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A Horror Game For Every Day of October!

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It’s officially time for all things spooky, scary, terror-inducing, and horror-fueled to take over for a whole month, and that should include your games! So I’ve assembled a list of 31 games fit for the season. Some are silly, some are tense, but all fit the Halloween vibe nicely.

So, without further ado, let’s get to the list!

OCTOBER 1: Betrayal at the House on the Hill

Let’s get a classic out of the way first. This game is loaded with various storylines to keep you spooked for hours on end, and its ever-shifting game board makes every play great fun. Controversial take: The Scooby Doo edition is the superior edition.

OCTOBER 2: Cult Following

Looking for a party game with a sinister twist? Look no further than Cult Following, the card game where you try to build the best cult and pitch it to your fellow players in the hopes of winning their hearts, minds, and unending loyalty. This is definitely on the sillier side, but the cult gimmick makes it perfectly Halloween-appropriate.

OCTOBER 3: Dead of Winter

If you’re looking for tension, high stakes, cooperative gaming, and the potential for self-serving surprises, it’s hard to beat Dead of Winter. The players are trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, but each player also has their own agenda (which might not always align with the group’s interests). This is an awesome game with plenty of replay value.

OCTOBER 4: Horrified

More family friendly than some other spooky games, Horrified is a good way to balance scares and good times. In this cooperative game, your group of heroes is pitted against some of the classic Universal movie monsters like The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolfman, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. You must work together to complete specific tasks in order to defeat the monsters. (There are loads of different versions. My current favorite is the American Monsters edition!)

OCTOBER 5: There’s Been a Murder

In this card game that’s quick to learn but harder to master, there’s a murder to be solved, and every card can help or hinder the investigation, depending on your motives. Will you help the Detective solve the crime, or will the Murderer dispatch the Witness and get away scot-free? This is a murder mystery condensed into a card game, and it’s brilliantly done.

OCTOBER 6: Werewolf

With the full moon, how could I not put this here? This is a classic social deduction game where a group of townsfolk are trying to find the werewolf in their midst. A great party game with very little prep, it’s always a winner. (For similar gameplay but different story trappings, check out Salem 1692 and Are You the Robot?)

OCTOBER 7: So You’ve Been Eaten

This is more sci-fi than horror, but I think the concept still fits the bill. You’re a miner inside the body of a giant space beast, and you’re trying to get your crystals before the beast’s bacteria turn you into so much bodily detritus. This game can be played with 1 player (as the beast or the miner) or with 2 players (the beast versus the miner), and it’s a peculiar mix of sci-fi horror and strategy.

OCTOBER 8: Dread

Ever play a scary game with your friends involving nothing but imagination and a Jenga tower? That’s the brilliant concept behind Dread, a horror roleplaying game where your choices lead you to pulling blocks from the tower, and if it falls, you die! With all sorts of scenarios to play, Dread is a new game every time you play. A perfect introduction to roleplaying games for anyone.

OCTOBER 9: Ghost Stories

The players take on the roles of Taoist priests protecting village from ghosts. This feels like a Halloween-fueled variation on Castle Panic!, given both the difficulty of the game and the relentless waves of spirits to defeat. But it’s a great time and one of the best cooperative horror games out there.

October 10: Ten Candles

Easily the bleakest game on the list, Ten Candles is a game about the secrets we keep until the end. This collaborative storytelling game after trying to endure as long as the candlelight lasts. It’s fantastically dark and makes you appreciate every single moment.

OCTOBER 11: Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to Ghost Town

What if 20 Questions, but about psychics delivering pizza while battling ghosts? That’s the insanely creative idea behind Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to Ghost Town. One player (the Mayor) builds the town and challenges the other players (the aforementioned Psychic Pizza Deliverers) to find a pizza and deliver it to the proper house in 20 turns or fewer. It’s bonkers, but with the right group, it’s so so fun.

OCTOBER 12: Welcome to Night Vale RPG

If you’re not paranoid or horrified enough yet, this is the perfect game to put you over the top. A roleplaying game set in the town from the wonderful titular podcast, Welcome to Night Vale RPG gives you eldritch horrors, governmental conspiracies, and all the weird your brain can handle. Fun and scary in equal parts, this is great stuff.

OCTOBER 13: Call of Cthulhu RPG

If you’re looking for mind-shredding scares and sanity-challenging evils, Call of Cthulhu has been the champion of the genre for decades. Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary mythos, Call of Cthulhu has very human, very mortal characters dealing with unknowable cosmic horrors. Tension runs rampant in this game, so be warned.

OCTOBER 14: Terror Below

Ever wanted to test your mettle in a Tremors-style scenario? Terror Below is where it’s at. Featuring tense gameplay, beautiful design (especially the minis), and all the giant worms you’ll ever need, Terror Below is an underappreciated gem.

