In this audio-only Hobby Cast, Daniel (@dungeondive) tackles a question close to the channel’s heart: can tabletop games actually do horror? His thesis is that horror needs empathy, surprise, and timing — and that solo board games struggle with all three, while video games excel precisely because the machine handles the rules and can genuinely ambush you. Woven through with patron comments on everything from Phasmophobia to Resident Evil 2 nostalgia, the episode tours six video games that left scars: the voodoo hellscape of Shadow Man, the prison horrors of The Suffering, Bloodborne’s slow reveal from gothic to cosmic, the delightfully sinister trap-laying of Tecmo’s Deception, Resident Evil 4’s perfectly paced village, and Eternal Darkness with its fourth-wall-breaking sanity tricks. Then five board games that manage the trick anyway, each assigned a keyword: Mansions of Madness (mystery), Alone Against Fear (wackiness), A Touch of Evil (camp), Cthulhu: Death May Die (action), and Machina Arcana (dread). There’s also a candid opening confession — the October horror programming underperformed, and Daniel isn’t sure he’ll do it again — which makes this thoughtful episode something of a collector’s item.
Daniel argues solo board games can’t truly surprise you the way video games can. Has a solo tabletop game ever genuinely unnerved you at the table — and if so, how did it pull it off?