Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
When push came to shove, theme saved the day.
Our friends at Goliath—the new owners of the Funko Games catalog—reached out to our team and gave us the chance to cover some of Funko’s recent output. I jumped at the chance to grab Five Nights at Freddy’s: Night of Frights! Game (yes, that is the title) because my son is a hardcore “FNAF” fan.
FNAF books line his personal shelves. Despite the fact that he is only seven years old, he asked to put a spooky-looking FNAF poster in his closet so that when he gets up in the morning, he is greeted by the characters. He has played a couple FNAF video games. Loads of FNAF stickers live inside his school notebook. And a couple times a week, he asks if he is old enough yet to watch last year’s FNAF movie (no).
So, when Five Nights at Freddy’s: Night of Frights! Game (FNAF: NoFG) showed up at my house, I thought my boy was going to rip ME open before ripping open the game box. Anything in his way was in trouble!
We got the game to the table the day it arrived, as well as a couple more times over the following weekend. For a non-fan (me), FNAF: NoFG has a few design choices that raised eyebrows here at the Bell compound. But, no matter—it has FNAF characters, a cardboard pizza pictured on the back on the small game board, and four character miniatures representing the game’s four stars: Freddy, Roxy, Bonnie and Chica (plus Mr. Cupcake, of course). My son was in hog heaven, no matter what his parents and 10-year-old sibling thought about the game.
Yes, You Are Grabbing Chits Out of a Popcorn Bag to Win
FNAF: NoFG is a 2-4 player action selection game that usually wraps up in about 20-25 minutes. Sometimes, games can go quicker because of the EXTREMELY luck-driven end-game condition: whoever draws the guard token from a bag mixed full of the guard token and Miss tokens wins.
Unlike some of the FNAF video games, this board game puts you in the shoes of one of the villains. Gameplay is simple: walk around the rooms of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza (the pizza shop where all the game world action takes place in the movie, games, etc.) to collect items that will be traded in to boost a character’s value on the “Scare Tracker.” Any time you boost your Scare value by even a single point, you will flip your character token on this track to the scary side, meaning you are now eligible to scare the security guard.
When a character is standing inside to one of the rooms adjacent to the security booth—and you are not in the same room as the security camera, signifying that the guard is watching certain rooms—that character can attempt to capture the guard by drawing from the Miss/guard token bag up to their scare value, a number between 1-10. Draw the guard token and the game is over. Miss, and all miss tokens are added back to the bag for future capture actions.
To begin the game, odds are pretty small that you’ll draw that guard token—a 5% likelihood. But, boost your way to the top of the Scare Tracker and you’ll later have at least a 50% chance to do it. Event cards up the ante also, by adding a second guard or permanently removing some of the Miss tokens. In my experience, it isn’t even worth wasting an action on trying to capture until you have a 25% chance of making magic happen.
Each character has a minor power, like Chica’s ability to use Mr. Cupcake and get a one cake item discount when redeeming items for a scare boost. Mostly, the game comes down to a rote exercise of walking around the building, picking up stuff, then doing the equivalent of rolling a die (by blind grabbing tokens from a bag) to see if you win the game.
But For a Superfan…
“Son, you are in the room next to the guard and you can try to capture him now. Don’t you want to try and win the game?”
“No, I’m OK…I just like playing.”
During our first couple games of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Night of Frights! Game, my son just wanted to keep collecting stuff, walking around, and occasionally playing a card that let him steal an item from another player. He didn’t care that this circular exercise wasn’t interesting to the adults…he just wanted to pick up more pizza tokens.
Throughout the game, he loved talking about how much the minis look like the pictures in some of his books. He adores the game box, which is shaped, colored, and opens just like an actual pizza box. He wanted the option to play the game as the security guard and have the animatronic monsters come after him. At one point, I wasn’t sure he even knew other people were sitting at the table with him, he was so excited to play a game about his favorite IP.
FNAF: NoFG isn’t great, mechanically. The end condition is ridiculous—theoretically, a player could win with a lucky draw on the second or third turn of the game—and the action-token turn structure is a better fit for a much younger child, even if this theme wouldn’t be ideal for a 4- or 5-year-old. (In our second two-player run, I won on the fourth turn of the game. It was over so fast we just played it again!)
Even after the first play, I knew this was not destined for the glory our family has reserved for games like The Quest Kids, Wandering Towers, Freelancers: A Crossroads Game, Flotsam Float, and the impregnable, bulletproof classic Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza.
But for one member of the house, this might be the greatest game ever made. If you’ve got a child who loves the FNAF world, this game is worth a look. Otherwise, stick with the video games and the movie!
Five Nights at Freddy's: Night of Frights! Game details
- Designer: Donovan Eberling
- Artists: Migy Blanco
- Publishers: Funko Games
- Release Date: 2022
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Action Points, Take That, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.47105 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.0.
- More articles about Five Nights at Freddy's: Night of Frights! Game.
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