Horrified: American Monsters

The original Horrified is one of my favourite games of all time, combining a great theme with simple but challenging cooperative gameplay. To say I was giddy when I heard about this sequel is an understatement. Does it live up to these sky-high expectations or will it be consigned to the horror bin of forgotten monsters along with the likes of The Video Dead, Pumpkinhead, and Neon Maniacs?

What’s It All About

Horrified: American Monsters is a standalone cooperative game for 1 to 5 players. It is very accessible for families and focuses on the ‘pick-up and deliver’ mechanism and destroying the titular American monsters. Every monster behaves differently and has a unique series of tasks that need to be completed to defeat it. For me, this is the most compelling part of the game as each monster changes how you tackle the game.

What Do You Do In This Game

On your turn, you can generally do four actions. These include moving, guiding the other citizens, picking up tokens, advancing a monster challenge, and sharing tokens with other investigators in your space. You will want to move citizens to their safe location as this gives you a perk card and stops the monsters from killing them and advancing the terror track. If ever the track reaches the skull, you all die.

After your turn, the monsters get their go. You flip a card and it will give you an event, several tokens to add to the board and tell you which monsters will move and attack. If a monster causes you damage you can either give up one of your tokens or go to the hospital which advances the terror track by one. Not good.

The next investigator then takes their go. The game progresses like this until the monster deck runs out or the terror track reaches its maximum. In both of these cases, you lose. To win you have to defeat all of the monsters.

For example, Chupacabra is a ravenous goat-eater. He loves to munch on those beardy little fellows. To beat him you have to save six goats from his gnashing jaws and take them to the farm and safety. Then when you’ve starved him enough you can go to his space and smack him about a bit. Sounds simple, but Chupacabra has a few tricks up his sleeves. He will target investigators with brown tokens. Plus, his special power is to remove a brown token from the board. Funnily enough, goats are all on brown tokens.

Chupacabra is one of the simpler monsters to play with and is recommended for your first game along with Banshee of the Badlands. The other four monsters are more complex, especially Jersey Devil with its Guess Who? clue-finding malarkey. Despite them being trickier to implement the game doesn’t stray out of the family game level of complexity.

How Hard Is It

You can set the difficulty level which again is good for families. For an easy game, just include two monsters. To really push yourself, try using four monsters in a game, definitely not for the faint of heart. I do find the game easier at lower player counts.

With two players, you have less time to wait before it’s your go again which means the monsters can’t sit with you for ages and beat you about the face. At most, you’ll be attacked for two turns, whereas in four-player games you may have to put up with four turns of beatings. So, if you would mainly play this at two players you can increase the difficulty by playing two characters each, essentially a four-player game, or starting the terror marker on a higher number.

The Components

The artwork is of a high quality in Horrified: American Monsters, especially on the perk cards. The board is detailed and vibrant and the paths that you can take are clearly marked. The components are very nice apart from some minor quibbles, such as the thickness of the monster boards and the way that Bigfoot’s footprints are hard to spot on the board. While the miniatures are in no way Games Workshop standard, they are good enough for this game.

One personally horrifying component is the token bag. The material it’s made of is a combination of crackly, greasy and general unpleasantness. My wife has to take the tokens out of the bag as I refuse to touch it. Get that filthy thing away from me. Disgusting. Please bear in mind that this is just my opinion, and is an opinion not shared with the majority of sane people.

How Replayable Is It

In terms of replayability, you have seven asymmetric investigators and six different monsters to choose your pool of monsters from. Luck also plays a minor factor in this game so sometimes one of the monsters may be dispatched easily due to the token placement or your dice rolls, and other times they can be a nightmare, lurking around for the whole game and repeatedly jabbing you in your kidneys. This changes how the game plays each time.

Comparison

So now let’s get to the big question: how does it compare to the original Horrified? Pretty well, actually.

Horrified: American Monsters is effectively the original Horrified but with six new monsters and a new theme. The main mechanisms have all been kept unchanged. The investigators have exactly the same powers as Horrified and the perk cards seem strangely familiar too. I’m fine with this because all I wanted was new monsters.

How do the monsters compare then? They’re good… but… they are a little fiddlier. I can’t help but use the words elegant and pure for the ways that the monsters worked in the original. This new set has more rules attached to them and they’re not as instinctive as the old ones. We found ourselves looking up the rules quite a few times in our initial games. Over time, it’s not a problem and the monsters are generally fun to play against. The only one that is a bit of a pain is the Jersey Devil who requires quite a lot of set-up and upkeep during the game. Fortunately, it changes the way you tackle the game in an interesting way.

I don’t find the theme as engaging with these six monsters that I know so little about. I have been known to play the original Horrified with four monsters and whichever is the last alive, I’d watch the original Universal film of that creature. I can’t do that with this version. I’d love to see a version of Horrified with 80s horror icons, such as Jason, Freddy, Pinhead, Chucky, and Michael Myers. I can’t see that happening though as the characters are owned by different companies. Ah well, I can dream…

Conclusion

Overall, Horrified: American Monsters is a great game. I’d rate it just a touch lower than the original due to the theme and the slight inelegance of the monster rules, but even so, I’ve enjoyed this game very much. It is great for families but can also be played by more hardcore gamers as the difficulty can be easily adjusted. It’s always fun to see which monsters you’re going to be fighting and work out how you’re going to fight them with the investigators you have.

If you enjoyed the original, this is a no-brainer. It’s more Horrified goodness and the monsters are different enough to warrant owning both. If you don’t already own Horrified, I’d advise you to get that game first. But which you buy may be down to which theme appeals more and you’ll be getting a fantastic cooperative game whichever you go for.