Marrying Mr. Darcy – With Zombie Expansion

If you aren’t familiar with it, there is a book called Pride Prejudice and Zombies. This takes the story of Pride and Prejudice and turns it into a zombie book while keeping the snark intact. There is also a movie on the book that is highly entertaining as well. But Marrying Mr. Darcy gets you playing as one of the Bennett sisters or other main characters trying to get enough wit, beauty, charm, or whatever it might be to get your perfect suitor. There is a small expansion for the game that adds in zombies.

This game is a lot of fun to play and is quite silly to play. It also handles a pretty large group. The game play is very simple but there are some good laughs in it as you play and decide if you want to get turned into a zombie yourself. The zombie expansion doesn’t add in all that much, and really doesn’t add to complexity, which makes it a nice easy option for Halloween.

The Bloody Inn

The Bloody Inn is an interesting one to put on the list because I haven’t played it yet. It’s theme also isn’t spoopy. You run an inn and it turns out that it’s more profitable to kill off the people who who up and hide their bodies and steal their stuff. But if you aren’t careful the police will show up and now you have to deal with them. The theme is just too absurd to be really horrific. Thus it makes it onto the spoopy list. You’re going to be telling stories about how you stuffed a body under a rug as the police showed up.

Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

You are a paranormal detective, as a group, going through this cooperative game. It is very much a choose your own adventure with a little game on top of it. You collect items, go into crazy rooms, probably die, and then continue on further into the story trying to figure out everything that is going on. This one barely qualifies as a game, but it’s a lot of fun.

The best way, I’ve found, to play this game is to just pass around the cards. So each person gets to read and gets to make decisions. You can make them as a group or discuss them, but the reader is the person who has the final say on what you do. It’s fun to just be surprised what happens when you’re not the reader.

Gloom

This one falls into the category with The Bloody Inn, if you actually think about it, it’s kind of horrific, but really it plays as spoopy fun. In this game you have a family and you are trying to get them to die as miserably as possible so you have the fewest points. You are playing cards on your own characters and narrating the miserable things that happen to them. And then you give your opponents good things, or at least maybe less miserable so they aren’t as negative in their points.

The game does require story telling. For some groups the game won’t work then because you do need to dive into the absurdity of the stories. Getting left at the alter and then stung by bees and chased by wild boars is all fun, but if you can narrate it well, it’s a grand old time with that horror them and also being very spoopy.

MonsDRAWsity

Another one that I haven’t played, but this is going to be party game and drawing game entry onto the list. You are all basically police sketch artists trying to get as close to what the actual monster looks like just from descriptions. IT’s a goofy premise, and one that is going to give you a lot of weird looking monsters and a lot of laughs.

If I were going to pick one game to pull out for a Halloween party, MonsDRAWsity is the one that I’d pull from my collection. some of the others would work as well, but this one is going to be maybe the lightest. Choose Your Own Adventure might be lighter, but this will keep people more engaged throughout.

Similo: Spookies

Okay, this one might also be one I bring along to a party. But for it to be really Halloween you need the Spookies which just came out. In this game one person is trying to get everyone else to eliminate the right monsters by giving clues based that the monster is either like or not like another monster. That can be trickier than you think. You might have great monsters to give a clue or a bad one, is a swamp monster similar or not to a vampire more so than a werewolf to get the right one eliminted.

I talked about this recently on my Top 100 games list as well. You can get multiple different sets of this, so you could mix in animals for the clues about the monster, or mythological figures with giving the monsters as clues. It makes the game really easy to expand and a whole lot of fun.

What Spoopy Halloween Games Do You Like?

Are there any on the list that you’d play of mine? I have a few others that just missed like Werewords which I don’t love but would work well. Or something like Silver: Amulet and it’s standalone expansions that have a werewolf theme on them without feeling like that. Definitely Silver: Amulet would be a good one as well.

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Ghost Hunt

It’s the only anime on the list, but it’s a good one. This one leans into Japanese horror but is also still an anime. That means that it has some lighter moments in it. However, it also does have some really good horror moments in it. Mai finds herself in a school where there is a ghost. She runs into the president of the SPR, Shibuya Psychic Research, and gets a job with him. She then goes on a lot of adventures and mysteries with ghosts and other monsters. That’s the basics of it, but it’s a nice fast anime to watch that I really enjoyed.

Locke & Key

Locke & Key is a great one to checkout because the second season is coming out tomorrow. Locke & Key follows the Locke family as they return to Rendell’s home after his death. His wife and kids go there, and Bode, the youngest starts to hear weird noises. These lead him to finding keys and to finding Dodge. The keys do amazing things, very fanciful and terrifying in nature, but Dodge doesn’t seem to want to use them for quite as simple things as Bod would want.

Locke & Key is on Netflix and based off of a comic book series by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son. The comics are much more violent and adult in nature than the show. The show on Netflix is more YA (young adult) focused, which I think works well. It still has that sense of uneasiness and dread in the show, but makes it more accessible to people. Really fun one to watch and not that long a watch.

Dark

Another Netflix show, this one about time travel and murder. I will say immediately that this is a show that is better watched sub titled than dubbed. The difference is fairly jarring while watching dubbed. And it’s a show that at least the first season, I need to watch the others, is really good. The time travel is well done and the mystery that is happening in the town works so well. The whole premise just feels like something different. And the title definitely matches what it is.

The show itself isn’t too violent or really contain many jump scares, but the mystery that is progressing throughout the story is just unsettling. The time travel works to make it even more unsettling as you go along. Aesthetically this just works really well.

Supernatural

It’s hard to make a list like this without putting Supernatural on it. I have not watched all of the show, it is a lot to get through. But it is a good show for Halloween because it is monster of the week a lot of the time. Sam and Dean are brothers who know about all the things that go bump in the night. It also has that element of angels and demons throughout the whole series as well.

Now, this is a series that you could start watching now and probably continue until Halloween of 2022, so much longer than most. And it is repetitive in what it does. But the first couple of seasons are more horror focused and tell an interesting story. Then after that it will get into more spoopy than spooky at times, but it’s still fun. There is just a ton of it so beware.

Helix

This one might be harder to track down, but this was a SyFy channel show that was basically The Thing, but not. An experiment goes wrong on the south pole and this disease or thing is spreading to people on the base. Is it an accident or is there some more nefarious plan behind it. The fact that I’m asking that question means that there is a more nefarious plot behind it, but how it unfolds is good. And who is infected and how they try and avoid getting infected works really well.

This, I think, had two seasons on SyFy. I can’t vouch for the second season, but the first is worth a watch by itself. This horror is all about the suspense of the unknown and is probably more traditional horror and jump scares than almost anything else on the list.

What Are Your Favorite Shows to Watch at Halloween?

I know there are a lot of horror shows out there that I didn’t mention and some that are more spooky than spoopy. There are shows like Grim which I need to watch again that I really liked. But are there any out there, knowing my tastes, that you think I’d like?

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