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Horrified is for 1-5 players, with a playing time of 45-60 minutes. You represent a hero in the town, and to win you must defeat 2-4 monsters based on the difficulty level of the game. To set up, you choose the monsters or draw them at random, place them on the board in their designated starting locations, choose a hero character for each player and place them on their designated starting locations, then get going.
On a turn, you take 3-5 actions depending on your character — moving on the board, picking up items, sharing items with one another, escorting clueless villagers to safety so the monsters don't kill them, taking steps to defeat each monster, and using your special ability — then you draw a card from the monster deck. Each such card directs you to place 0-3 items on the game board, has a special event — typically a monster attack or the arrival of a villager at one of the town buildings — then certain monsters move toward the humans on the board and attack them if possible.
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The game includes six monster cards (with Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein being paired on one card, and yes, we all know that's not the monster's name), and each monster has unique guidelines for how to defeat it: With the Wolfman, for example, you need to discard six blue items in the appropriate values at the laboratory, then take the lycanthropy cure to the Wolfman's space where you'll discard a bunch of red items to defeat him. With Frank. and B. of F., you need to discard blue items to the former and yellow items to the latter to humanize them, and each time you do so, you can move those monsters on the board — which you want to do as the only thing these two want to do is meet, at which time they cause terror in the town.
You also want to move them (and move away from other monsters) because if you're in a monster's space when it attacks, you need to discard an item to prevent damage or else head to the hospital — but each trip to the hospital increases the terror level, and if that level hits 7, you lose the game. You also lose if you run through the monster deck, so you have only 31 turns in which to get everything done.
Horrified replicates the classic style of the Universal monster movies, starting with what you see when you open the box. As for the gameplay, you need to figure out how to use all the items in play to work toward eliminating the monsters, while also combining the hero abilities to break the rules in your favor.
I've played four times on a review copy from Ravensburger, with 1-3 players in those games and 2-3 monsters trying to take us out. We've won all four games, with only the solitaire game providing a significant challenge, but we've also had a number of lucky breaks, with a valuable red item dropping into my hands in one game that let us bypass the multi-turn plan we had to win quickly and with several multi-die rolls turning up all blanks, which let us continue with our plans instead of taking detours to the hospital or dumping needed items.
I can see the difficulty of Horrified escalating with four or five players, similar to how Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — designed by Forrest-Pruzan Creative, the precursor of Prospero Hall — works, with players having the same number of positive actions on their own turns, while facing an increasing number of negative effects for each person added to the game. Still need to discover whether that's true in future plays, which won't happen until after Gen Con 2019, so for now I can only offer these thoughts on four games with a lower player count:
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