This Game is Killer: Frozen Horror review ⏤ An excellent evolution

We’re back with a sequel to This Game is Killer: Alien on Board, and this time we’re stuck in a frozen outpost trying to determine which of us is not human. That’s right, this time we’re trapped in The Thing rather than Alien. You can check out my review of This Game is Killer: Alien on Board, as the gameplay is nigh identical. Pretty much all of my comments for that game apply here. Let’s examine this game for differences and see if it’s trustworthy or not.

Overview

Really quickly, here’s how you play Frozen Horror. You’ll set up the neoprene mat, and each player will pick a character and the corresponding token. You’ll seed the characters on the map, and each round, every player will receive an identity card. One of the players, every round, is “The Horror”. The humans just want to survive and kill the horror, while the horror is trying to kill all the humans. If the horror survives to the end of a round, it will eat all the humans in their room with the highest priority number. Once a round is completed, you’ll remove any cards indicated from the deck and continue on with the survivors. Each round, you’ll shuffle up the identity cards and redistribute them so that there is a new horror literally lurking amongst the remaining players.

The gameplay for Frozen Horror can literally be summed up as:

This game uses the same clever card play as the first, with each player playing their two cards. One card must be an action, and one card must be a movement. The snake draft play order is still a great mechanic for such a small game. The new wrinkle is that the horror doesn’t act randomly like the alien did. There’s now human intelligence behind it. This really elevates this version of the game for me, as the randomness of the original sometimes felt frustrating. While thematic to make a 50/50 guess in a horror movie and die for it, as part of a game, it isn’t always enjoyable. I really enjoyed Alien on Board, but now I question if I’ll ever break it out over Frozen Horror. There are times when people don’t want to be the bad guy, and Alien on Board preserves the pure selfishness of horror. It is rare to find a non-social deduction game where someone is a hidden bad guy, and I found that players really took to being the best horrific monstrosity they could be.

Games are still incredibly fast, taking a maximum of 15 minutes. Even when you’re dead, it is entertaining to watch the remaining players jockey for survival. We watched as one game came down to two players, with the last human desperately trying to swap their identity card, as it was the only way they could win. They still got eaten, but it was a good try.

Components

Component-wise, the game is also nigh identical to its predecessor. You get a nice little neoprene playmat. The cards are, once again, just ok quality. I would absolutely sleeve at least the identity cards, as you don’t want that horror card to get nicked. I appreciate the attention to colorblind players, as the player tokens also have unique alphanumeric identifiers. I find the price point for the game incredibly fair given its contents.