become
disilluminated. There is an absolute minimum of both time
and opportunity here for p
layers to manipulate the positioning
of their foe, but also a minimum of player agency in regards to how the foe is going
to act in the gamespace. This lies in stark contrast with Final Girl,
for example, where you will spend multiple minutes each turn fiddling about with differently
coloured meeples and making strategic calls during moments
of rules ambiguity. The Night Cage far more successfully, in my
opinion, separates the player from the monster in a
physical sense, but also in an emotional
one. In terms of creating horror, the intestine
knottingly evocative artwork of The Night Cage can be compared very favourably, in my opinion,
with the hyper minimalist design of Escape from the Aliens in Outerspace, but also with the… Shall we say, ‘economic’ design
of Betrayal at House on the Hill, where the zombies or robots that will
be chasing you around this Haunted Mansion will instead be represented by tiny cardboard
discs with “small monster B” written on them. Another way this game se
lls this separation
is through the fact that it is a cooperative experience. You are all working towards the same goal. When you're in
The Night Cage, you're trying to get keys and get out. Nobody has a hidden agenda, nobody's goal
is going to butt up against each other, no one's gonna betray
the group. Meaning that the role of antagonist in this
game can be exclusively dominated by the game system itself. You're never going to look up from a game
of The Night Cage and be taken out of the experi
ence because your mate is grinning at
you, because he just got you or because he sacrificed you for the good
of the group. No, you're gonna look up and see him furrow
his brow as he tries desperately to work out who is better to lose in the dark: You, him,
or your girlfriend Nethmi. Either way someone's going lights out, and
either way everybody's losing tiles… Bleh! Jesus Christ! Secondly I want to talk about ‘agency’,
a topic which does absolutely share some space with this issue of player
sep
aration. In contrast to a game like Final Girl where
the player has a lot of control over their situation. But also in contrast to games like Escape
from the Aliens and Betrayal at House on the Hill where whether or not your antagonists pursue
you is pretty much totally out of your hands. The Night Cage gets this balance between player
helplessness and player action nearly spot on. In terms of taking control away from the player
there are very few ways for you to interact with this board and eve
n fewer to interact with the monsters
when you encounter them. For example, if you are to be hit by a monster
there's pretty much only one thing you can do apart from just letting it happen, and
that's discarding one of your nerve tokens to ‘defend’ against
it. However, in true to form Night Cage fashion,
defending against a wax eater's strike doesn't actually stop
you from getting hit. You still go lights out and you still have
to discard tiles from the tile stack, it's just that this time rath
er than discarding
three you only have to discard two. Because fuck you. Whilst you do begin the game with one nerve
token, you can gain them throughout the game and hold up to two at a time by choosing to
remain stationary on your turn. However if you do remain still, sure the monsters
won't hit you because you're not moving in their vision. But you also have to discard one tile from
the tile stack to do so. Meaning that if you choose to remain stationary
and gain a nerve token and then use tha
t nerve token to defend against a monster's attack;
you're discarding three tiles from the tile stack anyway! Additionally additionally, if you’re lights
out you don't gain a nerve token by staying still because you're scared
and alone in the dark. Instead you have to spend a nerve token AND
discard a tile from the tile stack to do just that. Because fuck you again! Players are very much at the mercy of this
game with very few ways to effectively organize against it. Bunching up is a dangerous s
trategy because,
of course, that runs the risk of multiple players getting hit by one or multiple monsters
at the same time. But staying apart is just as risky, because
if one or more players can't help but to go lights out it's going to be really difficult
to reignite their candle. Leaving them stumbling in the dark potentially,
landing on more monsters, destroying the tile stack even faster. Additionally, one player might stumble across
multiple key rooms and have to stay stationary for multip
le turns as all the other players
move across the space to get those keys. However, in staying stationary they are discarding
one tile every single turn and who knows how many gate or key tiles they'll
waste as the other players scramble to get the key
tiles that they know are there. However, I said that there's “almost”
no way to fight against this game and that is an important
distinction. There are a handful of seemingly dangerous
or backward tactics that, if players employ them successfully,
can lead to temporary wins
over this game's oppressive environment. One of the moves that you can take in this
game is to charge through a monster by discarding a nerve token moving your candle onto it
and then to the tile behind it whether it's illuminated or not. You still go lights out and you still discard
tiles from the stack but this can be used to move you a whole tile
further than you could normally travel. Potentially putting you closer to another
player who can relight your candle or
escaping multiple hits from
a different monster. You can also, if you become cornered in a
crumbling room, choose to remain stationary and let the floor
give out from under you. You'll fall for sure but you'll also dodge
the monster's damage and gain a nerve for your trouble as well. There's a lot more ebb than there is flow
when it comes to The Night Cage dishing out misery over hope. However these small moments of triumph add
