DISCLAIMER: Geek Native received a free review copy of Horrified: World of Monsters for the purposes of writing this review.
Well, hello again! I, Bronwen, am back to review yet another Ravensburger game, and this time it’s Horrified: World of Monsters! Why? Because it’s never too early to get into the Halloween spirit, that’s why!
It’s only been a couple of days since myself and my partner Murdo sat down to play Alien: Fate of the Nostromo, so with that still fresh in our minds, we got set up to play another exciting, shiny new game – this one all about monsters!
Here’s the official description from Ravensburger:
Embark to an immersive world of infinite thrills as you face off against storied monsters and unique puzzle-like challenges in Horrified: World of Monsters, a cooperative board game to save the world before terror overwhelms you.
First appearance and unboxing
The box is very visually appealing and dramatic, and looming over the town and the other monsters, we have The Great Old One, Cthulhu himself! We like that a lot.
When first opening the box, we’re then presented with the striking image of this monster’s eye, which as it turns out is the underside of the board. Then we find the instructions, boards with pop-out pieces, plastic monster figures, characters sheets, attack dice and more!
Assembling the board
The board is very pretty when you first lay it out, and you’re advised to familiarise yourself with it and take in all the different locations within.
Spoiler alert; you won’t remember any of them at first, and it’ll take you a while to get into the swing of things.
The pieces
This handy image courtesy of Ravensburger shows you exactly what you’ll be working with (thanks, Ravensburger!). But what it doesn’t show you here are the 60 item cards you’ll also have to be popping out.
This took a couple of extra minutes, but don’t worry – instead of assembling them all into colour-co-ordinated piles, we learned later they all can all go right into the purple item bag and mixed up!
We spent a lot more time reading through all the instructions than we did with setup, and this took around an hour in total.
We were very glad we’d played the simpler Alien: Fate of the Nostromo first as without having done so, getting our heads around some of the mechanics might have taken us quite a bit longer.
Gameplay
The game itself was fun to play, although I was disappointed when the instructions recommended we start with the yeti and the sphinx characters; I wanted to go right to Cthulhu!
However, reading over all the extra rules for Cthulhu, I admitted it probably wasn’t in our best interests for the first game.
As hinted at above, Horrified: World of Monsters follows a similar base system to Alien: Fate of the Nostromo in that there’s a fear (or ‘horrified’) countdown and that each player’s phase takes the sequence of them performing a number of actions specified by their character, before moving onto the monster phase.
The main difference is that horrified is more complex at this phase, with multiple monsters in play, and citizens to be aware of as well. The other big difference is that with Alien you draw cards to figure out victory conditions, whereas in Horrified, victory conditions are fixed for each creature in play.
The game itself took I’d say under an hour to play, and I’d say a big part of that was that we got exceptionally lucky with the yeti defeat, and our dice rolls. We found the yeti cave immediately, and it was very close to its (adorable!) children, with my character, The Buccaneer’s, ability allowing me extra actions to move.
Murdo played the parapsychologist, and I’d say we both used our character abilities less than expected, although I took advantage of mine the most, having picked the most obviously beneficial ability based on my limited knowledge of how the game mechanics worked at the time.
I really enjoyed the level of detail in this game, including the 10 ‘citizen’ characters, who all have their starting places and their intended destinations.
I think we were also very lucky in that our ‘horrified’ score only ever moved up by one, so the sense of urgency wasn’t as great. Again, this leaves me wondering how the game might play out with more players, and I may have to bring this along to a Halloween party to find out!
Game issues
There was only one moment of confusion when reading through the Horrified setup, and that was being told to start with the sphinx and take one item from the bag, before we were even told to put items in the bag!
It’d have been helpful to have read this in the monster setup, rather than having to get to step 4 of the player setup, which came later. This was the only real known issue we spotted.
Overall
This was a really fun game from Ravensburger if you like monsters (we do) and you don’t mind spending around an hour reading and getting your head around all the instructions first. Be sure to allow yourself plenty of time!
It might help if you’re familiar with other, simpler Ravensburger games such as Alien: Fate of the Nostromo, as there are some similar elements in the gameplay mechanics.
It did feel like we got lucky on our first game, and if a couple of things had gone differently, we might have spent a bit longer playing and the tension likely would have increased. I can also see this being more chaotic and urgent when more players are involved.
Want to give it a whirl? You can pick up your own copy of Horrified: World of Monsters right here from Target.
Have you played Horrified: World of Monsters – and would you say my review is about accurate? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
