ROLL & FRIGHT
ROLL & FRIGHT
Dan Thurot goes in search of cardboard chills and questions whether board games can truly deliver a terrifying experience. Art by Łukasz Kowalczuk
The massacre poses some distinct problems for my long-term plans. Most of the park’s guests—those who, like me, had always harbored an interest in the archaeological—have been reduced to quivering rabbits in the face of the ancient evil we awakened with some ill-timed recitations from an excavated tablet. Now two more have been reduced to even less.
An ordinary body would grow weary with exertion. The being who stalks us only grows more vigorous with each kill. The other guests, those I’d painstakingly herded toward the exit, now scatter in three directions. So much for that. He rears up before me: impossibly muscled, speckled with vitreous matter, soundless. I’m already bleeding from his last assault. The shield I’ve fashioned from the lid of a garbage can feels flimsy, offering no more protection than a flattened soda can. With my free hand,I prepare to swing my baseball bat into Inkanyamba’s skull, praying that this time he’ll feel the impact.
I am not afraid.
This is Final Girl, the solitaire horror board game by Evan Derrick and A.J. Porfirio, based loosely on the latter’s Hostage Negotiator. It’s the sort of game we might describe as “visceral.” Blood-spatters watermark the cards. Helpless victims cower across the map. My pool of health is located directly next to Inkanyamba’s, and it’s pathetically shallow by comparison. Whether I’m fighting a warrior out of time, a killer stitched into a pig mask or an insane puppeteer, that’s the one constant. Every time I play, my first thought is, “How the hell am I going to kill that thing?”
I am not afraid, even though everything about this situation screams that I should be. A teenage girl has been pitted against a horror beyond comprehension. The odds aren’t in her favor. This will likely end poorly. But I am not afraid.
This is one of the big conundrums facing board game designers, especially those who hope to transpose the emotions we often associate with other artistic mediums into their own craft. The reality is that board games tend to excel at building and exploring models rather than eliciting dramatic emotions. Humor? Sometimes. Usually when a board game leans into its ability to model collapse, whether the physical tumblings of Rita Modl’s Men at Work or the panicked squawks of Vlaada Chvátil’s Space Alert. Hope and dread? To some degree. There’s certainly some tension when a plan comes together only to be threatened right before completion. But these are mere flickers compared to the existential ponderings prompted by films like Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 or Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Once the game is finished, so are the emotions. Romance? I haven’t found any. Sorrow? Forget about it. The last time I shed tears over a board game was when my dad played an Arsonist on my Colossus of Catan in Klaus Teuber’s card game version of Catan released in 1996. I was born in 1986. I’ll let you do the math on that one. (Confession: The aforementioned event took place in 2020. It was a rough year.)
And then there’s that most primal of our emotions: Fear.
Can a board game make us afraid? Not just apprehensive or grossed out, but afraid? One of my favorite horror memories comes from the first time I watched The Ring.
I know, I know. My only defense is that I was a newcomer to the genre. I sat and watched the whole thing with my dad and barely moved the entire time. When it was over, I walked upstairs and there was a little girl seated in front of my glowing computer monitor, her dark hair wet and limp over her face. I freaked. My younger sister, who had me brush her hair at night, didn’t understand why I was yelping at her. My heart felt like someone had placed it between hammer and anvil. A board game has never managed that.
But every so often the grave blesses us with the faintest chill.
There was a particular play of Corey Konieczka’s Battlestar Galactica. Hidden roles are fantastic at upping the stakes; surprisingly so are longer playtimes. It probably doesn’t hurt that That Guy was also playing. You know: That Guy. Everybody has one. The Guy who rubbed me the wrong way. The Guy who made me want to win at all costs. It would be one thing if he were merely irritating. Nah. He was irritating and shrewd. There was a method to his abrasiveness, like a rock in the toe of your boot. Except the rock knows what it’s doing.
We went back and forth for two hours. Nettling at each other. Testing the limits of one another’s lies and evasions. I was a Cylon, the game’s version of a traitor, and it was my task to scuttle the ark that carried humanity’s last survivors. With That Guy breathing down my neck, the scrutiny was too much. I wasn’t a person playing a board game. I was a saboteur, certain my shift supervisor knew about the bomb beneath my coat when I requested access to the fighter bay.