a much needed texture to the game. Making The Night Cage not a total
slog to
play, but also adding a thrilling anxiety to your exploration of
this space. When you move onto this tile is there going
to be a monster that you can escape? Or are you going to get surrounded? Carol theorizes that suspense is created in
horror fiction when the narrative presents one of two possible
outcomes, a morally bad one and a morally good one,
as being respectively likely and unlikely. We are only scared watching Jason Voorhees
chase down the promiscuous teenager who's only had f
our lines in the movie thus far
because there exists, no matter how unlikely, the slim chance that
the girl will get away. When that outcome becomes too likely or disappears
entirely suspense similarly disappears. Additionally this suspense can only be created
when asymmetry exists within a narrative where the monster consistently has the upper hand
over the victim. Thus far The Night Cage is the only game that
we've talked about that I believe truly and successfully achieves this kind of horror
suspense. Betrayal at House on the Hill for sure achieves
asymmetry, but games of it become far too clearly won or lost shortly after the haunt
begins and before the haunt the chance of something bad happening is a rivalled by the fact that
A) you're opening up cool new rooms and picking up fun items and B) well, frankly, the haunt is the really fun
bit that all of the players are waiting to get to in the first place. In Final Girl the Imbalance between potential
good and bad outcomes is create
d, for example, through how the dice are far more likely to
present failures over successes. However the entire point and goal of the game
is to build your power level to eventually confront the killer. Meaning that that imbalance quickly disappears
the moment you find a gun and start rolling well. And Escape from The Aliens in Outerspace has
a very similar issue, with the aliens relying on the same kind of location or problem solving
that the crew are using to avoid them. Except the crew know w
here they're going at
all times. It's very difficult to feel scared of a monster
when you know that it's probably more lost than you are at any
given moment. The Night Cage however masters horror suspense
with its imbalance. There is no way to effectively defend against
or fight back against these monsters. They can attack faster and further than you
or any of your team can ever hope to run, and even if you do manage to avoid them there's
always a chance you'll simply reveal another at the end o
f the corridor or put the rest
of your team at risk of getting hit by them. However there always exists the chance
that this time you'll be able to step just around the corner *just* fast enough without
anyone else in the firing line and completely avoid their ire. It's with those temporary moments of hope
that the despair and misery of this game becomes so acute. Yes the darkness is terrifying, but remember:
there can be no shadow without light… Yeah… yeah! That's not even in script I just thou
ght that
up. God I'm I'm such a fucking pretentious prick
aren't I? And on the last point we can talk about the
safety of the turn structure. No one is ever truly safe on any other player's
turn in The Night Cage. As we've already said, if a player moves on
to a new space they may reveal a monster that threatens multiple players,
themselves included. However there are other ways that you can
endanger your fellow teammates. There is absolutely tactical decision making
to be found in every game of
The Night Cage. However the decisions that you will be making
are incredibly limited. Outside of the fun little tricks that I mentioned
earlier, the moves that you will be taking in any given turn will be limited to either
staying still or moving one space. Like Final Girl or Escape from the Aliens,
you can spend as long as you want thinking tactically about what your best move
is going to be. But, unlike those games, atmosphere isn't
lost as you suddenly view the game less as an immersive expe
rience
and far more three cold mechanically strategic lens with multiple interacting mechanics and
probabilities overlapping with one another. With The Night Cage whenever your turn comes
around the game kind of kicks its feet up and says: “Take as long as you want. At the end of the day you only have two corridors you can go down. Which one risks your friends the least?” You will feel as trapped in the simplicity
of this game's rules as your characters are trapped in this game's tunnels and, of
course,
it's not just you and your turn that you need to worry about. A seemingly insignificant move from another
player can spell apps absolute doom for the rest of the table, or can reveal an entirely
new goal that everybody now refocuses on and scrabbles towards. Of course this isn't to say that immersion
can't be lost and that your turn can't become a safe place within
the game. You can absolutely take a step back look at
the rest of the table and ask: “what is the best move for me to make
right now?” This does diminish the feeling of being trapped
in these esoteric tunnels and also, because this is a cooperative game,
can lead to one player becoming the ‘director’. The one who has the best strategic mind telling
everybody else what to do. At which point you feel less like you're being
pursued by evil monsters and more so that you're taking orders from your mate. Of course the genius of The Night Cage, and
more specifically its designers, is that they absolutely accounted for this
. There is an optional rule in this game that
I both love and absolutely despise which says that: if you want to truly be immersed in the feeling
of The Night Cage, not only can players only adjacent to one another exchange keys and
reignite candles, but also only those players are ever allowed
to speak. Playing with this rule not only means that
talking about strategy at any time you want is against the rules and therefore is no longer
an escape from the horror of the situation. But also adds a
