Twilight Creations earns the distinction of being the first board game I review. I’ve been familiar with the company since Zombies, moved through When Darkness Comes, and looked forward to their Deadlands release (I didn’t get a chance to play a demo, but I did hover for a little bit while a quartet enjoyed a brief visit to the weird west. Today, I’m reviewing Martians.

Martians is a tile-based board game similar to Zombies. The game is intended for two to six players, ages thirteen and up. I should go ahead and point out that my five-year-old son, a board game enthusiast, wanted to try out this game. After reading the rules and deciding to go with the cooperative version, I told him he could try. Except for reading the cards, he quickly grasped the fundamental concepts of the game. He places little green men and tokens accurately; furthermore, he understood the turn sequence just as well as his dad (who had to sometimes look at the rules).

Spectrum Games is pleased to announce the release of Horror Island, the initial adventure for the Slasher Flick RPG.

When a group of young adults travel to a supposedly deserted island for some fun and partying, they find out that the island is anything BUT deserted. Someone or something is watching their every move and starts killing them off one by one.

Horror Island is a full adventure for Slasher Flick. Included are maps, handouts and a ready-to-play group of characters to use. Presented as a late night televised movie, the book is as much fun to read as it is to play!

Slasher Flick is just over 100 pages, an RPG all about octopi. (That’s actually not true.) It’s written and designed by Cynthia Celeste Miller, produced by Spectrum Games. The game is called Slasher Flick. The pages are edged with blood. It’s not a game about serious exploration of the serial killer phenomenon, it’s not a strategy wargame. It’s a game about sitting around a table, having a night like one spent with an actual slasher movie, only in RPG form.

Slasher Flick is simple and focused in nature. Mechanics focus on the drama and tropes of the genre, instead of “killing the bad guy.” Characters are more likely to think the sound of the villain sneaking up is the wind, than a sign that they need to go monster hunting.

Review By David A Hill Jr

Spectrum Games is pleased to announce the release of Slasher Flick, the role-playing game that brings the thrills and chills of the “psycho killer” horror movies from the screen to your tabletop.

According to Cynthia Celeste Miller, “As with any of our games that emulate a particular genre or medium, Slasher Flick was designed to reflect every aspect of the source material. This isn’t a universal system. It was created specifically to feel like a slasher film in play. And I’m extremely confident that the game does exactly that. One of the most important keys to capturing the feel of the slasher movies was the implementation of something we call ‘kill scenes’. A kill scene begins when the killer appears in any given scene and ends when the character(s) present drops to below zero survival points (death) or gains a total of eight survival points (escape). Survival points are gained and lost by making crucial stat checks throughout the kill scene.

Amanda Feral is back and just as glamorous (and bitchy) as she was in Happy Hour of the Damned. But make no mistake: Road Trip is a very different book than its predecessor. Sure, there are still risks of zombie “mistake” outbreaks, partially digested food, and gruesome murders (only some of which are performed by our heroes–and really, the murders they perform are a public service, not a crime).* But unlike Happy Hour, Road Trip begins with the assumption that the readers already know how Amanda’s world works. There’s much less meandering into explanations of zombies, vampires, and other supernaturals and more delving into Amanda’s troubled past.** Now that Amanda’s mother is on her death bed, Amanda struggles to come to terms with a childhood she’d really rather forget.

“Vampires’ Quest” is a card game about competing vampires and is the first offering from Headless Games. In “Vampires’ Quest” players compete to match Bite cards with Victims, turning them into vampires and racing to create an army of the undead.

The game is played in rounds, scoring points based on the number of bitten victims claimed.

There are 15 different kinds of cards (including Bite and Victim cards) that can affect game play. Some allow you to steal claimed victims from other vampires, send claimed victims back to the deck or counter other players’ cards.

Review by Michael Erb

The Card Game of Monster Movie Mayhem!

This is a funny card game from Green Ronin with spoofs on various horror classics ranging from Frankenstein to Dracula with ghosts, beasts and other monsters mixed in to keep things interesting. The local townsfolk team up to destroy these monsters and deal with mayhem along the way.

There are three decks in this game, Townsfolk (representing the local “citizens” that are battling the monsters), Mob (including weapons, actions and other enhancements) and Monster (which also includes events that are often detrimental to the heroes).

Plenty of new cards, bad jokes and all, are included in this expansion for the Munchkin Bites card game from Steve Jackson Games. The set we got did not have any additional rules for the game and we did not run into any problems with the new cards (after all the information on the cards usually explains everything you need to know).

Expanding on the jokes in the core box, Pants Macabre has plenty of puns from horror films and horror RPGs (and LARPing). Most of the jokes are fairly predictable, but worth a good laugh if the player manages to add a little style to the delivery.

