Five games for Halloween
It’s spooky season! Here are five games to consider for your weekend festivities.
Quick! You have just a few short days to prepare for Halloween parties, and you’ve completely forgotten to pick up a board game to play. You’ve got lots of games on the shelves, but something a little spooky? Well, let’s just say that building a city in the French countryside isn’t exactly going to send shivers up anybody’s spine. You do have a board game shop nearby, and you’re planning to pick something up. But — what?
I had another newsletter planned for you this week, but I’ll give that to you on Monday. (It’s about Paperback Adventures, a game that has really excited me. I’ll even send it to you early, if you want. Just reply to this email and I’ll give you a sneak peek.) Today, we’re going to look at Halloween games. I’ve written about Halloween games before, and I will stand by those picks. But maybe you played those games last year, and you’re looking for something else — something that will really make or break the night. Light the candles and dim the overhead lights: Here are five more games to pull off the shelf this Halloween season.
Mysterium
Great for: Medium-sized groups (5-7 players) who want to spend 60 to 90 minutes looking at lovely art with the lights dimmed and somebody making ghost noises.
Surrealist art, murder, and a seance combine to make Mysterium one of my favorite games to play in spooky season. In Mysterium, players cooperate to try to solve the mystery of a murder — and to do so, they’ll need to communicate with a ghost. Thankfully, that ghoul is just another player in the game, and they’ll dole out surrealist cards in an attempt to lead you down a path toward solving the mystery. If you’ve played Dixit, you know all about these cards. They’re big, colorful, and hard to decipher. Mysterium Park is a good alternative that promises a shorter playtime and simplified gameplay.
Be warned — if your ghost starts telling you that it’s not a dream and that they’re transmitting from the year “one nine nine nine,” maybe run away.
Don’t Get Got
Great for: Larger groups (up to 10 players with one box, more with more copies of the game)
I recommended this in Five Games for Fall, but Don’t Get Got is a party meta game that you don’t play actively. (I mean, you can. But it’s not the intention here.) Instead, it’s a game you play while you do other things — converse, serve drinks, play other games. You know, party stuff. In it, you’ll try to catch other players doing something — not necessarily something ridiculous, but sometimes, it might be. Your goal? Don’t get got. It’s in the name! (An example: My wife lured me into ‘getting got’ by deliberately mispronouncing something, at which point I said it correctly. Quite a trick.)
Horrified
Great for: Families (up to 5 players) just diving into board games, with plenty of room for someone to step away when the doorbell rings
Last time I wrote about Halloween games, Horrified was on my to-play list. I played it not long after that, and while it’s not going to win awards for spooking players, it’s got that Halloween theme in droves. Players work together to defeat one of six monsters: Frankstein’s Monster, the Bride of Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s a nice introduction to some key gaming concepts, too, like pick up and deliver, variable player powers, and cooperative play.
Dead of Winter
Great for: A small gathering (3–5 players) of people who are into board games
Dead of Winter was once one of the hottest board games out there, back when it came out in 2014. A semi-cooperative zombie game with a hidden traitor element? It hit all the right notes, forcing players to make difficult decisions about what to do and who to trust. In Dead of Winter, (most) players have to work together to complete objectives, but they also need to figure out who’s trying to sabotage the whole thing — if anybody is at all. In fact, that balance of not knowing if there’s a traitor or not has made for one of the best times I’ve had playing this game. We didn’t have a traitor at all, but we spent 100 percent of the game being suspicious of each other. When we turned over our cards at the end of the game and say none of us were the traitor, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief.
While Dead of Winter no longer holds the allure of being a fresh, new, innovative game — in part because many games that followed borrowed from its way of dealing with conflict, and in part because that’s just sort of what age does — it accomplishes plenty in the confines of this box, and it does it all really, really well.
The Quacks of Quedlinburg
Great for: Small groups (2–4 players) who are ready to laugh while they push their luck
I wrote about my love of The Quacks of Quedlinburg back in May, but it’s making an appearance here, because it’s just that good. In The Quacks of Quedlinburg, you play as a quack doctor concocting potions in a bubbling cauldron. You’re definitely not a witch, but if you wanted to, say, pretend you were a witch, I don’t think anyone would stop you. As you sell potions for more and more money, you’ll get ingredients to add to future potions. Those ingredients go in your bag, from which you’ll blindly draw, hoping for just the right ingredient — but if you draw too many cherry bombs, you’ll explode. It’s just an incredible amount of fun, and it’s just spooky enough that it makes for a tremendous Halloween game.
As always, thanks for reading! Next week, I’ll take a long look at Paperback Adventures, a deck-building word game that feels like a video game transported to the table — in the best of ways.
Thanks for the reminder to get quacks out! It's a decent game for kids that can do basic math, too!