FIVE HORRIBLE GAMES
ALONE
(2019, £80)
A game of either fighting your way through a dark spaceship as the hero, or trying to kill the human invader of your lair – depending which side of the screen you’re on. The evil player controls monsters, minions and some big slugs whose whereabouts will remain unknown to the player until (ideally) it’s too late. The hero spends their time trying to navigate a map that gets wiped out at the end of each turn. A tense game of bad lighting, jump scares, and hidden information. While it can be played with three versus one set up, we like it most as a one on one bluffing game where one player is holding all the cards (quite literally). There’s nothing more delicious than sending the hero the wrong way just because of the look on your face. Plus, the miniatures are amazing.
RAILROAD INK
(2018, £20)
A speedy roll and write game of locomotion linking and network building for one to four players. Draw routes and connect the various exits around your board attempting to build a large and useful network, with bonus point for the longest rails and roads and minus points for dead ends. The Challenge version of the game adds extra, weirder, dice and more ways to mix-up your game. Not that you’re short of those options anyway, with over 20 expansions ready for you to throw into the mix, you’ve already got more options than most big box titles out there. We particularly like the lakes and rivers which are added to the Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition. Who knew you could fit an entire expansion on to four dice?
POTION EXPLOSION
(2015, £50)
The original calling card for what Horrible Guild are all about. Not many publishers put actual marbles in their game boxes after all. Players take the role of wizarding students in a potions class. Mix potions using the available ingredients from the dispenser tray and then use those potions for their one-off effect to propel yourself into the lead – becoming the teacher’s pet, or at least acing the test. Just avoid taking marbles that will lead to a big bang. Or do, and intend to remove marbles from the tray that are useful for your opponents. A real crowd pleaser on the table.
THE KING’S DILEMMA
(2019, £80)
A legacy-ish game of noble houses rising and falling, at the will of the king. Of course, your goal is to improve your house’s standing while avoiding bringing the whole kingdom to its knees. Discuss amongst the rest of the court, and work out how to deal with the troubles of the realm. Using legacy elements your court will move through the ages, and your decisions of the past will echo through the generations of your line. An interestingly restrained art style gets out of the way of the real gameplay, which is arguing with everyone around the table about what to do about a local town that’s stopped paying its taxes.
SIMILO
(2019, £12)
What can Horrible Guild do with a deck of cards? Travel through a whirlwind of themes like animals, myths and history in one of the most charming guessing games available today. The guessing players have to whittle down to the secretly dealt card by removing one card from the tableau each round. This is helped along by the use of the reference clue where the clue giver provides another unused card and designates as ‘similar to’ or ‘different from’. A surprisingly interesting approach to the ‘guess who’ format. You can mix and match sets too, begging the question, who is more like a horse, Richard III or Genghis Khan?