Doctors Paul Wake and Sam Illingworth
With Halloween just a few weeks away, we find our thoughts turning to horror in board games. As video games designer Richard Rouse – best known for horror series The Suffering – has said: “The marriage of horror and games just seems too perfect for designers to avoid.” While he’s talking about video games, horror clearly exerts a similar pull on designers (and players) of tabletop games. So, what is it that makes the marriage of games and horror so compelling?
Literary studies offer one way of approaching the subject. Continuing a line of argument initiated by Ann Radclifie, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), scholars of the gothic often distinguish between ‘terror’ and ‘horror’, the former signalling awful apprehension and the latter sickening realisation. As scholar Devendra P. Varma puts it, it is the difference between “the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse”. Given the number of stumbling corpses populating many of today’s games, let’s start with ‘horror’.