n additional level of tension,
as you clock other players about to make terrible decisions or missing genius plays
and you desperately try to non-communicate to the rest of the table that, if only someone
were to come close to you, you could voice this and save the situation. It's such a tiny change, such a small
optional rule, and I love that the designers thought enough about it to put it in the manual. It really shows that they know how to create
true horror tension. You can also play The Nig
ht Cage solo,
and this is where it goes from being a horror board game into genuinely feeling like a possessed
tool of a worse devil from a nastier Bible. It's one thing to play this game with your
friends or enemies and recognize that every time somebody gets hit by a monster everybody's
tile stack goes down. But it is fundamentally another when you are
controlling every single candle and you realise that every single
candle represents you. There are no turns that you can feel even
slightly rel
axed because somebody has moved their piece away
from yours. Every turn is your turn. Every threat is a threat directly aimed at
you. Look, if the words that I am saying are not
selling you on the fact that I think this game is both a brilliant game in its own right,
but also a beautifully simple yet simultaneously innovative horror experience in a medium that
traditionally struggles to create them, then I hope the way that I'm saying it is
doing just that. Because I'm noticing the more I talk a
bout
The Night Cage that the kind of generic estuary accent that
I put on whenever a camera is pointed at me or I'm on stage because International audiences
can kind of clue into it a lot better is slowly withering away to be replaced with
my native Welsh. Which only ever comes out if I'm really angry,
really happy, or had a couple of things to drink. And I haven't had a dram today, and it's a
lovely day outside, so get yourself The Night Cage to shit yourself in fear and you'll have
a great tim
e doing it. The Night Cage is phenomenal. It is one of my favorite games of all time. Rarely do I ever finish a session of it with
friends or on my own and feel any different than I would have if
I just walked out of the cinema after having watched an ambiguously inconclusive horror
movie… This is not, however to say that it is perfect. There are times where this game, even with
all of the optional immersive rules, does falter in terms of delivering horror
and sometimes in really disappointing w
ays. The dirge is a mechanically and psychologically
powerful piece. When you first get to the night cage home
open it up and see this looking back out at you, you will wonder what exactly it is you have
brought into the now questionable safety of your home. It is a massive piece, taking up a third of
the gamespace and it's coming is triggered by revealing two of these ‘omen’ tiles
as you explore the cage. However, introducing it into the game is more
awkward than awe-inspiring. It can be placed
across any spaces in any
orientation provided that at least one of the spaces it
covers includes the space that the second Omen was revealed on. Inevitably this leads players to placing it
in the best possible position for themselves as a team with an absolute minimum of players
being either hit or disrupted by it. It is entirely possible for you to play a
game of The Night Cage with the dirge, which the game itself calls a boss monster,
and have only one player or maybe sometimes even no playe
rs whatsoever be affected by
it when it does arrive. Of course a gigantic set of ghoulish eyes
popping out from the darkness only to leave behind a Looney Tunes style cut out ravine
is a very evocative image. But knowing that, as a player group, you have
near full control about how and where this monster will pop up
pretty much demolishes any potential threat that it actually represents, and any fear
that it ought to arouse in you. There are of course other parts of this game
which let it down f
rom being genuinely perfect. Because of course the tile stack is shuffled
and randomized before the game begins the beast of variance here too sometimes rears
its ugly head. Whilst the designers have done a decent job
of balancing the game, and you can add and remove tiles if you feel that it's too unfair
or too easy, you will inevitably play a few games of The
Night Cage which are either inescapable nightmare mazes, where seemingly every other tile that you
draw is a threat and every single tim
e you discard from the stack you get rid of a vital component
that will let you win the game. Or it can be an absolute cake walk, where
in the first eight turns everybody has a key and it's just kind of waiting for a gate to
show up. Either way it's never particularly fun to
play The Night Cage in those moments. This all being said, however. I believe that The Night Cage
represents a triumph. A brilliant example of designers overcoming
the supposed inherent limitations of their form to produce a
genuinely phenomenal horror
experience. I also want to say that a lot of the music
that you've heard in this video, particularly the spooky ones of course,
is music created by the team that put The Night Cage together that you should put on
whilst you're playing this game. It is brilliant! They've thought of so many things! This is one of my favourite horror games of
all time… However, it's not the game that I would most
likely whip out if I'm attempting to create a spooky atmosphere. That hono
ur goes to Escape the Dark Castle. My favourite board game of all time and a
game that I would love to talk more in depth about. Indeed, all of the other music that you've
heard throughout this video has been taken from this game’s soundtrack. But as much as I'd love to regale you in how
brilliant this design is; this day too is growing late. The shadows are growing long and I must rest. I also have been ill off and on for like two
months. Uh a celiac reaction was followed by COVID,
which is fol
