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.
Wait…ANOTHER review of a game in the Horrified series? Yes, it’s true, and by now, we know our Horrified stuff around here—check out our reviews of the base game (Horrified: Universal Monsters), Horrified: American Monsters, and Horrified: Greek Monsters for the evidence, as well as an overview of how these games play if you are new to the series.
Horrified: World of Monsters is my first foray into this series, so I unleashed the newest set of monsters—the Yeti, the Sphinx, the zombie Jiangshi, and Cthulhu—on the best and most reliable gamers in my network, my two kids (ages 10 and 8).
Over the course of three plays, I got all four monsters to the table. In reading the rules from the last two games, nothing has really changed with Horrified: World of Monsters—players work together to defeat monsters before those monsters deal enough “terror” to advance the players past the threshold for defeat (deaths by the players, deaths by the villagers and legend non-playable characters, or the monster deck being exhausted when a player needs to draw a new card).
Everything in the game is dictated by running around the map to pick up items (here in one of three colors) that will be used both to advance a monster’s defeat condition, or to defend players and NPCs from their own demise. Like the previous games, the artwork on the cards is slick and feels like it was ripped out of a comic from the 1960s or 70s, and the board layout is easy to navigate with plenty of named locations used to move items, monsters or quests from one point to another.
The Horrified system is good and the kids enjoyed their plays a bit more than I did. That said, Horrified is a good time at the table with the family. Here are my thoughts on the monsters in this set.
The Yeti
The Yeti has kids? Who knew! The setup here is that players have to move three Yeti children on the map to a lair (lairs were introduced earlier in the series) that specifically names itself as the Yeti kid delivery location, the Yeti Cave.
“Dropping the kids off at home?” my 10-year-old joked during our first play with the Yeti. “This should be easy.”
But of course, it was never that easy, because there are various card effects that can move the lair if it has not been revealed, which usually led us to spend a lot more time than necessary to “guide” the Yeti kids home after the lair was located. Any player can guide or move the Yeti kids around, and the Yeti’s power is weird: no matter how far away one is from the Yeti, if it attacks and a player rolls the power icon, the player closest to the Yeti’s location (but not sharing the Yeti’s location) has to take a hit. This caused us a minor amount of pain in each game when someone had to burn an item to take it to the face!
(I don’t think of this as a problem, but I did find in each of my three plays that spending a player’s first few turns rounding up every item in sight is a requirement. I’m not sure that is always fun, but it is definitely always required because of the random nature of monster movement and attacks.)
My favorite part about the Yeti was the illustration of the kids. Yeti, the parent: spooky, scary, nasty teeth. The kids? Angelic. I don’t know why these kids want to go home to the parent. In real life, I’m calling Child Protective Services if this Yeti guy is OK murdering people the way he did in my playthroughs!
The Sphinx
I’m torn on the thinking behind the Sphinx. The main puzzle is a fun one: run to the location of the Sphinx, drop off items in its “puzzle grid” that build a math puzzle, and then bring six or more green item strength back to defeat it. But the idea that you have to share a space with the Sphinx to drop off the items, then ideally run away without constantly getting attacked, is a sizable challenge.
But its power is somewhat ridiculous. If the power icon is rolled during an attack (a one in six chance), players have to discard two items matching in item strength or the Terror level goes up by one. That will definitely end a solo game or two simply with a random die roll, because a lot of factors need to line up for a player to have items that match numbers all the time.
You also have to burn an action to move pieces in the riddle puzzle. When time is running out (and time seems to always be running out, so kudos to the mysterious and unnamed members of the Prospero Hall design team who came up with the main processes behind Horrified), I think the Sphinx might be the hardest boss in the box. It’s certainly the boss I plan for first, because the others are a little more plausible to approach from a tactical perspective. (For example, you might pick up the Yeti kids just by strolling the map to pick up all the item tokens you need to defend yourself.)
Lots to like about the Sphinx. Also, lots of reasons to leave it behind if you are playing the “standard” difficulty and are using three monsters instead of four.
