Board Games To Give You Nightmares |
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An Interview With Twilight Creations Resident Ghoul Kerry Breitenstein
www.twilightcreationsinc.com
Interview conducted by: Josh Haney
Originally Appearing In Hacker's Source Issue #20You know lots of horror folks these days are always praising X-box and Playstation 2 for all of the great horror themed games that are hitting the market. But for those of us with a yen for something a little more cerebral, something that hearkens us back to the days of playing role-playing games like Call Of Cthulhu and GURPs Horror, or board games like Atmosfear, the Universal mystery games, even the slightly cheesy Nightmare On Elm Street Freddy Game, luckily, Twilight Creations has risen like a flesheater from the grave to supply everyone with ghastly horrors that fit on your coffee table and won't bleed your wallet dry.
With an ever-expanding range of games from the lighthearted All Wound Up to the dark and foreboding When Darkness Calls, every game in their stable offers up new and exciting challenges, while never repeating itself.
My wife bought me Zombies!!! when it was released, and I have played that (along with it's expansion packs which include a mall, an army base, and even an Evil Deadish cabin in the woods) literally hundreds of times, never once getting bored with the survive a zombie (or undead dog) apocalypse setting. Keep in mind that this is no usual board game. The variable tile system allows the players to place tiles anywhere they want to, thus changing the game EVERY TIME you play it!
Zombies not your cup of gore? How about surviving a spook-infested mansion in The Haunting House, where you must race from one end of the old Breitenstein place to the other, which is not as easy as it sounds.
While these games are rather straightforward one-night affairs, When Darkness Calls allows you to build a player character role-playing game style, and adventure to your hearts content.
Even monster kids can get in on the action with All Wound Up, an escape from the cemetery game with wind-up zombie toys for pawns.
So read through this question and answer session with one of the founders of the company, and then rush off and get these games for yourselves, and experience the terror firsthand!
JH: For those that haven't heard of you, what is Twilight Creations?
KB: We are a game publishing company specializing in horror and party-themed board and card games.JH: How did you get started? A brief history of the company?
KB: Todd was working for Journeyman Press when he designed Zombies!!! (aboard game). Journeyman Press soon thereafter dissolved. Instead of letting the game die an untimely death, we (Todd and Kerry Breitenstein) started Twilight Creations. We obtained the rights to publish further Zombies!!! expansions and ultimately bought the rights of the game outright from the United States Playing Card Company, who was the parent company for Journeyman Press, last month. Since Twilight Creations was formed, we have designed and published seven different base games/game lines with over 20 products to date.JH: Where do you get your ideas?
KB: Movies, books, television, etc. You name it.JH: What games did you all play when you were younger? What got you started in gaming?
KB: Chess, Checkers, Stratego, Risk, Monopoly, the usual. We started into hobby games in high school when we both played Dungeons & Dragons, which led to Magic, and then all Hell broke loose.JH: How do you go about creating a game?
KB: A lot of the game ideas have been floating around in our heads for a while. When they start to solidify, we jot things down on paper and then form the ideas better. Not all of these ideas come close to a decent board game though. Some of the games start with theme and others start with a really cool mechanic. Once we've formed a rough game idea, we sit down and play it, change it, play it again, change it again, send it out to others who do the same. The end product usually is fairly different from the beginning idea.JH: Your favorite horror films…books…games?
KB: Favorite horror films…The George Romero trilogy, The Exorcist and Shocker. Books…The Exorcist, Amityville Horror, any HP Lovecraft. Games…The Exorcist (just kidding, we had to start our own company to play horror games.)JH: How do you feel about the fans/gamers that love your games? Fan submissions? Play testing?
KB: We have some of the coolest fans around (which I'm sure all the companies say), but we mean it. We love to hear from them, compliments and criticisms. We get a lot of fan submissions and we try to utilize them and make them available to the other fans as much as possible. As far as play testing, we can never do enough play testing to suit us.JH: What games are out on the market right now? Brief descriptions of them?
KB: When Darkness Comes...The Awakening is an innovative GM-Free, role-playing / board game, with a modern-day, horror setting and focuses primarily on all sorts of undead nastiness. The expansions for it The Horror Within, Hell Unleashed, The Darkness Before The Dawn, The Most Dangerous Game, This Is Not Happening, and The Nameless Mist includes an assortment of additional rules and scenarios, game aids, additional map tiles, more encounter disks and two additional miniatures. Zombies!!! is a survival board game where you race around the town, defeat the zombies and be the first to reach the helipad and safety. It has three expansions, Zombie CORPS(E), Mall walkers, and The End. The Haunting House is a wildly fun, fast paced, strategy board game with a twist. The object is simple; players enter the front door and race to be the first to reach the exit. This one has two expansions so far, titled The Second Story and A Ghost Story. All Wound Up, which is a race through the graveyard game featuring self-propelled pawns! Finally, Dante's Inferno, a strategy board game based on the classic literary work Dante's Inferno. Players race around the circles of Hell saving souls and battling demons until they reach the final conflict with Lucifer himself.JH: Best selling game so far?
KB: Zombies!!! sells like gangbusters.JH: Most of the games use the Variable Tile System…can you explain that to people that haven't played your games?
KB: It's a mesh between role-playing and board gaming. The board is set depending on the scenario that is being run with each scenario having a different objective, such as finding/disarming the bomb, finding the lead adversary and defeating it, etc. Each player can create a character or use one of the pre-generated ones. Using the characters skills, they are able to accomplish certain tasks such as unlocking doors, finding allies/items, getting past security and fighting adversaries. It's a very simple intro role-playing system.JH: How would you describe When Darkness Comes as opposed to Zombies!!! or Haunting House?
KB: All three games are completely differently. When Darkness Comes is far more complex than either Zombies or The Haunting House. It adds role-playing (playing a specific character rather than a static one) to the fight for survival. Zombies!!! is a very simple move, kill, die mechanic. The Haunting House is more of a strategic racing game where you are racing to get out of a haunted house first. It is not similar to the first two at all. The game plays in two rounds. The first round the player to your right picks four of your cards and places them in front of you. Each player flips over their first card and does that action starting with the first player. The actions include move, switch tiles, switch places, rotate tiles, secret passage, trap door, move exit and hall of mirrors. The next round, the last three cards are taken out, and you get to choose which four cards you want and in which order. These two rounds continue until someone gets out of the house.JH: For the parents of monsterkids out there, please describe All Wound Up, as I feel that all fiendish parents should own this game!
KB: All Wound Up is a game where the players are controlling wind-up pawns. The players bid on actions and when they win the bid they get to perform the action. Such actions may be wind 2, wind 3, turn right, turn opponent, etc. When you win a wind action, you mark where your zombie was with the "start here" token, hold the winding mechanism and push the zombie on it's forehead to flip over one time for each wind. Once wound, you place it back on the board at its previous location and let it go. There are bonuses (brains) and obstacles (open graves, mausoleums) on the board as well. The object of the game is to get out of the cemetery first.JH: If you could have ANY horror writer do an expansion for one of your games, who would it be?
KB: Stephen King, no doubt. Clive Barker would be good too.JH: What does the future hold for Twilight Creations?
KB: We have a lot in store for Twilight Creations, including two new game lines this year (MidEvil and Hidden Conflict) and expansions for all of our other game lines within the next year. We are sticking with the horror theme for the most part as that is something we seem to like and do well.
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