It is never too early to begin the Halloween hype! We have a ton planned, from our Hell-themed Dungeons and Dragons Baldur’s Gate one shots, to the Pumpkin Dungeon runner quest at Nitehawk, and never forgetting our D&D Murder Mystery Halloween Party on All Hallow’s Eve! 

To get excited for all these spooky events, we will be playing our favorite horror-themed and scary games! This week, we will highlight Spooky Board Games, and check in later this month for our favorite Spooky RPGs.

The Exorcism at the House of Monkton Falls

The Exorcism at the House of Monkton Falls is a brand new game to our store, and we are excited to jump into the paranormal investigation. This cooperative game features a haunted home that acts as complex puzzle you must solve before you are captured by the evil spirit haunting the house.

What captivated us about this game is the artwork. Illustrated by beautiful cartoons, the game provides a real sense of immersion into the haunting tone of the game. It is a complex challenge that maintains high tension throughout. Bonus points - this game can be played a solo experience! 

Escape Room Games : Exit & Unlock!

Escape Rooms have become all the rage in recent years, and now games like Exit and Unlock bring that experience to your home! Both the Exit and Unlock series provide puzzle-solving madness in a variety of themes and settings! 

Unlock! creates the same time pressure of escape rooms and is based almost entirely on a deck of cards. A companion app keeps time, gives hints, and adds puzzles to the mix. Because you solve all of the puzzles the first time around, this is a great game to buy and share with family and friends so they can experience the escape for themselves!

Exit provides a set of puzzles you complete one after the other. Along with the card deck, the escape room is emulated using a booklet and items that are often physically destroyed in the process. The Exit games help capture the feeling of the one-time experience of Escape Rooms and the manipulation of physical products as you play are an interesting, unique element. 

Save your money on Escape Rooms and Haunted Houses with these fun, unique games that provide memorable experiences!

One Night Ultimate Werewolf and Ultimate Werewolf Legacy

Werewolves and hidden identities? You don’t get more Halloween than that. One Night Ultimate Werewolf takes the horror of a werewolf-hunt and expands it! 

One Night Ultimate Werewolf is based on the party game Mafia, centered around taking up secret roles and trying to find the Killer or be the last person standing. In One Night Ultimate Werewolf, everyone takes up different roles with different motivations. The main goal is to find The Werewolves (while the Werewolves try to survive!), but roles may change as the game progresses. 3 to 10 people can play this game in 10 minutes!

Ultimate Werewolf Legacy raises the stakes! As a Legacy game, Ultimate Werewolf Legacy takes place over sixteen sessions, and each session impacts future sessions. Family Roles create alliances, the village will change shape over time, and a Diary will chronicle your misadventures. Ultimate Werewolf Legacy is perfect for people who like the flow and flavor of a party game but want a more lasting experience.

Werewolf Legacy is a favorite among the ever-growing selection of social deduction games, or games that feature hidden identities, teams, and bluffing. Maintain your secret identity in our other social deduction favorites, such as One Night Ultimate Superheroes, Werewolf, and Bang! if you’re dressing up as Butch Cassidy this Halloween!

Arkham Horror

If you don’t work together, your city may fall into chaos, conquered by doom, ruled by the merciless Cthulhu… but it’ll be really fun in the process.

Arkham Horror is a cooperative horror game in which you and your friends play as investigators in the 1930s town of Arkham, of H.P. Lovecraft infamy. Something strange is afoot and you must find clues, fight monsters, remove Doom, solve Anomalies, and preserve your Sanity! You’ll play as different characters and roles, each with their own special abilities and tools to help in your work. 

At any given time, there are multiple obstacles to contend with on the board, pushing you to communicate with the other players, and lean on your character’s ability to prioritize which to handle first. Success is not easily won, but even a loss is somehow satisfying amidst the complexity of handling many problems at once! 

This new edition features streamlined rules, a modular board with location-specific scenarios, and narrative forks that change the outcome of your decisions. Arkham Horror isn’t just a strategy game - you will work together to tell a compelling story of a town caught in forces greater than it can understand.