As a fan of Big Red, I was eagerly anticipating seeing this sequel to Hellboy after watching the Hellboy and the Golden Army trailer and hearing about Guillermo del Toro’s involvement with the film. Impressed with del Toro’s work on Pan’s Labyrinth and Christopher Golden‘s novelization of Hellboy with artist Mike Mignola, I went into the movie with certain expectations.

Like other films and content within the Hellboy franchise–you do not need to be familiar with the characters or the setting to watch this film.

“InSpectres” is a role-playing game of horror and comedy written by Jared Sorenson and published by Memento-Mori Theatrics. Players take on the roles of supernatural investigators who are part of a franchise, ala “Ghostbusters.” The players control not only their characters, but also the business itself, allow it to grow financially, physically and in terms of contacts and clientele. A game master sets up the story and calls for different die rolls at different times, controlling all of the non-player characters in the game.

Review by Michael Erb

The dead are walking and hungry for brains. Shutter the windows, barricade the door and load your shotgun.

Oh, and this round draw three and play two.

“Zombie Fluxx,” a card game from the appropriately-named Looney Labs, is based off the popular and zany “Fluxx,” an ever changing card game that begins simple and ends up insane.

“Zombie Fluxx” takes the base game one shuffling step forward, adding in iconic images from zombie and horror movies and a new kind of card to liven (pardon the pun) up the mix.

“The Shab-al-Hiri Roach” by Jason Morningstar and Bully Pulpit Games is a storytelling game about academic life, the pursuit of tenure and the lengths people will go to for success, even if that means swallowing an ancient Sumerian bug and burning down the campus. Billed as a Lovecraftian dark comedy of manners, players take on the roles of assistant- or full-proffesors at the ficticious Pemberton University in the fall of 1919.

Players choose an Expertise for their character, an area of learning such as History or Geology, and two Enthusiams, areas in which they excel and delight, such as Creativity, Manipulation or Debauchery.

Review by Michael Erb

Munchkins have hacked their way through dungeons, kung fu temples, starships, haunted houses, and super-foes. Now they face their greatest challenge – Cthulhu! Will they survive? Will they retain their sanity? Will they . . . level up?

Munchkin Cthulhu combines the zany comedy of the previous Munchkin games with the oddities of the Cthulhu Mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft and its further developments by other authors and game designers.

You’ve seen it before: authors blurbing other books, claiming ‘I wish I’d written this’. Seems kind of hyperbolic, I know. But then I experienced it. This 300-something-page tome shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to read. This is my fault because as I started reading, mood-killers kicked in: jealousy, envy and that dreadful thing that’s summed up as ’emo’. I did not want to feel this way, so for the first half of the book I read only in short sessions. For the uninitiated, I’m only an occasional fiction writer. Still, Mark Henry’s writing is so all-encompassingly engaging that I started hating my work and myself, lalala (emo).

Review by Tez Miller

A good urban fantasy can be like a mixed drink. It’s got to have the right flavor—but it’s also got to have a lot of kick. Not so much, of course, that you’ll regret it the next morning. The characters in Mark Henry’s Happy Hour of the Damned might not liken themselves to mixed drinks, but they would certainly appreciate the allusion. Because few zombies appreciate liquor like the heroines in Henry’s novel.

Review by Alana Abbott

You may recall that we recently posted a call for suggestions to review horror webcomics. Well, I’m happy to report we’re digging deep into all things gory and illustrated to provide you with a list of the best places to visit on the web. One work of horror comedy art turned up in a place […]

Sometimes the best in horror comes from the most unlikely of places; some of you might remember Franklin W. Cain’s Lego® Cthulu. While building horror images with Legos® can be a lot of fun (my favorites are the Darth Maul Lego® Sculpture Kit and the Viking Fortress against Fafnir Dragon) Brick Films knows that Legos® […]

Let me introduce you to Angel, the Starry-eyed Serial Killer. She was cursed by the queen, and grew old without grace. In her old age, she was pushed down the stairs. May our dearly departed Angel rest in peace. I was immediately drawn to Gloom for two reasons. The first is artwork, produced in the etching style of Edward Gorey by Scott Reeves, that sets the mood of the game. The second, is the unique game design concept created by Keith Baker. The result? One of the best card games I’ve ever played.

How did you get into gaming? I started roleplaying in college, mainly GURPS. I had been trying my hand at writing fiction for a while, and amassed a nice collection of rejection letters; my girlfriend suggested I tried submitting a gaming article, and next thing I knew I was writing GURPS Martial Arts for Steve […]

How did you get into gaming? Totally accidentally. Some jocks and preps and I were wandering the halls of our high school, looking for less popular kids to oppress. We found some nerds in the hallway, squatting on the floor and playing D&D. We kicked their asses, and they left their books behind when they […]