Horrified, with Friends

A cousin of Anne's had a board game afternoon, so we went to visit and played two rounds of Horrified then a funny game of Bananya.

Horrified is an odd game.  It's a cooperative game where your team tries to defeat some number of classic movie monsters.  It's SO collaborative that everyone pretty much plans out your move for you by the time your move comes around.  Each player gets a character card.  Each character has 3, 4 or 5 actions plus a special ability.  The actions are (from memory here):
- move your hero one space
- move a villager one space
- make one attack on a monster
- pick up all chips on your current space
- trade some number of chips with another player on the same space

Chips are placed on the board throughout the game.  The chips each have a color, some number of points, and the name of the space where they are placed.

Each monster has its own quirks and different ways to defeat them.  For Dracula, you have to wipe out all four of his coffins with 6+ points of red chips then spend 9 red chips to kill him.  For the Creature from the Black Lagoon, he has a little game board on his card showing a river, where you pay chips to move Candyland-style to the next space of that color, and when you get to the middle you can finally kill him.  The Mummy had a 6-piece puzzle where you have to spend chips to move the pieces to try and get them into the correct order, then he can be attacked.

Each player makes their player move then draws a black card as their "Monster move" and plays as the monster according to the rules on the card.  When a monster lands on a space with a hero on it, the hero is attacked, which means rolling 1, 2 or 3 dice where an explosion icon means kill damage, but the current player (not the player of the hero being attacked) can burn chips to block the kill, otherwise the hero goes off the board and comes back on the hospital space next round.  There is a "Terror Level" track with 7 or 9 spaces, and each time hero or villager is killed, it moves one.

The game ends when the Terror Track hits the last spot or the last black card is played.

Aside from some other special movement rules for monsters, you just try to survive, solve whatever set of tasks will make the monsters vulnerable, beat them, and win.

It is very confusing as a newcomer.  We mostly let the experienced players come up with the best moves for us.  A move might go like this if I had 4 action points: move a space (1), pick up the chips there (2), move a villager 2 to get away from a monster (action 3 & 4), where someone else might have the ability to teleport to me, or move me extra spaces.  Some of the fancier moves were: move to Anne's character, get the two chips we needed from here, move the 3 spaces to the Precinct space and play one of those pieces to fill in the Invisible Man's puzzle spaces.

Still confusing.  We played the second game withe Frankenstein and the Bride -- one monster card with two figures on the board.  They had been afraid to try them before.  Their card has two dials, one that goes to 9 and one to 11, one takes blue chips, one takes yellow chips.  And when you play a chip to their card you also get to move that monster the same number of spaces, which is important because if the two of them meet up on the same space it's GAME OVER.  Unless you can max out those dials, then when they come together they go off happily together and are defeated.  That was nerve-wracking, and we won that game with only one mark left on the Terror Track.

I'm not sure we would pick that game again from a list.  There was too much of every player interfering constantly.  Some of the suggestions were good, others were just annoying.  Let me play my guy, it's my turn.  But we did work as a team, up to the point needed to get the win.

Funny note: the cat in the photo is not the usual cat in our photos.  Orange, yes.  But this was Cap.  I'm an animal magnet and Cap spent most of the game just sitting up against my arm watching the action.