lowed by long COVID, which was followed by another celiac reaction
and I think if I spend any more time talking about yet another board game in this video
I will not get this out before the end of the financial quarter. Also, I wrote that joke back in April and
it's now June. Meaning I have missed the financial quarter
that I was supposed to release this in. My gags about my upload schedule are even
more optimistic than my actual upload schedule. If you'd like to see me talk about Escape
the Dar
k Castle, or board games more generally, then please do let me know by sharing this
video with a friend, family member, lover, or one of the three dozen near perfect strangers
who you regularly bear your soul to on your Age of Sigmar Discord server. Whatever floats your boat. This has been quite an experimental and “out
there” video in comparison to the stuff I normally put out on the channel
and I will only make videos like this in the future if I know that you lot want to watch
them. But, for
now, this is where we must part ways. I hope that this has been an interesting exploration for how horror is, or indeed struggles to
be, created within board game media. I hope that I've at least tweaked you on to
a couple of board games that you otherwise may not have heard of. But most of all I hope that you take away
from this the main lesson of my most recent feature-length extravaganza which is of course:
that at their core all board games are fundamentally reskins of Battleship. A massive
thank you to Dark Pact Cosplay for
providing their voice in reading all of the quotes from the Philosophy of Horror. Go check out their work! They make cool costumes and wear them well! And an extra massive special thank you to
all of my patrons who make my videos possible. I hope you're all okay with the fact that
I spent a couple of months making something that isn't Magic the Gathering related. I hope you all enjoyed it, um, but even if
you didn't,- wow can you tell I never script how I'm sup
posed to start my credit section? Uh, anyway a massive special thank you to
all of my patrons and an extra special thank you to all of my 10 patrons who include: [Spice Reads Patron Names] Fucking stupid idiot! Ha ha!
Comments
Spice hiding the game like we don’t know their greatest fear is capitalism so it’s obviously Monopoly
"All games are just battleship" is the boardgame equivalent of Magic's "all mechanics are just kicker"
I work in a boardgame shop in London, and I remember my jaw dropping when Spice walks in whilst I'm talking to a customer about magic aha. Got to suggest a bunch of boardgames for them to try out and a couple even made it into this video! Was very cool meeting them irl
This is one of the most generous, thoughtful, and engaged reviews I’ve seen of The Night Cage. I love how clearly and completely you grokked its design goals. I’m so glad you enjoyed it, and we’re excited to share more of it with y’all very soon.
One of your complaints about Final Girl is always knowing where the killer is. One of the boxes, the one with the Evomorph, has a mechanic where the killer will disappear and you need to hunt them down before they ambush you and murder you to death.
i feel like the night cage would very well benefit from online integration with voice-only calls, at least with complete silence rules active. nothing feels more isolating than being in a discord call where everyone is muted, it feels like playing a game by yourself, surrounded by NPCs, until one of them comes to life for a brief second.
I know this isnt really a board game but Inscryption's ability to use digital tools to enhance what would be a tabletop game is really sweet
2 hours of Spice on board games? cool, I wasn't planning on working today anyway.
Please please please tell us about escape the dark castle. It would be an absolute treat to hear about your favorite board game. I'm glad that you are feeling better as well! All good health to you and your nights of inescapable board game induced horror
It sounds like The Night Cage is mechanically similar to Forbidden Desert, but the vibe is so different. What an achievement!
As per tradition I will have to have multiple different people explain the rules of this video to me while talking over each other. This explanation will take more time than just playing the video.
I finished this video and it was really good!! Honestly as someone who's fallen off of Magic I really appreciate seeing your channel move in a different direction!
Not the topic I expected from Spice, but one I am super ok with. And by ok I mean " Oh my, this is exactly my kinda video. And it's two hours? By my fav tuber!?" I really needed this.
This is the first new video you’ve released since I discovered you through the professor, really looking forward to watching it! Hope you are feeling better Spice
Would love to see the follow up featuring Dark Castle, but I would also be very interested in a companion video that delves as deep into Horror TTRPGs such as Ten Candles, Call of Cthulhu, Mork Bork, and Kult.
The Night Cage popped in my head from the moment you said "horror board games". Absolutely loved the video!
Oh hell yeah, multiple hours of board game coverage? This is gonna be damn good.
I kinda ended up falling off of MtG a while back so seeing you cover something like this was a very pleasant surprise. Would love to see you cover more topics relating to non-MtG games, as this was brilliant!
Congratulations, Spice, "Ba-ba-ba-ba-babadook" is now going to be my personal earworm for the next six to eight months.
The Night Cage sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would want to subject my friends to - I mean play with them. And now I am VERY curious about Escape the Dark Castle, please do make a video about that! Have you ever played the TTRPG Mörkborg? It's a very good apocalyptic fantasy game, where your character feels genuinely fragile and helpless, and like you're in WAY over your head at all times, would recommend as a sorta-kinda horror RPG.