Dark Gothic: Colonial Horror Review

Dark Gothic, the deck-building game based on Flying Frog Productions' A Touch of Evil board game, was a lot better than I was originally willing to give it credit for. Unfortunately, the release of the base set last year was downed out by the fervor over FFP's weird west dungeon crawler Shadows of Brimstone. Supernatural history is doomed to repeat itself, and this year's standalone expansion, Dark Gothic: Colonial Horror, was again over-Shadowed by a new Brimstone release. Despite this public neglect, it's obvious that Colonial Horror was the subject of great care internally. Rather than rehash the same mechanics with some new artwork, the expansion improves on the original in every possible way, making it by far the superior release...unless you happen to need a game that supports 4 or more players, in which case you'll just have to buy both. (Colonial Horror contains enough cards for 2-3 players only, while the base set supports up to 6.)

Part of the reason I almost wrote off Dark Gothic was because the cooperative mode stinks like a Ferrian Bog Fiend. It's predicated on the Shadows, one of the game's many unusual features. Certain effects cause a card to enter the Shadows, representing the supernatural villain's growing threat, and once the Shadows has 10 cards, all players lose. This is true of the standard competitive format as well, but in that, it acts more like an unpredictable game timer keeping players from sandbagging or dilly-dallying trying to optimize their scores. The cooperative variant, however, takes something that's already totally arbitrary and adds another level of randomness to it: every time it's the first player's turn, he rolls the Omen Die (a 6-sider showing the numbers 1-4 and two skulls) once for each Minion in the center offer, and on a skull result, that Minion adds itself to the Shadows. The idea was fantastic—Minions represent an actual threat instead of sitting there passively until someone bothers to fight them—but the execution was poor, since there were already cards in the deck that, as soon as they entered play, could add up to 4 Shadows cards at once. Win or lose, the conclusion felt disappointing and disconnected from the players' actions; plus, it was easy to game the system by simply clearing out the Minions and then not buying any more cards, preventing new ones from entering play.

While there's no rescuing the cooperative mode, standard play, which is a race to accumulate Renown points in a similar style to Ascension, is good enough to keep the game out of the trade bin. Not because it's all that satisfying to play mechanically—you can pretty much assume that Lady Luck, not Sir Skill, will determine the winner—but because of the excellent job it does of delivering an old-school horror atmosphere, making the original board game almost redundant.

The Shadows is still busted in Colonial Horror, but at least it's more dynamic and exciting thanks to the introduction of 2 new features: Roaming Minions and Lightning Strikes. Roaming Minions are monsters that push steadily toward the right side of the card offer. When they reach it, they keep right on marching into the Shadows. In this way, they behave like actual servants of evil, helping the villain carry out his shadowy machinations. (Notice that this is pretty much a fixed version of the original game's cooperative variant.) They also give players short-term goals to attempt while building power for the big fight. Meanwhile, the "Lightning Strike" cards replace the obnoxious "Murder!" from the base set. When added to the card offer, a Lightning Strike immediately destroys the cards to its left and right, then adds itself to the Shadows, making room for 3 new cards to enter play. This prevents the card pool from stagnating and might have the unpleasant side effect of hatching a brand new batch of roaming monsters.

And keeping the card offer moving like this is a very good thing. Remember when I complained about how arbitrary the Shadows threat felt in the base set? The reliable turnover created by the new effects guarantees that a bigger chunk of the deck will see play every game, giving those weird shuffles a better chance to even out. Plus, the deck itself is smaller, and compared to the unsightly behemoth packed into the base game (a deck too thick to hold in one hand), a more svelte deck is a good thing, equating to less bloat and a tighter overall game.

The new cards are good ones, too. Apart from the Roaming Minions and Lightning Strikes, we now have cards that interact directly with the Shadows, like the Town Key or the Town Elder Doctor Manning, both of which allow you to gain cards directly from the Shadows. Dark Omen has the opposite effect while in the center row, possibly forcing you to choose a card from hand to add to the doomsday timer. Two new Gear cards are plentiful: keys destroy themselves after a single, powerful use, while books grant a variable bonus based on the roll of the Omen Die.

Looking at the reduced player count, you may assume they've skimped on Heroes and Villains, but they've done anything but. The 5 new heroes are full of surprising tricks, particularly the schoolteacher Anne Marie, who gains Training cards like crazy and gains combat from books, and Sara the Bright Witch, who draws a card every time the Omen Die rolls a skull. There's also a full complement of 9 new villains, all of whom are more interesting and interactive than the previous set. The Gremians play havoc with your plans, replacing a random card from your deck each turn with a random card from the Crypt (previously destroyed cards). The Necromancer gives all Minions the Roaming ability, and if there are any in the offer when he's defeated, they get put in the Shadows. The Fell Reaper is the worst: he destroys the top card of the main deck each turn, and costs an extra resource to fight for every Ally in the Crypt.

Though smaller, Colonial Horror is in every way a better game than its predecessor. If you have yet to try this peculiarly creepy deck-builder, you'll want to start here.