OCTOBER 15: Nyctophobia

There’s perhaps no fear more primal than the fear of the dark, and Nyctophobia uses that to its advantage, plunging all but one player into darkness. (Blackout glasses are provided for the players.) The now-blind players must try to escape a dark forest, while the one player who can see stalks them, removing them from the game one by one. When properly executed, there’s no board game more immersive and scary than this one.

OCTOBER 16: Float from the Deep

You’re lost at sea, with untrustworthy people on the raft with you, and strange terrors lurking in the deep below. Can you make it to the island in the distance before your fellow players betray you, you drown in the unforgiving waters, or something drags you into the briny deep? This survival game (that could be cooperative, depending on the cards) might start a fight at the table, but it’s gonna be one heck of a game night.

OCTOBER 17: Don’t Go In There

You know how kids are with haunted houses? They wander in, they get haunted by ghosts, and they desperately try to get out alive. This is definitely on the less-spooky end of the selections in today’s list (and one of the shortest to play), but it is still a good time and worthy of a spin at your table, especially with newer players.

OCTOBER 18: The Faceless

In this game that feels like Stranger Things but with magnets instead of powers, you must navigate your group around the board, following a compass’s directions, manipulating it with cards and the magnetic figures around the board. Part-strategy game, part-scary hunt for your friend’s lost memories, The Faceless is a unique experience.

OCTOBER 19: Nemesis

This is, hands down, the best way to play the movie Alien with your friends. Aboard a deteriorating ship, overrun with alien monsters, you can only trust your skills and your fellow crewmates… despite their own agendas. Oh, and the longer the game takes, the stronger the monsters become.

OCTOBER 20: The Night Cage

The light is fading. The tunnel behind you looks different than it did before. There’s something in the dark, and it’s getting closer. The Night Cage is brilliantly anxiety-inducing, so challenging and scary and atmospheric. I cannot say enough good things about this game.

OCTOBER 21: Arkham Horror

During the Roaring Twenties, you and your fellow investigators must hunt monsters and prevent one of the Old Ones, a great cosmic evil, from being released and dooming the world to insanity and darkness. This cooperative game puts a little bit more of an action-y spin on the Lovecraftian horror genre, but it’s still an engaging horrorshow of an experience.

OCTOBER 22: Mysterium

Nothing makes a game atmospheric like a murder to solve, and Mysterium goes way beyond Clue by having players work together to find the murderer. But there’s a twist, as one of the players is a ghost, and cannot speak. Instead, they offer visual clues to all of the other players, who are psychic mediums. The mix of clever communication and immersive storytelling makes this an excellent choice for a macabre night of gameplay and murder-solving.

OCTOBER 23: The Thing

It’s hard to make a board game capture the tension and paranoia of an all-time classic horror movie, but man, The Thing does one hell of a job translating the creeping terror of that isolated polar station at your table. Can you figure out which player is the creature before it’s too late?

OCTOBER 24: Grave Robbers from Outer Space

I love movie-based games that break the fourth wall, and this game hits all the high notes for that genre of gameplay. You are the producer of a B-grade monster or slasher movie, sending monsters or villains to attack the movies behind made by your fellow players. It’s meta in the best way, and a really good time.

OCTOBER 25: Sub Terra

Some horror scenarios are very simple and terribly effective, and this is one of them. In this cooperative game, you’re a group of cavers exploring a network of subterranean tunnels, and you’re trying to find your way out with diminishing light and resources. This tile-laying game is brilliantly claustrophobic and will get your heart pumping!

OCTOBER 26: Dead Man’s Cabal

Sometimes it’s hard to gather friends and loved ones for a party. Well, in Dead Man’s Cabal, that’s not a problem, since you can simply raise the dead and make them attend your party! As players compete to gather the most undead partygoers for their event, they can affect not only which guests arrive for their party, but the queue for other players’ resurrected guests as well. The dark tongue-in-cheek humor of the game only enhances the experience, making for a raucous and ridiculous time for all involved.

OCTOBER 27: Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG

If you want scares and monster-slaying, wrapped in a story-fueled package, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG is the perfect way to get it. Told like a season of the show, you get to build your character’s strengths and flaws, battle the forces of evil, and maybe trigger a plot twist or two along the way. This is a top-5 roleplaying game for me. Do yourself a favor, grab some friends, and try it out.

OCTOBER 28: Mansions of Madness

Can you survive a Lovecraftian horror in a mansion? That’s the question posed by this app-assisted game that will have you in knots for hours. With numerous scenarios and game pieces to choose from, this hits a lot of the same checkmarks as Betrayal, but with a decidedly more sinister vibe. Plan your whole night around this one.