Not Alone

Your intergalactic expedition was smooth sailing, until the shipwreck. Now that you’re on a mysterious, dangerous planet, you’ll need to keep your wits about you. Especially because you can’t help but feel like you’re being followed…

Not Alone is an asymmetrical card game that follows a shipwrecked crew, The Hunted, exploring and surviving a strange planet, with one player acting as The Creature hunting them. Not Alone features small elements of deckbuilding, management of cards, guessing, and bluffing. It immerses you in the scenario of exploring a strange planet, trying to get home, and being hunted by something strange and sinister.

Not Alone creates a heart-pounding sense of dread and tension in under an hour of gameplay, and uses a mix of strategy and luck to keep the game balanced for all types of players. Enjoy the anticipation before the jump scare with Not Alone! 

Dead of Winter

It’s the Dead of Winter. Food is scarce. Your shelter is in disrepair. The wind is howling. And the dead are rising…

Dead of Winter is a cooperative, story-centric game about a colony of survivors trying to outlast a harsh winter. Most of humanity has fallen and each player leads a faction of these weakened survivors. The threats are not limited only to the unforgiving hand of nature and the relentless attack of zombies. The real threat is the psychological toll a post-apocalyptic world has on a group of people. The colony may live but lose their mind. 

Dead of Winter is a heavier game, both in gameplay and theme, and invites its players to dive deep into the bleak aftermath of the fall of civilization. Dead of Winter is a favorite for those who like storytelling coupled with strategy. There are multiple expansions that change the game. Raxxon is one of our favorite expansions, with a sci-fi flavor that deepens the conflict, as players try to find a cure and quarantine the sick.

Mansions of Madness

Jump back into Arkham and battle for your sanity in Mansions of Madness!

Mansions of Madness is a cooperative, story-telling game that is facilitated by an immersive app. Each game is a new mystery for players to investigate, aided by spooky music and clues from the app. Along the way, new problems will unfold, from puzzles to solve, monsters to fight, and nonplayer characters to befriend.

The app is the real hero of this game. One of the best companion apps we’ve used, it has everything you need, not only to run the game successfully, but to become fully immersed in the world. The app features background music that never overtakes the story, sound effects that are effective and subtle, and narrations that’s not only clear but eloquent and captivating. Mansions of Madness almost feels more like a structured roleplaying game with its strong narrative and depth of player choice.

Mysterium

It’s not Halloween without ghosts, is it?

In Mysterium, one player plays as a ghost seeking to solve their own death, and the psychics dedicated to helping them. During the course of a séance in a 1920s manor, the spiritually weakened ghost will use cards to communicate with the psychics to help them find the person behind their untimely death. This cooperative game relies heavily on the intuition of the psychics, as they make guesses and hypotheses about the ghost’s death, to which the ghost can give further hints.

Mysterium has multiple tiers of difficulty so as you get better at the game, you can challenge yourself further. The importance of intuition is a refreshing change from the highly strategic nature of many cooperative games. Tell your own ghost story with Mysterium.

Honorable Mentions

Below are some of our most popular games that we ran out of space for, but still wanted to give a mention! The games have been enduring favorites that you have probably heard about from us before, so allow us to re-introduce them!

Betrayal Series

In the Betrayal series of games, beginning with House on the Hill, you and the other players will construct a haunted house room by room. You will then explore the board but beware - someone in your midst is plotting to betray you! The rest of you must work together to figure out the betrayer and escape with your lives. Play the same game in a D&D setting or expand it in a Legacy game. 

Zombie Dice

Zombie Dice is a simple, push-your-luck dice game! You each play as zombies to devour as many brains as you can. Each round you collect as many as you can but if you roll too many times, you risk getting Shotgun-ed and losing everything. Easy to learn and fast paced, a perfect quick game to play at a party.

Choose Your Own Adventure : House of Danger

Based on the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books, House of Danger throws you into an interactive story about isolation, death, and mystery. This game can be played by any number of people as you all step into the role of a psychic private detective. Each card gives you a choice or a consequence, so how the story unfolds is truly up to you. If you've already uncovered the mysteries in House of Danger, go to War with the Evil Power Master in the scifi expansion!

Stay Spooky! 

Written by Johnni Medina