Fall isn’t just for pumpkin spice lattes. As the shadows get longer and the autumn air bites at our skin, it’s the perfect time for us to embrace fear. Board games are quickly becoming a wonderful medium for spooky tales, turning the tabletop into a modern day campfire for telling ghost stories.

Beyond Monopoly, Life, Battleship and their ilk, there exists a world of complex board games built on themes both mundane and fantastical. You can travel to space, wage war with elves and orcs or simply live the agrarian life.

With Halloween just around the corner, we’ve selected a few horror-filled tabletop adventures for you and your friends (regardless of how familiar they are with the world of boutique board games).

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Image: PETER CARLSON/MASHABLE

Players: 3 to 6 (best with 5 or 6)

Playtime: 1 hour

MSRP: $50

Many games have tried to capture the feel of B-movie horror, but few get it right. Betrayal at House on the Hill knocks it out of the park.

Players choose their character, including the stereotypical jock, buxom cheerleader, precocious little girl, and wizened priest. As more rooms in the creepy old mansion are revealed, players collect useful items, encounter melodramatic scares and progress towards an endgame that always involves a sinister twist.

One or more members of your team will turn against the others, falling victim to the darkness that seeps from the mansion walls. We’ve ventured into a seemingly endless underground lake, burned Frankenstein’s monster and fought for our lives against our own shadows. Each side keeps their win conditions secret, so you’ll only know how to thwart your enemy by watching their moves and pursuing your own goals.

If you already have and love Betrayal at House on the Hill, you’ll be delighted to know that the game’s first ever expansion has finally been released after 12 years on the market. Widow’s Walk adds 20 new rooms and 50 new haunts, including scenarios written by Cards Against Humanity’s Max Temkin, Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins and Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward.

Arkham Horror

Image: PETER CARLSON/MASHABLE



Players: 1 to 8 (best with 4)

Playtime: 2 to 4 hours

MSRP: $60

Fantasy Flight Games has built a significant part of its business around the written works of horror author H.P. Lovecraft. The first of the publisher’s games based on the Cthulhu mythos pits players against unspeakable horrors that threaten both body and mind.

Originally published in 1987 by Chaosium (and later updated and republished by Fantasy Flight in 2005), Arkham Horror tasks a team of 1920s investigators with protecting the town of Arkham (and the entire world) by closing gates to other worlds, thus thwarting the rise of a “great old one.”

These Lovecraftian dark deities bring doom with them, and should they rise, the players will most likely perish. Cthulhu isn’t one to mess around, and he and his friends all have different impact on the town and the monsters that spawn every round.

If you’ve got a group of players looking for a rich, thematic experience and you’ve got the three or four hours to play, Arkham Horror is a rewarding experience. We strongly recommend investing in the companion app to manage many of the card decks and keep your table a bit neater. And, if you fall in love with the end of the world, there are a number of expansions that add more monsters, investigators and locations.

Elder Sign

Image: Peter Carlson/Mashable

Players: 1 to 8 (best with 4)

Playtime: 1.5 hours

MSRP: $35

Let’s say you like the idea of Arkham Horror, but don’t think you can convince your friends to commit three or four hours to a board game. Don’t worry, you’ll get them there eventually. Until then, you might give another Arkham Horror Files game a try.

Elder Sign lands our eager investigators in hot water once more. This time, the setting is a museum with cursed artifacts that threaten to pierce the barrier between our world and the realms of world-ending monsters. The gist is the same, but this entry in the franchise is largely driven by dice.

Players are on the hunt for the eponymous elder signs to seal away the ancient evil for good. However, the clock is ticking. Elder Sign is far more approachable than Arkham Horror, and takes significantly less time to play. Just remind your friends that in cooperative games, sometimes bad luck means the end of the world.

Like Arkham Horror, there are a number of expansions for Elder Sign that add new features and great old ones. If you want to get an idea for how it plays, there’s a digital version available for PC, Mac, iOS and Android called Elder Sign Omens.

Last Night on Earth

Image: Peter Carlson/Mashable

Players: 2 to 6 (best with 5)

Playtime: 1.5 hours

MSRP: $60

It’s not Halloween without the undead. Last Night on Earth gives one player control of a zombie horde to torment the living. Survivors attempt to survive the night, gather gasoline for a car or complete a holy ritual to send the dead back to their graves.

Last Night on Earth is full of B-movie kitsch, though in a different way than Betrayal at House on the Hill. The cards feature costumed actors playing the parts of the stereotypical survivors. A number of the components have amusing names like “Get Back You Devils” with flavor quotes that seems ripped from the goofiest scripts across horror movie history.

The modular board and varied scenarios keep things fresh for a number of plays. Expansions add new survivors, zombies, cards and tiles to give the game more juice if it starts to wear thin. Of all the zombie games out there, we keep coming back to Last Night on Earth.

King of Tokyo / King of New York

Image: Peter Carlson/Mashable

Players: 2 to 6 (best with 4 or 5)

Playtime: 30 minutes

MSRP: $40

It’s important to have one game in your library that you can pull out when the kids are in the Halloween spirit. King of Tokyo and its sequel King of New York fit the bill.

For adults, Halloween is about jump scares and gory frights. For kids, though, it’s about adorable looking stompy monsters, plodding giant robots and cyber bunnies. This pair of games, developed by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, is easy for young kids to grasp (though there is some reading parents might need to assist with).

Players pick their monsters, and fight for control of Tokyo or New York. The goal is to knock your opponents out by dealing damage or be the first to score 20 victory points. Along the way, you’ll purchase cards that give one time boosts or permanent advantages.

Everything is handled with dice rolls, giving the game a bit of a Yahtzee! feel. We strongly recommend the Power Up! expansion that adds unique evolution cards for each of the monsters. The vanilla version only distinguishes them by aesthetic instead of mechanic.

And, given that this is a Halloween list, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the holiday-themed expansion. It adds two new monsters, evolution cards and dice clad in the orange and black of the season.