The city of Waterdeep just can’t catch a break. Despite the various adventurers that call it home and stop to rest at the Yawning Portal Inn, the city and its citizenry find themselves under assault by dangerous and powerful monsters, leaving everyone Horrified.
The latest rendition of Ravensburger’s popular cooperative series, Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons, crosses over with Wizards of the Coast’s legendary tabletop RPG. The result is a game that my friends and I thoroughly enjoyed and were eager to play again, despite a few stumbling blocks.
Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons
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The original Horrified was released back in 2019, and this new Dungeons & Dragons edition is the series’ sixth iteration. The basic premise each game shares is that up to five players work together to vanquish a selection of monsters by racing around the map, collecting resources, escorting civilians to safety, and beating back the monsters.
To win, each monster has to be dealt with. But players will lose if the monster deck is depleted or if the terror track ever hits seven (it’s raised whenever a citizen is killed, hero is knocked out, or an effect triggers it). The extra fun part is taking out the monsters. How you deal with each monster is unique, with each one having its own sort of mini-game associated with it that players have to work through before they are gone for good.
Being Dungeons & Dragons themed, this version of Horrified features some of the most recognizable creatures from its pantheon, including the Displacer Beast, a Mimic, the Beholder, and of course, a big red dragon. As a longtime fan and player of D&D, I was instantly intrigued by the box art and the board – but it was the monsters and how they operate that really drew my friends and me in. The developers really managed to work in how these creatures behave according to D&D lore when designing their challenges.
The Red Dragon, for instance, has a treasure you have to claim before you can vanquish it upon its treasure horde. The Mimic, for its part, is hidden and off the board until the party manages to finally reveal it. My favorite, by far, was the Beholder, which requires you to take out its 10 eye tendrils first, before going after its large central eye, each with a unique and powerful effect they could hit you with, dictated by a die roll. And yes, of course, there are dice rolls here; you can’t have Dungeons & Dragons without some sort of dice-rolling goodness involved, and it doesn’t stop with just eye lasers either.
Players assume the roles of staple D&D classes, including the Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Bard, or Wizard. For the most part, each character plays identically, with the exception of their special actions, which require you to roll a 20-sided die (one is included with the game in case you don’t have a small dice horde like yours truly).
Taking your special action can result in one of five possible outcomes, with the various classes behaving differently. For instance, bards can allure other players and citizens towards themselves. The fighter can rush to the nearest monster to do battle, and the cleric helps during monster attacks by letting you re-roll dice. We had some especially funny moments where our resident Wizard teleported the Beholder monster straight to the spot where our cleric just so happened to be – twice in a row. We had a good laugh about that (at least most of us), but that’s just how it goes when you’re rolling d20s.
Admittedly, we did homebrew and tweak the cleric a bit, however, allowing her to “stock” her special actions (basically using actions on her turn to hold rolls for actions), allowing her to use her beneficial skills during any monster phase up until her next turn. This lets the character feel more cleric-y, helping her teammates, as opposed to the as-written rules, which only let her use those skills on her turn’s monster phase.
Horrified, in general, isn’t an overly complex board game. In my testing, first-time players were usually able to grasp the flow of the game within a turn or two. Taking actions is straightforward, and the monster cards that dictate how many new items are spawned, any events that take place, citizens that appear, and what monsters activate, are equally so.
Some of the wording on how monsters behave caused some confusion and debate, such as whether the mimic monster moved the number of spaces indicacted on the monster card’s movement space, or just a single space when it is activated. But overall, we figured it out (whether our decision was correct or not) and it worked out for us.
Unique to this version of Horrified is the ability to reduce the terror track, which gives players a hand, pushing them further back from defeat. This is done whenever a monster is defeated, and I found it to be a great addition to use – especially when first introducing new players to the game, as Horrified games can be a bit challenging and require strategy to win. I also appreciate that it is easy enough not to use, so Horrified veterans can simply ignore this feature if they find it lessens the challenge too much.
One aspect that I am a bit disappointed by with Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons is its small pool of monsters you can pick from. With “easy” games asking players to pick from two monsters and the standard challenge requiring three, it means you’ll be replaying these monsters frequently.
Other versions featured six or seven monsters, with only the Cthulu-themed Horrified offering just four monsters. And with so many other classic D&D monsters left on the table, it’s a shame we couldn’t have gotten a couple more in the box. Where are my Gelatinous Cubes and Owlbears, or heck, throw something wild like Vecna, the terrifying Lich, into the mix. I can only hope that Ravensburger adds more monsters or classes with future expansions.
