If you’re entertaining guests this Halloween, then you’re going to need to conjure up some special themed activities for them to enjoy. While sitting in your living room dressed as a member of the living undead may have been the extent of your plans this year, a great way to bring people together is a good old-fashioned board game, with there being plenty of horror-themed games for you to play on October 31st.
We’ve compiled a list of the very best horror games you can play this Halloween, featuring a diverse range of games for a variety of different age ranges and skill levels, ensuring that there’s a little something for everyone tucked away in our gallery.
Here are the Best Horror Board Games to Play This Halloween:
Best Horror Board Games to Play This Halloween
-
Betrayal at House on the Hill
Players: 3-6
Age: 12+
Betrayal at House on the Hill perfectly encapsulates its haunted house theme, tasking players with exploring its forever-changing spooky mansion setting and completing a randomized, secret mission.
Betrayal's biggest selling point is that it provides a different experience each time you play it. Each player starts out on equal footing, exploring the house and trying to level up their character along with obtaining items and weaponry that will help them on their adventure. However, eventually a player will trigger the "Haunt," an event which sees one player betraying their teammates before embarking upon their own hidden objective. This is where the real game starts.
From this point on Betrayal becomes an asynchronous, competitive multiplayer game, with the traitor working on their own to complete their objective while the other players simultaneously attempt to complete theirs, too. With neither the traitor nor the team knowing what objective their opponents have been given, Betrayal therefore revolves around trying to guess your enemy's next move, successfully outplaying them before they do the same to you. Couple this with the tile-based board, which changes each time you set up a new game, and Betrayal is one of the most exciting and unpredictable board games that money can buy.
-
Eldritch Horror
Players: 1-8
Age: 14+
There are few more appropriate ways to spend a Halloween evening than enjoying the wonderfully weird creations of one of the grandfathers of the horror genre, with Eldritch Horror providing a unique way to appreciate the otherworldly, inhuman terror of H.P. Lovecraft's literary classics.
Eldritch Horror is a fresh take on the popular Arkham Horror, tasking a team of up to eight players with travelling around the world in order to protect it from the wrath of the Ancient One, pitting you against the likes of Azathoth and even Lovecraft's most famous creation, Cthulhu.
There's a lot to get your head around with Eldritch Horror, with the game sending you and your team across the globe in order to solve mysteries, battle monsters and find clues to help you progress towards your ultimate goal of saving the planet from the benevolent forces of evil, as the drawing of Mythos cards slowly transforms the board into a surreal landscape of inter-dimensional portals and unfathomable horrors. If you want a board game to really sink your teeth into this Halloween, this is it.
-
King of Tokyo
Players: 2-6
Age: 8+
Among the board games featured in this list are some that will probably be a little too complicated to explain to a group who may not be as familiar with board games as yourself, so Kings of Tokyo is a great alternative for those who want to play something easier to grasp.
A riff on classic Japanese monster movies, Kings of Tokyo is a gorgeous looking game with suitably large, cardboard playing pieces, each representing a monster in the vein of silver screen beasts such as King Kong and Godzilla. The aim of the game is for players to break into Tokyo, reeking as much havoc as possible by rolling dice to accumulate attack points. Players can also purchase cards to help improve and gain abilities, and ultimately destroy every other rival monster trying to threaten your status as the king.
Though these booster cards add an element of strategy to proceedings, King of Tokyo is fundamentally a dice game that favors luck more than it does skill. With the success of your attacks reliant upon the throw of the dice, it's therefore suitable for a wider age range of players, though a group of adults may find that it lacks the depth of some of the more complex board games featured on this list. However, if you have a mixed group of both adults and kids this Halloween, then Kings of Tokyo is a great choice.
-
Level 7 Escape
Players: 1-4
Age: 14+
Although most of the games in this gallery feature ancient horrors from werewolves through to Lovecraftian nightmares, Level 7 Escape is instead a board game for those more interested in sci-fi horror which pits alien monsters as your enemies.