Jiangshi
Jiangshi is the monster that got the shaft in this newest version of Horrified. Defeating it is somewhat easy, requiring as few as five items to build a “Coin Sword” before running after it and discarding purple items valued at nine or more strength. You don’t have to really plan around it, since you just have to find its lair, similar to the Yeti. (If both characters are in the current game, and there are three or more players, it feels like you are going to find the right lairs by the end of the first full round when all players have taken at least one turn, maybe their second at the latest).
Jiangshi also has a strange power: after damage has been dealt in its location, it moves to the location of the player taking the next turn. In a solo game, that means that a couple unlucky die rolls means that Jiangshi is probably going to kill off your character really, really soon if they have a large dice pool.
Jiangshi (a character I’m not familiar with, but the Chinese translation for the word is “zombie”, which feels right given the token’s mold) seems like a nice guy. But he feels like the only monster in this set that is included for the sake of needing a top-tier henchman, not a full-blown villain. If Jiangshi is the only monster left in the game with multiple players, you are definitely going to win.
Cthulhu
Come for the Horrified system, but stay for the Cthulhu.
Here’s all you need to know about Cthulhu: the setup steps for the Sphinx, Yeti and Jiangshi take up like six lines of text in the rulebook. Cthulhu has its own rules section, with an elaborate (for this game) setup that includes a fancy toy model, a separate card used as a board, a bunch of “Manacle” tokens, and an almost ridiculous defeat condition—all players need to have a set of three different colored items and be in the same location.
I think the game is challenging as it is, in part because you only get so much time with the monster card deck serving as a game clock. But Cthulhu is comedy, people. It has two sets of power rules—the first is to either advance the Terror tracker by one or to discard a Monster card, both of which speed up the game clock. The second set is borderline unstoppable.
It almost makes more sense to dedicate one player’s actions to defeating Cthulhu, because defeating it is so involved. For this and a few other reasons, I wouldn’t even use Cthulhu in a game until players are experienced with everything else in the box.
Using all four monsters to win with a low player count in Horrified: World of Monsters is a beefy challenge, made semi-ridiculous mainly because of Cthulhu. For that reason, using Cthulhu, Yeti and Jiangshi on the standard difficulty is plenty of game for me!!
A Keeper, Because I Only Need One
We’ve enjoyed Horrified: World of Monsters, and its best asset might be the variability around player count and difficulty included in the box.
Simply put, solo play on the game’s hardest difficulty (defeating four monsters) is Dark Souls-level agony. If someone told me they have done it, I would not believe them. In part, that’s because the Terror track starts at three (instead of zero) during a solo game, but the game still ends at seven terror regardless of player count. That’s crazy, because villagers are usually getting killed off a couple times at least during the game through random game effects.
On the other hand, playing with three players on standard difficulty is a very nice challenge that usually ends with the Terror track at maybe five or six and only a handful of cards left in the monster deck. Sometimes, you get hosed late and suffer back-to-back character kills and that costs the team the game. Oh well. The Horrified system is a fun puzzle and games only take about 45 minutes for my family now.
I can’t speak to the other games in the series, but the system has stayed consistent, so I’m sure I would enjoy them all. I just know I don’t need any more of them, even though the prospect of combining monsters from other sets is a fun idea. (All Horrified games are compatible with each other, and at least in the case of Horrified: World of Monsters, there’s a handy guide on the back of the manual for any edge cases between the games. And our marketing contact at Ravensburger may or may not have handed me a promo pack that adds an intriguing fifth monster to this set.)
The price point for Horrified games is very fair, so give this one a look if you are looking for a fun, thematic co-op that scales to families of almost all ages!
Horrified: World of Monsters details
- Designer: Michael Mulvihill, Peter Lee
- Artists: George Doutsiopoulos, Grim Moon Studios, Raph Lomotan, Studio HIVE, Tom Moore, Victor Maristane
- Publishers: Ravensburger
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 1 - 5
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 60 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Action Points, Cooperative Game, Dice Rolling, Pick-up and Deliver, Point to Point Movement, Solo / Solitaire Game, Variable Player Powers, Variable Set-up
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.45256 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Horrified: World of Monsters.
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