Horror Board Game Mechanics

I've recently had an idea for a horror-themed board game, and I'm looking to gather inspiration for game mechanics. I want the game to actually inspire...maybe not fear, but suspense, thrills, possibly even a few shivers. I've found some games with ideas I like, but may not necessarily use. One is the obvious Betrayal at House on the Hill, in which the players start by working together, then one player is semi-randomly determined to be the betrayer, and the game either ends with him/her winning or the rest of the players winning. The Resistance has something similar, where some players know from the beginning that they're traitors, and the others are constantly nervous because they don't know who to trust. Another game, of which I forget the name, was a roleplaying game in which the players were characters in a horror movie; the mechanic to determine if their actions succeeded was simply a game of jenga. Take a piece out and put it on top without knocking over the tower, and your action succeeds. Tip over the tower, and you die! From what I remember, it actually made players have physical symptoms of fear because of the anticipation of that simple game.

So what board games made you actually tense, or sweat, or get just a bit nervous while playing? And why?

The RPG you are thinking of is Dread.

A co op game like Pandemic does a good job of this as you can see the end coming and you know if certain cards get drawn an outbreak happens and it can spread and do all kinds of damage.

The hidden traitor games like Battlestar Galactica and Shadows over Camelot I think build suspense better then something like The Resistance because the Resistance just doesn't last that long.

Crothian said:

The RPG you are thinking of is Dread.

A co op game like Pandemic does a good job of this as you can see the end coming and you know if certain cards get drawn an outbreak happens and it can spread and do all kinds of damage.

The hidden traitor games like Battlestar Galactica and Shadows over Camelot I think build suspense better then something like The Resistance because the Resistance just doesn't last that long.

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Yes, that was it! And yeah, the plan is for this game to take a lot longer than a game of Resistance; Shadows over Camelot is actually a very close analogy to my idea, with horror themes instead of Arthurian legends. I haven't played Pandemic, but it reminds me of Forbidden Island, where you know that a bad card is coming up eventually, and every draw is nerve-wracking, especially after several safe ones. That would actually work very well for a portion of my idea.

The card draw for advancing bad stuff mechanics in Pandemic and Forbidden Island are very similar--they were designed by the same person.

Elder Sign is another cooperative game I have that's actually horror themed. I'm not sure I'd say that it actually inspires fear in its players, though.

I just got introduced to Pandemic and Eldritch Horror- Arkham Horror's little brother, in a way- in the last couple of months. Both good, fun games, and I'd eagerly play either one. But I think EH was a better game overall.

With Pandemic, it seemed as if once things got to a certain tipping point, the outcome was almost assured, and you were only playing it out to see the details.

EH, on the other hand, seemed a bit more of a roller coaster ride. We had real highs & lows, sometimes within seconds of each other. We got on a roll...then the wheels came off. As the saying goes, "it is always darkest just before the dawn"- and so it was. Just as things got really bad, we won. Luckily, we happened to have the right pieces in the right places at the right time.

Since you're looking for mechanics, two other games come to my mind, both are cooperative/solo player games:

- Death Angel: Set in the Warhammer 40k Universe, it's basically a simplified card-based variant of the Space Hulk boardgame. A squad of marines has to make their way though a wrecked spaceship swarming with genestealers (think : aliens - the movie). Mortality is very high in this game, so it's really a race against time, trying to survive with as many marines as you can to have a chance to achieve your objective ('guarded' by a lethal mechanism or boss encounter).

- Lord of the Rings (Living Card Game): In this card-based game each player builds a deck of cards resembling heroes, allies, and equipment trying to solve quests by defeating enemies, exploring locations and surviving treacheries that are revealed from an 'encounter deck'. While it's obviously set in a fantasy setting, the gameplay is often rather brutal. The inherent randomness of the encounter deck can at times be devastating, resulting in a quick loss, sometimes apparently from out of nowhere (a single, deadly treachery), sometimes very apparent because of a flood of enemies. In contrast to the above this game often makes me quite angry because of an overabundance of imho 'unfair' effects. (Well, the different scenarios have a difficulty rating, so you kind of know in advance whether you'll get a pounding. For the harder scenarios you're typically forced to built a custom deck to beat the quest. Personally, I thought that was a PITA, since I ended up spending more time tuning my deck than actually playing, but if you enjoy that kind of thing...)

Can you tell me about the developer please.