Robot Viking

Guns vs. tentacles.

A few years ago, we started a Halloween tradition with our gaming group. Every Halloween, we get together and play an appropriately themed game for a few hours, often with some kind of house rule that lets the players earn the right to eat candy. If we can manage it, we play on Halloween night, so we go to the door and hand out candy to neighborhood kids throughout the game. Sometimes there’s a scary movie playing in the background, too. With that tradition in mind, here are five of our favorite spooky games.

Arkham Horror. Based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this is a cooperative game in which the players play investigators roaming a haunted New England town in search of clues and weapons to use against an encroaching other-dimensional entity. It’s made by Fantasy Flight Games and features their usual lavish production values — a huge, full-color game board, plus tons of cards and tokens with brilliant, evocative art. There are many different investigators to play and a variety of different “end boss” monsters to fight, so this has tremendous replay value. There’s a bunch of expansions, too. I consider this game a must-own for any gamer. Order Arkham Horror from TrollandToad.com.

Zombies!!! Every game put out by Twilight Creations could be on this list, but they’re most famous game is Zombies!!! It’s a classic “beer and pretzels” sort of game — it doesn’t require much deep thought or record keeping, just good, gory fun. Each player is a human stuck in a town overrun by the brain-hungry undead. The board is constructed as you go, each player adding a tile on her turn. You win by either finding the helicopter pad and escaping, a killing a huge number of zombies. The game usually devolves into a vicious competition, as the players play cards on each other to hinder escape or plop massive zombie hordes in each other’s path. There are many, many expansion, some of which have different win conditions. One year, we combined every expansion we had and played a game on one huge, sprawling board. The winner got to the helicopter on the military base with a last ditch final turn using a rocket launcher and a stolen jeep. Order Zombies!!! from TrollandToad.com.

Horrorclix. This was one of the last click-base game Wizkids created before they were shut down by Topps. It never achieved any kind of critical mass in terms of popularity despite the innovative design and fun gameplay. If you’re unfamiliar with Wizkids miniatures games, each figure has all its stats built into the base of the figure itself. A little window reveals the currently active stats. When a figure takes damage, you turn the base (which clicks as it turns to each slot), revealing a different set of stats in the window. That makes the figures dynamic as they are hurt or healed throughout the game. Horrorclix built on this concept by creating supernatural creatures with “dead” spots on their stat dials that would automatically move each turn, allowing them to “come back to life” on a later turn, or take on a ghostly form. Players took on the role of competing groups of monsters stalking a cemetery or haunted house trying to eat the most human victims. A few expansions were released, along with some excellent licensed theme packs featuring the likes of Jason Vorhees and Aliens vs. Predator. Booster packs are still available (and pretty cheap) at TrollandToad.com.

Hunter: the Vigil. All White Wolf RPGs deal with the supernatural, the dark and the ominous. You could go with any of them, and many gamers might prefer the classic White Wolf horror franchise, Vampire (whether you like old-school Masquerade or the new Requiem). But for my money, nothing is scarier than being a human in a world full of walking nightmares. Hunter: the Vigil pits humans against the unknown, X-Files style. Hunter: the Vigil is well supported by numerous sourcebooks and adventures for storytellers to run “out of the box,” and a lot of other World of Darkness material can easily be incorporated into it. Order Hunter: the Vigil from TrollandToad.com.

Last Night on Earth. I’m a recent convert to this game by Flying Frog Productions. We played through it at Origins in June and ended up buying the game and an expansion. The production values rival those of a Fantasy Flight game, and it even comes with an original soundtrack on CD. The theme is your basic zombie survival horror movie — in fact, the game is designed to mirror cinematic action. Players control either the zombies or the humans. There are some elements that feel similar to Arkham Horror (each player has a unique character card with special abilities, and you collect items to aid you), but it plays more quickly and isn’t quite as complicated. Even without the expansion, you get a bunch of modular board pieces, and there are many different scenarios to try. Win conditions range from “survive until dawn” to “create a firebomb and destroy all the zombies.” Order Last Night on Earth from TrollandToad.com.

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