Harrow County: The Game of Gothic Conflict & Fair Folk expansion review — Cube tower of terror

To me, “thematic” is a borderline dirty word. Playing too many early American designs that favored turning you into the DiCaprio pointing meme over fun or interesting gameplay has given me cardboard PTSD, so I generally shy away from games that are labeled as such. Harrow County, based on the comic of the same name, may fall into the category, but does a much better job of compromising strict adherence to the source material in the name of being an actually enjoyable experience.

 

The new and improved rules (although still a bit much, clocking in at 50 pages) designer Jay Cormier provided us with start off with the 2-player game, which is the logical beginning for all explanations of Harrow County. It’s a perfectly solid game in its own right, but also the backdrop for the 3 and 4-player variants. Two of the Protectors, the Family, or Kammi take turns breaking mason jars to take actions in a race to seven points which they accrue in any combination of faction objectives, killing enemy haints, and holding the bramble in the middle of the map in a a murderous king of the hill with side quests. Sprinkle on top the tokens littered around the map which offer improved efficacy for future actions when collected and the bonus tiles set between players given to the first player to take its associated action, both of which reward taking three lefts instead of that right you were initially planning on, and you’ve got a damn good game of two factions going at it.

The 2p game itself doesn’t ooze theme, but there’s a mild dusting of flavor on each of the factions, with each of them having either an array of characters from the comics aligned with them available as playable legends or lone wolf Kammi bringing a level of deception into the game that’s evocative of her character. While I generally prefer my two player games to be more svelte and focused than what what Harrow offers, given that most dudes on a map games’ 2-player modes are slapdash disasters that nominally exist so publishers can put 2-X players on the side of the box, I’m taking that Harrow County’s 2-player mode is a thoroughly enjoyable, fully fleshed game as a feat that makes it already stand out from its peers in the genre.

If the two-player factions feel like fighters in a cage match, everyone feels the horror theming as soon as Hester’s introduced for the third player. Much like if Jason Vorhees showed up at the next UFC as a surprise third entrant on a match, Hester is a threat that demands acknowledgement. She starts off slow, with no board presence and taking a round and a half to accomplish much of anything, but snowballs hard once she gets going and only needs to accomplish her objectives (smashing infected haints together to create bonfires and eat enemy legends) thrice to win the game. Hester may be a powerhouse, what with her extra actions and infinitely replayable cards, but she has plenty of counterplay for cautious players; she’s got the vibes of a horror villain that punishes haughty mistakes.

 

The Fair Folk, my personal favorite, are the referees of this cage match, trying to do their job making sure that nobody gets slaughtered so they can get out and get paid. In actual gameplay terms, they play a deduction game, trying to find where on the map another player has decided to hide their sword, queen, and crown. Every turn, they drop a nest with an offering for the other players onto the board, drop a cube onto the battlefield if they used one of the terrains they gain benefits from, and, finally, if they successfully completed one of their nest placement objectives, they can either drop an arrow to narrow the field they’re searching in or guess a hex. When another player redeems one of the offerings, they activate the tree, and I can stop holding my breath because now I’ve gotten to the point where I talk about my most and least favorite part of Harrow County because though it might be a clunky gimmick, it’s also a stroke of genius. Since the tower is integrated into the game’s box instead of being its own component, it takes up more table space than it needs to, and the battlefield tray is too small and shallow to reliably catch all the cubes falling out, leading to multiple cube hunts a game, unnecessarily breaking the flow of everything.Thematically, a faction’s strength cubes in the battlefield represent their influence in the county, both as a resource to be spent and a defense. For example, whenever one of the point based factions attack, they activate the tree by dropping all the cubes from the battlefield into the tower and have to have more than the defender drop and then spend back to their supply to kill stuff. Because of that, there’s a real feeling of weight every time you spend those cubes, as you’re unquestionably weakening yourself.

Hester has her own special layer on top with her strength cubes, as they’re all tied to a specific terrain type, making her moves that smidge more telegraphed, but also working with the gothic horror vibes- stay away from the woods, Hester’s got green cubes. I’ve waited until the Fair Folk to talk about the battlefield and tree though, because they feel the weight of adding and removing those cubes more than every other faction. When another player activates the tree after using one of their offerings, they get a free precious arrow or guess if they win the drop, so obviously they want to sit on the max six cubes, right? Only no, sometimes they feel compelled to step in and play referee with one of their absurdly powerful cards that cost cubes to keep the game going on.

What I’ve given you so far is the ideal smooth game for the faction, but inevitably things go sideways and you’ll have to make compromises in order to actually advance your game state. So you just had to blow a ton of cubes playing cards to enable a Hester kill, do you drop your offering next to the player in last place, who needs it but will probably immediately cash it in while you don’t get the arrow or guess, or someone else? I’d say if you tried to negotiate with the bottom feeder to give them a mutually beneficial blue shell and they spit on it, that’s on them, but if the player that does get it winds up winning before you can, then both of y’all just hardballed yourselves into a loss.

I generally don’t wander into recommending particular editions, but if you’re going to be primarily playing Harrow County with more than 2 like I am, I’d suggest the deluxe edition. It’s $20-30 more than the standard edition, with the Fair Folk expansion, a gametrayz-esque storage solution, and all the cardboard upgraded to wood. Matter of fact, I’m ditching my review copy to get a deluxe edition in my next personal haul.

See below for our list of partners and affiliates: