Top Of The Table – The Best Games For Halloween

Maybe trick-or-treating isn’t your thing, but you still want to do something fun with friends to celebrate the spookiest time of the year. Might I suggest a dedicated Halloween board game night? A few candles and a spooky background soundtrack can get you well on your way, but the most important ingredient is the right game. I’m here to help, with eight of my favorite games for a Halloween gaming get-together. 

Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Designer: Nate French, Matthew Newman
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a whole column looking at a great horror game called Mansions of Madness, an ambitious app-driven game for up to five players. If you want to tap that Lovecraftian horror vibe, but you’re playing with just a single friend or partner, you might consider Fantasy Flight’s new Arkham Horror card game. Based on the excellent board game of the same name, this new release is an ongoing story-driven cooperative adventure for one or two players (or up to four with two copies of the base game). The game allows for extensive customization of your personal card deck, and the card-based interactions are fast and streamlined, keeping the focus on the ongoing story. This is also one of Fantasy Flight’s living card games, so subsequent expansions allow you to continue the story with set cards in each release, rather than a randomized collection. This one is a great choice for small groups or couples who still want a full-featured game complete with creepy narrative elements.

Dead of Winter
Designer: Jonathan Gilmour, Isaac Vega
Publisher: Plaid Hat Games

If you’re not afraid of confronting some disturbing and adult scenarios in your board gaming adventures, you can hardly go wrong with 2014’s Dead of Winter. Much like in the wildly popular The Walking Dead stories, this survival game finds the players in control of a group of survivors, desperately trying to survive after a zombie apocalypse. Sometimes conflicting victory goals for the different players can lead to morally complex conflicts, and might even see one of the players exiled from the settlement. The game demands constant, often painful decisions, and regularly results in fascinating options for emergent storytelling. The game also can be found as a separate standalone expansion, called Dead of Winter: The Long Night, all about a shady pharmaceutical corporation and its horrific experiments. 

Potion Explosion
Designer: Stefano Castelli, Andrea Crespi, Lorenzo Silva
Publisher: CMON

Maybe your Halloween game night needs to steer a little more toward family-friendly options? I’m a big fan of this great new release that’s all about crafting concoctions as young witches and wizards and trying to pass your final exam in potions class. The game is built around a cleverly constructed marble dispenser, which drops multi-colored marbles in random orders into several orderly columns. If you pull a marble ingredient and two new marbles of the same color touch, you get those ingredients as well. Once you have the correct ingredients for your potion, you can then use that potion for advantages in later rounds of play. Potion Explosion is tactile, easy to understand, and great fun for a family gaming group with a shared love for the wizarding world. 

The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow
Designer: Philippe des Pallieres, Hervé Marly
Publisher: Asmodee

There are numerous variations on the familiar Werewolf formula, but I’m personally partial to Miller’s Hollow. No matter the variation you choose for you and your friends, the basic idea is roughly the same. Role cards dictate whether each player is a villager, a werewolf, or one of a small number of characters with special powers, like the fortune teller, hunter, or witch – all of whom have special abilities that also might paint a target on their back if anyone figures out who they are. One additional player takes on the role of the moderator and dictates the flow of the game. Each “night” the werewolves kill one of the players, and in the “morning” everyone debates who might be the monsters. Built to be played with 8-20 players, this riotous party game encourages lying, critical thinking, and careful listening. A typical full game round plays in just 15-20 minutes, so everyone has a good shot at getting to be both a good guy and a bad guy by the end of the evening. 

Next Page: Conduct a séance to uncover a grisly murder, or confront hordes of zombies and necromancers as knights and wizards

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