Daniel (@dungeondive) opens a mid-game review of A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Game from Jason C. Hill at Flying Frog Productions — possibly Flying Frog’s best game and Daniel’s favourite of theirs, “drowning in theme” and built to play like an old Hammer Studios horror picture. Released 2008, the game has the base box plus the Something Wicked expansion deployed here; the Coast expansion is long out of print at time of recording.
Investigators move out of Shadowbrook into the surrounding countryside, gathering investigation tokens to buy items, identify town-elder secrets (some elders are harbouring evil), and purchase lair cards that pinpoint where the villain has hidden a base — all running against a shadow track that escalates the threat. The session in progress pits Katrina the Outlaw and Eliza the Witch Hunter against the Banshee, with the Groundskeeper minion roaming and Barrow Shades spawning on the lair deck.
Daniel argues the system is essentially “talisman with theme tightened to within an inch of its life”: you still roll to move and run a fight phase, but the cross-talk between mystery cards, minion charts and location decks builds emergent micro-stories — a murder at the Abandoned Keep, a militia rushed in, a Barrow Shade rising from the ruins, all in three card draws.
When the mechanisms are deliberately simple, how much narrative work do you, as a player, willingly do to connect the dots — and does that effort make a session more memorable or just more forgiving?