I played A Touch of Evil last night at CodyCon. It’s a fun game, reminiscent of “Talisman”, but with an early 18th century flavor. A supernatural evil is loose in the village of Shadowbrook, and it’s up to the players to stop it. Each player takes on the role of an investigator who has different perks and abilities. Game play can be competitive or collaborative, and the object is to travel around the board picking up various resources to build up strength and learn the town elders’ secrets before confronting the monster in its lair.





There’s a nice narrative quality to the game, giving the impression of a “Sleepy Hollow” style story unfolding as you travel around the board. Plus there’re chips and cards and tokens and dice and minis and, yeah, it’s geeky as all hell.



We had eight players, and our villain was the werewolf. (Our story wound up being something like this -- the village midwife was not what she appeared to be and was in fact the werewolf who was under the control of the evil lord of the manor.) Our group size was something of a burden, as it would take close to an hour for everyone to go. Optimal size would probably be about four players. We started out as competitive, which led to some great fuck-over-the-other-player moments, and a few players got transformed into werewolves, which was fun, but after three hours we all wanted to go home and started helping each other out a bit. By then practically all of the town elders had either been knocked out of play or joined the villain, so things were getting desperate in Shadowbrook.






Design-wise the game was nice, although hand-drawn illustrations beat dressed up and tweaked drama-camp model photography any day of the week. Also, the game soundtrack was a wee bit silly. But these things are pretty minor (especially when off set by cool minis!), so if any of this at all sounds appealing to you, than you might want to check the game out.

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