Turns out, we were both Cylons. While I was squirming under That Guy’s gaze, he was squirming under mine. I was That Guy too. Like the inspectors in Chesterton’s Thursday, we were so preoccupied with our respective identities that we couldn’t recognize the ally behind the disguise. The Galactica prevailed that day.
I don’t remember who pointed out that one of horror’s most basic tenets is the discomfort of having your personal space violated, but plenty of board games lean into that one. It’s the same predatory thrill that gives schoolyard tag its wildness. There are plenty of examples. Nearly any game with hidden movement is a ripe contender: Fury of Dracula, with its cat-and-monster evasions. Specter Ops, the best “rogue on the run from corporate goons” simulator ever designed.
More recently, Mind MGMT, impressionistic paranoia in a box, an effect heightened by the game’s insistence that it isn’t a game at all, but an activation kit for psychic agents. One time, my wife shouted aloud when the space monster pounced on her in Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, even though nothing had physically touched her. Another time, a sickly shiver coursed my spine when a clammy hand guided my fingers across Nyctophobia’s board, my eyes literally blind thanks to the game’s blackout glasses. That touch was physical, and unwelcome despite being consensual, and persuaded me to sell the game soon after.
Of course, there are countless board games that use horror as an aesthetic. But if we’re talking about horror as a feeling, a sense of lingering dread or impending terror, that’s where we flounder. The problem, I think, is how the medium forces uncertainty into an awkward duel with certainty. There’s tremendous uncertainty in what your opponents will do. Which action they’ll take, the priorities they assign to their goals, whether they’ll prove disruptive or ignore you entirely.
At the same time, conventional wisdom holds that the rules must be certain. Because games are things that must be taught and understood before they can be experienced, we can’t be playing one thing one moment and another the next. The floor will never drop from beneath our feet. The ceiling will never cave in. We’ll never be confronted with something utterly unexpected. There simply isn’t room for that sort of experience.
Or so I once thought. Years ago, I watched a group of boys play a terrifying variant of UNO. It worked like this: Assume the rules of UNO. Now everybody at the table jots down an extra rule on a piece of paper, which they hide from everybody else. That rule can be anything that would impact play. Perhaps talking means you draw two cards. Or playing a card with your left hand means you can openly play two cards instead of one. Or, heck, let’s go for it: You’re allowed to secret up to three other cards under a blue card—but if discovered cheating with more cards, or concealing cards under any other color other than blue, you now draw ten. Oh, and now make the rules enforceable not only by the person who wrote them, but by anybody else who’s figured out the rules. Also, cheating is legal. But getting caught cheating means you draw cards. But but! If you call somebody out for cheating when they weren’t, then you’re the one stuck drawing cards.
Sounds like a big mess, right? Exactly. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a group more paranoid than those boys were. Every move was jittery. Every opened mouth made someone jump. Even a game as straightforward as UNO became an object of broken minds and plaintive wails. It was more cosmically horrifying than any game with Lovecraftian monsters.
Here’s the thing. Every medium has its strengths. Television does serialization. Movies drop us into a perspective. Books excel at inner thoughts. And board games do rules and models. When I watched that group dissect and reshape UNO, the result occupied some liminal space between board game and role-playing. The strictness of the former, the fluidity of the latter.
More and more, board games are figuring out how to break the rules, or at least how to bend them. Hidden roles and soft role-playing elements are a part of that. So are legacy games and anything that plays with our expectations of consistency. There’s nothing quite as entrancing as sitting down to play a game, asking how you win, and having the host go, “Well, about that…”
Sure, it isn’t the same as a limp-haired ghost forcing her way out of my computer monitor. But it’s a start. More than a start; it’s the redefining of an entire medium. We can hardly go half a year without another title forcing us to reexamine what’s possible in board games. I still haven’t been scared silly. But I have had tension stretched to the breaking point when my secret mission is on the verge of discovery. I’ve realised that I’ve been holding my breath for fear of someone realising a fortified position isn’t as secure as it seems. I’ve grown confused and flustered when everybody at the table seemed to be operating from information I didn’t have.
In other words, board games are wholly capable of horror. But that horror will be on its own terms, in its own shape, with its own set of limitations and possibilities. The fun part is that we’re still discovering what those possibilities will look like.
For board games, the future looks like it’ll be dark in all the right ways.