OCTOBER 29: Gloom (or Gloomier)

If you’re looking for a darkly fun game with shades of The Addams Family or Edward Gorey, then Gloom is the game for you. In Gloom, each player is the head of a spooky family, and it’s your job to make them miserable in hilariously ghastly ways before they croak. And as you do so, you regale your fellow players with the ongoing tragic tale of their fates. The gameplay is accentuated by the beautiful clear playing cards, which allow you to stack different events and effects on your family characters and still be able to see what’s going on!

OCTOBER 30: The Doom That Came to Atlantic City

Have you ever wanted to play Monopoly but steeped in APOCALYPTIC MALICE instead of greed? Good! In this game, you crush houses to claim properties, play Chants (instead of Chance) cards, and basically try to be the best doomsday cultist at the table, summoning your monstrous god to end the world before the other players can. It’s tongue-in-cheek and great fun.

OCTOBER 31: Endangered Orphans of Condyle Cove

Here is my all-time favorite spooky game. Everyone plays orphans visiting all the creepiest places in town, hoping to be the last one standing before the boogeyman gets you. It’s so gloriously dark and creepy and an incredibly good time. This one might be hard to find, but it’s so worth it.

Will any of these games be haunting your Halloween game tables, fellow players? Or is there a spooky favorite of yours that I missed? Let me know in the comments below!

Our Annual TableTop Tournament: Recap!

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We wrapped up our fourth annual in-house tabletop tournament last week, and as you probably expected, it was loaded with all sorts of board game goodness.

So what went down?

Well, it was a 12-person two-week tournament with different games to play every round. With four competition days across two weeks, it was a virtual gauntlet of gaming to determine who is the best in the company.

One of the things I liked about the layout of the tournament was how there are no one-on-one match-ups until the final. Instead of a single-elimination tournament, competitors were first slotted into groups of three. Each group of three played two games, and the two winners (one from each game) from each trio moved on to the next round.

So to survive round 1, you had to win either Timeline or On the Dot.

In the first bracket, former champ Kevin and last year’s defending champ Nikki moved on. In the second bracket, yours truly was bested in On the Dot by newcomer Ryan AND in Timeline by perennial top contender Rick. In the third bracket, Gordon and Sam moved on in impressive fashion. And in the fourth bracket, former champ Jen and newcomer Laura each earned a spot in the next round.

So right away, all three former champs were in the running, along with some new blood and some tough competition with tabletop experience. This was shaping up to be one heck of a tournament.

Round 2 began the following Thursday, and this time around, competitors were slotted into groups of four. Each group of four played two games, and the two winners (one from each game) moved on to the next round.

So to survive round 2, you had to win either Noueni or Guillotine.

Guillotine is a card game for 2 to 5 players set during the French revolution. As the royals are marched to the guillotine in one big line, you play cards in order to switch the royals around so that the most valuable royals are beheaded on your turn, adding their scores to your pile. (You can also manipulate the hands of the other players by forcing them to give you cards or discard them.)

Played over three rounds, the player with the highest score (i.e. the most valuable royals beheaded) wins.

Noueni is a card game for 2 to 4 players that involves pattern-matching, color-based scoring, and cards that can either overlap or sit next to other cards. Your score is determined by how many of your scoring orbs are on the board at the end of the game.

Each card has two colored scoring orbs and a pattern of black lines emerging from them. Those lines are the connectors, and they determine how the cards are placed in the play area. Any card played must link up with the other cards on the board, whether there’s zero, one, two, or three connectors along that neighboring edge.

Noueni was a new experience for all of the players, though it is similar to Qwirkle, which the competitors had played before.

All of the players quickly took to Guillotine, deftly maneuvering valuable royals into their score piles. Noueni proved to be a tougher play experience, as many players devoted so much time to covering up the colored orbs of other players that they neglected to play simpler moves to add colored orbs to their own scores. Too much defense can be a bad thing if it hinders your offense.

In the end, four more players were eliminated from the field, including the first two tournament champions. After this colorful round of play, only Rick, Gordon, Laura, and returning champ Nikki remained.

Round 3 began the following Tuesday, and the remaining players were collected into one final group of four. But they would all play the same game, and the top two point-scorers would move on to the finals.

The game for round 3? Sheriff of Nottingham.

Sheriff of Nottingham is a card game that mixes strategy, resource management, and bluffing. The players collect cards with different goods to take to market — apples, chickens, bread, and cheese — as well as cards of contraband items (like spices, mead, and weapons). Each of these cards is worth points, and the contraband goods are worth more than the legal goods. Of course, the contraband goods are illegal, so if you’re caught bringing them to market, there’s a penalty.

And, unfortunately, in order to get your goods (legal or otherwise) to market, you have to get past the Sheriff.