Level 7 Escape shares similarities with Betrayal at House on the Hill, with you exploring a tile-based board that is created as you and the other players move through it. Opening up a new room in the desolate alien base will bring with it new events, spawn new enemies to fight and generally make escaping the mysterious "Level 7" a much more arduous task. Although Betrayal is the better game, for those who want a purely cooperative role-playing experience with a sci-fi theme then you can't go far wrong with Level 7 Escape.
-
Mysterium
Players: 2-7
Age: 10+
Mysterium provides an interesting spin on the classic murder mystery board game Clue, by having one player assume the role of the ghost of the deceased victim. With every other player playing as part of a team of mediums hired to investigate the circumstances of the ghost's death, Mysterium makes for a unique cooperative game in a spooky setting, having players work in tandem to successfully out the identity of the killer, but without being able to receive direct communication from the only person who knows who committed the crime.
Although very similar conceptually to Clue, with it even requiring players to pinpoint the location and weapon used to murder the ghost, Mysterium also shares a lot in common with the popular card game Dixit. Like Dixit, Mysterium requires players to convey words using visual clues outlined on cards, with these cards being passed to the mediums by the ghost in order to help them with their investigation. At the end of the game, mediums must try to outline the circumstances of the murder and, if successful, the ghost can therefore pass over to the "other side." Although its beautifully illustrated cards are far from terrifying, Mysterium is an excellent co-op game that requires a creative mind or two.
-
One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Players: 3-10
Age: 8+
One Night Ultimate Werewolf is perhaps the best party game I own. A game of bluffing, One Night places players in the shoes of a group of villagers with various abilities, tasking them with finding the werewolves in their midst.
The game is divided between night and day phases. At night, players must close their eyes while the narrator (available via the free One Night iOS/Android app) reads out instructions for each individual villager. One by one, the players open their eyes in order to carry out their tasks - which range from swapping cards through to mimicking the ability of another player's card - with the werewolves also revealing themselves to one another in order to successfully work together after the night phase has ended. In the day phase, the players must work out who the werewolves are, with the werewolves tasked with bluffing their way out of their secret identities being discovered. At the end of the day phase, players must vote on who they believe is the most likely to be the werewolf - if they successfully manager to uncover one of the wolves, the villagers win, but if they accidentally select a villager, then they lose.
One Night is therefore pretty much the board game equivalent of John Carpenter's The Thing, with players tasked with convincing each other of their identity and outing the monster hiding among them. However, the introduction of character-specific abilities ensures that even if you started the round as a villager, you're still not entirely sure whether or not that's still the case when the daytime comes. You're therefore required to think on the fly, putting other players off your scent while deducing the identity of the werewolves. It's an excellent, fast-paced card-based game that you'll have difficulty putting down once you've started playing it.
-
Zombicide: Black Plague
Players: 1 - 6
Age: 10+
Zombicide was a hugely enjoyable game because it took a potentially complicated concept for a board game - tasking players with battling against a horde of non-player-controlled zombies - and simplified it while still managing to remain exciting. Zombicide: Black Plague takes the original game and improves upon it, by way of doing away with the fiddly cardboard character cards in favor of plastic "trays" which players can easily use to monitor their progress and inventory, a new medieval setting and a new enemy type in the form of the Necromancer.
Zombicide: Black Plague isn't a drastic improvement over the original formula, though there are enough changes here for it to earn its place on your wish list ahead of its predecessor. Aside from the aforementioned new additions, the game still retains those high-quality miniatures - all of which are ready to be painted if you're that way inclined - along with a variety of unique scenarios that ensures that game has a high replay value.
As is the case in pretty much every entertainment medium, there are a wealth of zombie board games to choose from this Halloween, from Dead of Winter through to Last Night on Earth. However, given how easy Zombicide is to set up and get rolling, I'd give the edge to Black Plague as my game of choice for October 31st.
