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.
My kids and I really enjoyed Horrified: World of Monsters last fall, and any game that is a co-op game where players defeat monsters is a winner at this house. When our partners at Ravensburger reached out to see if we’d be interested in covering the new entry in the series, Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons, my 11-year-old put down their Dungeon Master’s Guide (the companion to the Player’s Handbook 5E, obviously) and screamed “DADDY, you need to review that game!”
We won’t be doing a full rules overview here. For more on the Horrified system—originally designed by the team at Prospero Hall, led by Peter Lee, with design and development in the Dungeons & Dragons edition provided by Mike Mulvihill—please check out our previous content on the 2019 original, 2021’s Horrified: American Monsters, 2023’s Horrified: Greek Monsters, and last year’s Horrified: World of Monsters.
A Swing and a Critical Miss!
After I did a quick solo play of Horrified: D&D to relearn the game’s systems, my family took the fight to the streets of Waterdeep and Undermountain in a three-player game the next day.
My 11-year-old selected the Bard. My eight-year-old went with the Fighter, and I picked the Rogue. (The Rogue had a sneaky, old-guy-in-a-svelte-outfit look to him, complete with a one-eyed owl/cat-looking thing on his shoulder. Sold.) In this version of the game, each character can take four actions per turn, a change from my experience in previous Horrified games…it’s just kind of obvious to me that more actions is better, in a game that is timed to the Monster deck, so I’m glad I didn’t have to watch children fight over the character that got the most actions in this game!
For our setup, we decided to use three of the game’s four monsters: Mimic, the treasure chest that happens to eat people from time to time (gosh, we loved the use of the Mimic monster in the Dungeons & Dragons film from a couple years ago), Displacer Beast, and Beholder. The rules for each are very straightforward, so we were able to get rolling quickly.
Horrified: D&D has the familiar beats that I enjoy about the system. Gather as many items as you can, burn some of those to defeat bosses, and occasionally save citizens that appear on the map to escort them to various locations to earn the bonus of a Perk card, which can be used to help anyone in the party during their turn. My 11-year-old likes to fight a monster from time to time, but is always more concerned with the safety of the hapless citizens, some of whom seem to spawn right into an instant death a few times in each game.
My eight-year-old was fired up to be the Fighter. In a nod to the D&D system, a D20 is included in Horrified: D&D, and is used from time to time to deal with monster challenges but also to use each character’s special ability. In this first multiplayer game, we didn’t do a great job of using the special abilities, because we began by playing Horrified the way we’ve seen work well—run around to grab a bunch of items, then run right up to the closest baddie to start “advancing” their defeat conditions.
But the special powers are really cool here, assuming you roll well. We tried to incorporate each character’s powers where we could. The Rogue can share items with other players from anywhere on the map, as well as other item-specific powers. The Fighter can help players during the Monster phase, or potentially skip that phase entirely. My 11-year-old had the Bard, so they were excited to be able to move citizens outside of the normal Guide powers.
The game had the tension we like about the system. A couple citizens got spawned, then immediately murdered, early on. The Fighter went into Undermountain to grab a number of items, then found himself on a space with both the Beholder and the Displacer Beast on a turn where both monsters activated, and the Beholder had a Frenzy token, so he was going to be attacked by the Beholder twice then the Displacer Beast. For sure, the Fighter was a goner, but we decided to roll the dice anyway. (He didn’t have the items to survive even a single hit, so the odds weren’t looking great.)
The first Beholder activation resulted in a roll of two attack dice. The results were a POW (one attack of its special Eyestalk skill) and a miss. We had to roll the D20 to resolve the POW.
My eight-year-old rolled a 1…a critical miss! His Fighter had staved off death, but he had two more rolls to go.
Second Beholder activation…same attack die results, of a miss and a POW. My boy was up again, and somehow, my son rolled another 1. Back-to-back critical misses! The three of us made so much noise that my wife came out of her office, asking if everything was alright.
“We just rolled back-to-back critical misses! It’s CRAZEEEEEEEE!!!”
“Uh, OK.” She went back into her office, unfazed by our ranting.
Now it was time for the Fighter to face the Displacer Beast. The Beast rolled two normal hits. The Fighter was a goner. The Terror level rose, and later, we lost the game when the Monster deck ran out before we could finish off the Beholder, maybe two turns before we would have won the game.
Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons, like other Horrified games, has a lot of moments like this. My kids are always griping about the fact that they prefer games where you can pick up weapons and use them as weapons, not like they are used in the Horrified system, where they are picked up as items, then used to both solve puzzles and defend the heroes from monster attacks. “I wish I could use this Longsword to kill something” is a common gripe in our household.
So, Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons isn’t perfect. And the monsters in this edition are less interesting than the ones from last year’s superior monster collection featured in Horrified: World of Monsters, in part because there are no real puzzles with the three monsters we used in this first multiplayer game.
But Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons is authentic to the source material, and for a D&D junkie like my 11-year-old, they were satisfied with the chance to try the game. We’ll see if it comes around again for family game night soon!
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