Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft is a cooperative adventure game where you play the role of a D&D hero defending the gothic land of Barovia from monsters including Strahd, Baba Lysaga, Carionette and the Gulthias Tree.

Working together, move around the map, collect items, use unique character abilities, and meet each monster’s unique defeat conditions before terror overwhelms the land.

You can choose 2 to 4 monsters to play against depending on how heroic you’re feeling. Each monster has a different challenge to be completed to defeat it, and all are varying difficulties, so there’s immediately a whole heap of replayability here, even before you start to mix and match with monsters from other Horrified games.

After every turn, you’ll draw a monster card which will add new items to the map and trigger an event which may mean adding a villager to the board. Villagers need to be guided to their destination before a monster reaches and attacks them. Get them to their destination and gain a perk card which can be used at any time.

It’s not mandatory to save all villagers to win the game, but if a monster makes a successful attack on a villager, they have no defence, die immediately and the terror level increases one step. Once terror reaches the max level, you lose the game so while you do want to be focussing on defeating the monsters, you also need to keep an eye on those villagers!

Another big reason to save a few villagers is that when you do, you get to draw a perk card – these are going to be vital for your game and provide instant benefits that can be used at any time and often used for any hero, regardless of who the perk card belongs to.

Monster cards also move certain monsters around the map. If they reach a space with a hero or villager, roll the attack dice. You can defend against attacks by discarding items, but if a villager is hit they immediately die and your terror increases.

You can also die if you have no items or choose not to discard them. You will keep all items and perk cards and respawn in a certain location, so there may be times when this is preferable to losing items – providing you’re low enough on the terror track!

Once you’ve defeated a monster, remove them from the map and lower your terror by one. Defeat all monsters before the monster deck runs out or your terror reaches max to win the game.

A solo game plays exactly the same, except your terror rating starts at 3…because you’re not at enough of a disadvantage. This makes the game far more challenging as a solo experience. Not only is there just the one hero to collect items, save villagers and defeat monsters, but you’re being targeted from all angles and effectively have fewer lives! That said, I really REALLY enjoyed this as a solo game, go figure!

Verdict

This was my first dalliance into the Horrified world. After a couple of 2p games I knew I loved it, but the solo experience where you can drive your own story is something else.

The ability to choose a hero and customise mosters for a unique experience, goals and difficulty each game is brilliant, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on other Horrified games so that I can do the ol’ mix n match!

I’m not familiar with the world of D&D or Ravenloft but found myself completely immersed thanks to the highly thematic art, components and gameplay. I’m sure D&D fans do get slightly more from the experience through knowing the lore of Ravenloft, but I don’t feel like I missed out on anything by never having played D&D myself.

A note of caution, the game outcome relies on luck and dice roles as much as strategy. For the most part I did still feel relatively in control, but if the dice aren’t on your side, or a villager is placed in a location next to a monster and you’re on the other side of the board, there’s little you can do to mitigate that.

I really enjoyed this as a solo experience – far more than I expected given I generally steer clear of games both with a high luck element and conflict, but this is just another example of a game reminding me to stay open-minded about the mechanics and game genres I believe I do or don’t enjoy!

Horrified D&D Ravenloft was kindly gifted to me by the publisher for review purposes, but all thoughts are my own.