For example, in a four-player game, let’s say the first player is the Sheriff. The other three players will each place up to five cards in their bag, then snap it shut, and declare what’s inside to the Sheriff. A player may be telling the truth about the contents of her bag, or she may be lying. The Sheriff can choose to either let a bag pass through unchecked or open and inspect the contents of any bag.

Anything that gets through the Sheriff goes into your market stand and is worth points at the end of the game. If the Sheriff chooses to check your bag, one of two things happens. If you were honest about what’s in the bag, the Sheriff pays you the value of those items. If you lied about the contents of your bag and the Sheriff catches you, you must pay him a penalty, and any contraband goods in the bag are seized.

Of course, you can always negotiate with the Sheriff before the bag is opened. Bribes (of coin, product, or favors) can be offer, and deals can be made.

Once the Sheriff has either let the players’ bags through or finished the inspections, everyone settles their goods in the marketplace, the next player takes over as Sheriff, and the cycle starts again.

The game ends after every player has been the Sheriff twice. Then the players count up the value of everything they’ve brought to market — including any contraband they’ve snuck through — as well as their coin piles. (Plus, there are bonus points to be gained if you brought the most of any product to market. For instance, the person who brought the most apples is King of Apples, and the person who brought the second-most is Queen of Apples. Both titles are worth points.)

Once starting coins and cards were allotted to each player (plus a few coins extra to encourage wheeling-and-dealing/bribery), the game commenced. In the end, only two of the four players at the table would be moving on to the finals. What combination of Nikki, Rick, Gordon, and Laura would face off for the championship?

As it turned out, a game all about duplicity can be won with transparency. In this cutthroat round, honesty reigned supreme as most players opted to avoid contraband and move only legal goods through the Sheriff to market. Rick, as the most suspicious Sheriff, ended up paying some hefty fines to players whose bags he checked.

(Personally, I probably would have cut a deal with one of the other players and promised to allow whatever they wanted through when I was Sheriff, in exchange for the same treatment from them. That way, you could move a LOT of valuable contraband one round, and play it safe the other rounds. But I am nefarious that way.)

After a tense game, the judges swooped in to count everyone’s haul, and the players stepped away from the table to enjoy some marvelous cookies and treats provided by the judges… and await their fate.

In the end, Nikki and Gordon had accumulated the top two scores, and they would be moving on to the finals.

Or would they? In the end, there was one more wrinkle!

It turns out that Laura had forgotten to empty her bag of goods in the last go-round, and with her additional contraband, she had outearned Gordon! Shock and heartbreak!

It would instead be Nikki and Laura in the finals.

Now, given that this was our fourth annual tournament, we’d finally amassed some proper stats and trivia regarding the event. You see, not only had no previous champion ever repeated as champion, but no previous champion had ever made it to the finals again!

So already, Nikki had set a new precedent as the only previous champion to return to the finals. Would she be our first repeat champion (back-to-back, even!) or would we have our fourth new champion in four years as the newcomer Laura ascended to the throne?

Let’s find out.

Unlike the previous rounds, this was a head-to-head match-up, winner-take-all. So, naturally, we made posters to hype the event like a prizefight.

And to survive round 4, the finalists would need some help from the audience, as they played a round of the card game Cult Following.

Cult Following is a card-based improvisation game, similar to Superfight, wherein you have to draw several cards that dictate what your cult is about, and then improvise your answers to various questions posed by the other players, who are potential recruits for your cult. Once the round of questions is over, the potential recruits vote on which of the cults they’d rather join, and the cult with the most recruits wins.

To make the task even more daunting, both players had to stand in front of the audience and plead their case.

Nikki’s cult centered around saving the planet from toxic waste (and yes, she did acknowledge the possibility that you might gain superpowers from said toxic waste). Laura’s cult centered around the magical ability to transform yourself into any animal you wished.

Although many potential recruits in the audience were wowed by this idea, I couldn’t get past the very real danger that you could end up as prey rather than simply enjoying life as an animal.

After answering questions from the audience about recruitment, rules, cult theme songs, and more, both competitors turned their backs to the audience so the audience members could vote for the cult of their choice.

Nikki made a valiant effort to retain her crown, but unfortunately, the cards were not in her favor, and more potential recruits opted for Laura’s were-cult. (Not me, though. I was a toxic avenger all the way.)

And thus, Laura dethroned the previous champion in impressive fashion to become the new tabletop tournament champion!

The traditional crown, scepter, and Game Night Gift Pack awaited the new champion, as did an enthusiastic round of applause and a well-earned chance to sit down after the fierce improvisational back-and-forth.

Alas, we must bring this marvelous recap to a close. With a new queen atop the tabletop throne, what will her reign be like? Peaceful? Warlike? Boastful? Quiet? Only time will tell.

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