The Best Horror Board Games & RPGs

Written by Tim Clare

It’s one thing to watch a slasher movie from the comfort of your sofa, screaming at the protagonist to get out of that room, it’s quite another to be yelling those same warnings to your best friend across the table, as they delve deeper into the eerie mansion. If you’re looking to feel hunted, paranoid, and only possibly alive at the end of it all, here are our recommendations for eight pulse-raisingly, chemise-soilingly good survival horror games across a range of systems and settings, from deck builders to tabletop roleplaying.

Not Alone

Not Alone is a weird, paranoid many-against-one survival horror game where most of you are space explorers who have crash-landed on a strange new planet, Artemia, while one plays the Creature, hunting the players in an attempt to wear down their resistance until they willingly merge with the planetary hivemind forever. The card-based, simultaneous action system is simple and brilliant, powers and equipment add variety without feeling stupid or unfair, and the dramatic tension of trying to anticipate the Creature’s next move as the rescue ship edges ever-closer is superbly poised. It’s quick and scales well, though it works best at the upper end of its 2-7 player count.

Buy Not Alone on Amazon

Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game

If you’ve played Dominion, Ascension or Star Realms you know the drill – start with a little deck of not-terribly-powerful cards, use those cards to damage enemies and buy new, better cards, shuffle your discard pile and repeat. What Legendary Encounters does so well is combine classic moments and characters from the first four Alien movies with a genuinely excellent traitor mechanic, where one of you might be working for megacorp Weyland-Yutani and actively out to get the rest of the party killed. You can even get implanted with a facehugger mid-game and come back as a xenomorph, playing against your former teammates with your own special deck. It’s a faff to set up, but if you’re at all fond of the movies and deck builders, it delivers a remarkable, stressful, cinematic experience like no other.

Nemesis

This semi-co-operative SF survival horror game is Alien with the serial numbers filed off, a story of trying to escape a ship while creatures stalk you, and maybe pursuing your own private agendas along the way. The hidden objective twist familiar to players of Dead of Winter generates some lovely paranoia as your supposed allies start acting in apparently irrational, unhelpful ways. Should you trust them? Do they secretly want you dead? It’s not as if you haven’t got plenty to worry about already, with aliens that react to sound and grow stronger the longer you take. While clearly inspired by the Alien franchise, freed from established IP or universe canon, Nemesis has the freedom to do whatever it wants, something it has exploited in its various expansions. It’s very cinematic, tense, sometimes hopeless, occasionally glorious – the pinnacle of the whole maybe-one-of-us-is-a-traitor subgenre.

Buy Nemesis on Amazon

Fury of Dracula

This many-versus-one game of hide-and-seek across Europe pits a team of vampire hunters against the notorious Count Dracula as he travels from Rome to, uh… oh, he’s just turned up in Swansea, apparently? Creepy! What’s notable is how who’s doing the surviving shifts over the arc of the game. Early on, if Mina Harker or Van Helsing get caught alone by Dracula, they’re in for a pasting. Your desire to track him down is tempered by the consequences of actually finding him. As the game progresses, however, the vampire hunters acquire weapons and items that turn the tables, so by the end it’s Dracula who is doubling back over the French border, gritting his fangs and hoping against hope that he slips through the hunters’ net in Fury of Dracula.

Buy Fury of Dracula on Amazon

Escape: The Curse of the Temple

Escape is the classic people either forget exists or haven’t yet had the joy of playing. It’s a manic, intense real time co-op where you and your friends scramble to gather magic stones and escape a collapsing temple. You all simultaneously roll dice, revealing rooms from a pile of cardboard tiles, blundering into traps and yelling at your friends to come and unlock your dice. It comes with its own ten-minute soundtrack which serves as your timer – yep, that’s the maximum game length. Ten minutes! It’s probably the least intrinsically spooky of the games on this list – the accent is more on survival than horror – but it packs more panic and dramatic peril into a quarter of an hour than many games manage in hours.

Buy Escape Curse of the Temple on Amazon

Sub Terra

Much like Escape, this is a game of creeping through caverns, slowly revealing a modular labyrinth via a deck of tiles, but where the former game is hectic and silly, Sub Terra is a far darker, creeping affair – a freezing, wet digit running down your spine rather as opposed to a 5 a.m. air horn. You’re playing a group of amateur cavers, each with their own special abilities, hunting for a route to the surface, dodging cave-ins, pockets of gas, and – as you soon discover – vicious, unnatural creatures. The sense of being on a timer as your air runs out, and the tension that creates between checking for danger and rushing headlong into the unknown makes for a gnarly ride where, quite often, not everyone will make it out alive.

Deranged

A semi co-op after the tradition of Mansions of Madness and Betrayal at House on the Hill, Deranged sees the players working to complete group missions and hidden personal objectives while zombies, ghouls and werewolves rampage across a map. Fail to fulfil the conditions of your secret side quest and the curses your character is saddled with blossom into full-blown derangement, mutating you into a beast come nightfall and turning you against your former allies. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to survival horror, but the minis look neat, the rules aren’t overly complicated and it makes for a fun evening if you’re after some schlocky popcorn thrills.

10 Candles

As far as roleplaying survival horror goes, 10 Candles offers one of the best one-shot experiences going, but be warned – no one – none of the players at least – will be surviving. It’s open information, right from the start, that none of the players are getting out of this alive. A disaster has engulfed the world, shutting down the power grid and most communication technology, but the nature of quite what lurks in the shadows in decided, in scraps, by the players. 10 Candles uses an interesting system where, yes, there’s a GM, but players co-create and hijack the narration. Their goal isn’t to survive – although the characters they’re playing may very well want to do that, right until the moment it becomes clear they’re cooked – but to wrest some personal meaning out of this last doomed struggle. The titular candles sit on the table, forming part of the game’s mechanics – you might burn an index card that features some aspect of your character, and a candle’s getting snuffed accidentally can bring a scene to a sudden, bleak conclusion. An atmospheric, somehow not wholly bleak game, to be played in an otherwise empty house, with the lights low.

A sneak peek – this article is from Tabletop Gaming magazine, our monthly publication on all fun things gaming – board games, card games, miniatures and more. If you enjoyed this article you should consider picking up a subscription to get all the best news, reviews, interviews and features directly to your door. 

Sometimes we may include links to online retailers, from which we might receive a commission if you make a purchase. Affiliate links do not influence editorial coverage and will only be used when covering relevant products