Many Dungeons & Dragons fans are experiencing franchise fatigue. Company heads at Wizards of the Coast famously claimed the game is undermonetized, while one of the new higher-ups flat out said the brand is shifting to a “franchise model.” The fear is that our beloved RPG will be watered down as we get wave after wave of skateboards, pop tarts, and video game crossovers with the DnD ampersand lazily slapped on them. Thankfully, Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons is a sincere evolution of the original board game that lovingly uses DnD to up the stakes. 

The Horrified board game and DnD actually share two properties that make them a good fit for one another. First, both games are about fending off monsters. In Horrified’s case, players are the characters in a horror movie who must escape a seemingly-invincible entity long enough to discover its weakness. Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons‍ keeps this spirit alive by making the monsters a Mimic, a Beholder, a Displacer beast, and a Red Dragon. Each of these also demand you face them on certain terms that pay tribute to their behaviors in DnD. 

The other similarity is action economy. In Horrified, players can do four things on their turn. They must strategize together on how to best use their turns gathering items to defeat a duo of monsters. And like DnD, the dragon offers a higher difficulty than the others. So there’s “tiers” of play, so to speak, that offer difficulty options. The player characters are four classes–rogue, fighter, cleric, bard–and each comes with a d20 ability unique to Horrified DnD.

You can tell the game’s designers love DnD in how they incorporated both mechanics and lore. The game takes place on a map of Waterdeep and there’s recognizable characters throughout the art. As mentioned before, the monsters have unique win conditions such as disabling each of a Beholder’s eye stalks to mitigate its signature rays. As a DnD fan who has never played Horrified, it does its job of leveraging my love for the franchise to make me discover a new board game. 

For those who have played Horrified, they said the DnD version is one of the better spin-offs. They praised how the new Waterdeep map offers new strategies via its teleportation points that both players and monsters can use. They also liked the new d20 system, saying it adds more payoff to character choice. On the negative side, they wished for more monsters. Horrified usually provides six monsters. While Horrified DnD does come at a lower price of $29.99 to compensate, having more monsters would add replayability. 

In the end, Horrified remains on the more casual side of strategy games. Action economy is important and these monsters do seem to be more difficult than those of previous iterations, but there are only so many things you can do. Fans of tactical DnD combat could appreciate it but won’t find as much depth in puzzling out monster weaknesses as they like. Fans of roleplay obviously won’t find it in a strategy board game. It instead sits in a middle ground as a sort of dungeon crawl simulator. Which is fine, Horrified is a well designed game that knows what kind of audience it’s aiming for. It delivers enough strategy to chew on while still being easy to learn for infrequent game night groups. 

The DnD theming for Horrified plays into this causal appeal. It promises the thrill of searching for treasure while fighting for your life against deadly monsters. It delivers, even if there’s a feeling that it could’ve done a lot more. It’s still one of the best uses of the license I’ve seen in a while. 

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3.5 out of 5 stars

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A copy of Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons was provided by the publisher for this review. 

Sergio Solórzano is the best Dungeon Master in the USA (according to a Wizards of the Coast competition, anyway). He loves minis and terrain but also goes all-in on improv!