Opening Credits

With spooky season just around the corner, the quest to find seasonally appropriate games moves to the forefront of my gaming sessions. Sure, you have the classics like Fury of Dracula, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and any flavor of Horrified, but I’ve always felt like I haven’t found that quintessential Halloween game that hits the table year after year.

That is…until now with Spooktacular.

Level 99 Games titles were never really on my radar in the past, with their bread and butter being anime-themed card games like Millennium Blades, BattleCON, and Pixel Tactics. But when I demoed Spooktacular at Gen Con 2025, my head immediately turned, and I felt a tad guilty for overlooking the fine folks there.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to track down a review copy, which proved difficult considering how quickly each printing sold out thanks to the unexpected success of what I feel will become a cult classic for years to come.

However, it wasn’t all frights, as I managed to snag a copy at this year’s Gen Con, and I absolutely could not wait to get all that movie monster glory to the table.

Monster Mayhem

Spooktacular is a highly asymmetric…

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It's rare that something so dangerous can occur, such as reviewing a game in which you had no great interest and then discovering that there's a sequel. When I gave This Game Is Killer a review, I left with a mixture of emotions. Although Alien on Board had some interesting concepts, the confusing rules and the inconsistent gameplay prevented me from really enjoying it. The series is now returning with This Game Is Killer: Frozen Horror, switching from the confining hallways in a spaceship to a similarly pleasant setting: the frozen wasteland of Antarctica.

Or, to be even more specific, The Thing (or the sequel) for the movie crowd, or Who Goes There? for the book people. The foundations haven't changed much. You still need to survive, and the well-being of your neighboring players is not your concern. Instead of an Alien randomly attacking locations on the ship, a single player becomes the “horror” for the round, and whoever shares their location dies.

The Thing, Literally 

No, this is not a social deduction game. While your identity is kept secret, it is revealed at the end of the round. From there, the identity cards are shuffled and dealt out again. Apparently, in this universe, the “thing” temporarily…

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If you asked me many moons ago whether the horror genre would be a good fit for a party game, my answer would have been a straight-up no. Sure, Murdery Mystery party games exist, but horror is on another level. Horror has a body count, and it ain’t no lead pipe in the library nonsense here. The corpses, more often than not, don't remain particularly intact.

Yet three years ago, I did take a look at the Scream board game by the now-defunct Funko Games. It was a surprisingly fun game that somehow made a real-time set-collecting card game with an app work. Not exactly the best game I'd ever played, but it was different, and more importantly, it was good enough to hit the table quite a few times at my local game meetups.

So when I heard about This Game is Killer (great name!), which could handle up to 10 players, lasted around 15 minutes, and used the Aliens franchise as its setting, curiosity got the better of me. And since I'm no cat, I wasn't too worried about where that curiosity might lead.

Wake From Cryosleep

The premise of the game is pretty simple: there is an alien on board causing problems, as aliens tend to do,…

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When I first got into hobby gaming, Sushi Go was a hot new release, and it became a quick favorite. In the subsequent decade and change, I and millions of others have spent hours planning the perfect sushi plate. The game for which Philip Walker-Harding will be remembered is an easy game to love, especially for individuals to whom the frontiers of modern gaming are all but unknown. Sushi Go is just hooky enough to get people in, but simple enough that they can chat, smack-talk, and perform. Though I and many other hobbyists feel that we have moved beyond that game, it remains a dominant commercial force for a reason.

Be honest with me, my fellow hobbyists; don’t you miss it? Don’t you find yourself wishing you could get that same early buzz back, to revisit the times when something as simple as Sushi Go could set your brain alight? I do. I loved loving Sushi Go. I loved having that quick and reliable source of dopamine.

Personal Demons, from designer Judson Cowan of Deep Regrets fame, won’t quite take you back to those days, but it’ll get you close. The frictionless drafting of Sushi Go and its numerous imitators has been swapped out for something a little grittier, something gnarlier. Or maybe that’s just the illustrations?

…

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Welcome Demons is the latest game from designer Daniel Newman, who has a wide variety of titles under his belt. Some of you may also be familiar with his publishing company, New Mill Industries (NMI), which specializes in small and limited print runs of unusual card games. In the last couple of years, he and NMI have focused almost exclusively on shedding and trick-taking games. It is in that genre that he has created his two best-known designs, Gachapon Trick and the exquisite Mori.

I always think of NMI releases—and, by extension, Newman’s more recent designs—as equal parts game and formal experiment. The games don’t always work, but you’re unlikely to forget them. They’re always trying something. NMI’s catalogue of li’l weirdos runs deep, and with the release of Welcome Demons, it grows deeper still.

Oni Oni Oxen Free

Japanese mythology is full of stories concerning oni, these hulking demons that often live in caves and like to terrorize unfortunate people. You know ‘em. If I asked you to picture a typical Japanese demon, the picture that’d most likely pop in your mind is an oni. Most of the time, they’re evil. But the onsen town of Noboribetsu has…

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Haunted Mouse is a hard game to write about, because it falls perfectly into the gap between the good, about which there is much to say, and the bad, about which there is often even more to say. Jonathan Cox’s shedding game, a reimplementation of his own Spring Cleaning, is a perfectly alright time at the table. People talk about their days, the weather, the latest gossip. The game goes on quietly around this, undemanding and unobtrusive.

The goal of the game is to empty your hand by playing sets of increasing size and strength. Every trick-taking and shedding game has its gimmick(s), and Haunted Mouse is no exception. It joins the rapidly expanding field of shedding games in which you cannot rearrange the cards in your hand, and are forced to make sets out of adjacent cards. This has been used to marvelous effect in Scout, Jungo, and dnup, and works just fine in Haunted Mouse.

A common mechanic between these games, though it works differently in each, is the ability to add cards to your hand, putting them anywhere you want. In Haunted Mouse, this idea is combined with allowing players to shed troublesome singletons from their hands to make…

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