The Brightview Haunting Board Game Preview

The Brightview Haunting

Player Count: 2-6

Published by: Typhon Games

Designed by: Justin Gale

This is a preview copy. See our review policy here

By Steve Godfrey

This is a prototype copy of the game and as such all components and rules have the potential to change through the campaign. 

At the time this preview is going out the Kickstarter campaign has finished and is fully funded. However, it is / will be open for late pledges. You can find the campaign here

Bert Hudson has gone and got himself ensnared in the Elder Tree by The Whisperer, a demon that Bert unwittingly awakened. It’s now down to his sister and her friends to stop the Whisperer and free Bert… Which is probably a source of frustration for them. How many times have they told Bert that he was expressly forbidden to go into the Forest and awaken ancient evils! It’s happened so often at this point that they almost never went after him this time……but that probably wouldn’t be much of a game though. 

How to haunt the woods.

In this one vs. many game, the goal of the Exorcists (the name given to the “many” players) is to reduce the power of the Elder Tree to zero by invoking rituals and eventually freeing Bert, and then presumably moving to somewhere much less creepy with zero forests around. However, only non-possessed players can win. The Whisperer player wins if they manage to possess all of the Exorcists, but only the Whisperer player wins. 

As an Exorcist, you can perform two different actions. You can search an adjacent search tile, draw a utility card, and then flip the tile over to reveal a different symbol that relates to one of the other decks of cards. The next time you take a search action on this tile, you'll remove it and draw a card from the depicted deck. The cards in these decks do different things like throwing down salt to slow down the Whisperer and removing corruption from other players. The main ones you want to focus on to help win the game, though, are the ritual cards. With these, you can take an invoke action (this will cost you both your actions to do), and most of these cards will drop the power of the Elder Tree. You can also use items from cards in your hand, trade cards, and you can also take a Resonance action, which lets you take a token that you can spend in a later turn to repeat a move, use, or search action again in that turn. Each Exorcist will also have a passive ability that's unique to them.

On their turn, the Whisperer player can, like the exorcists, take two different actions. They can move 7 spaces, or they can track, which is basically moving as many spaces in a straight line (obstacles will stop this), and disperse salt in an adjacent space. They can absorb an echo token adjacent to them. These will either move their control track up or put down a gateway token. As an action, you can teleport between gateways. Once you have absorbed echo tokens, they get placed on your board. When you have two, you can use the pulse action. This lets you either put all exorcists’ corruption up by one level or move two exorcists up to 6 spaces toward you. If you’re adjacent to an exorcist, then you can try to ensnare them. They roll the three dice and increase their corruption for every symbol they roll. If their corruption hits five because of this dice roll, they’re immediately possessed. If you hadn’t guessed by now, corruption is bad for the exorcists. Not only does it make it easy for the Whisperer to possess you, but it also hinders some of your actions as it increases.

The last action is Possess. If you're adjacent to an exorcist whose corruption is at five, then you can possess them. I mentioned control earlier, and these are special abilities that the Whisperer unlocks as it increases to make it more powerful and terrifying. When players become possessed, they now take turns for the Whisperer. Their actions are limited, but they will essentially be trying to corrupt the others, flip echo tokens, and generally be a nuisance to their former fellow players. It's possible for the others to use cards that remove corruption. If a possessed exorcist's corruption drops below five, then they snap out of it and return to normal.

The Exorcists.

We’ve all seen those movies, horror or otherwise, where one of the gang of main characters gets themselves possessed or is put under the bad guy's spell, etc., because let’s face it, there’s always one. This might be the only time that I’ve personally seen it used so openly in a board game. Sure, I’ve seen it in hidden traitor games where the traitor can turn one of the other players to their side, but this is all done secretly, of course. Here, though, it’s done right in front of you. One minute you’re standing next to your friend and may even have given them a really handy item that you didn't think you’d need because, surely, there's no way they were going to get possessed, right? Then they go and get themselves possessed and are now chasing you, trying to corrupt you like one of those people in town centers trying to get you to take a survey. “Please, have you got five minutes to talk about the Whisperer? It’s not a pyramid scheme, I promise.” It’s an interesting feature that serves to ramp up some tension in the game, especially as more and more of your friends start to become possessed as well.

Now your list of allies starts to grow thin, and you're now trying to juggle with keeping away from them, trying to search for a way to help them, and still trying to finish your objectives to win the thing. It all serves as the game's way of ramping up the danger and giving it that thematic edge, especially if one player starts to become the “final girl” of the piece. The overhanging threat of possession is the element that keeps you wanting to just run to avoid the Whisperer, but it's the idea that you need to discover those tiles to find the things you need that keeps you from running too far. You see, the limitations of only being able to perform an action once are pretty clever in a game like this. Yes, you want to run, but you also need to stay because you’ve just flipped over that search tile, and on the other side will give you a ritual card that you need to help win the game, and if that Whisperer is on your tail, then it can make for some tough and interesting decisions. 

The Whisperer

Of course, you can’t possess people without a demon (or so I’m told), and so we move on to the role of the Whisperer. Incidentally, a whisper is registered at around 20-30 decibels! So make sure that player is adhering to that; otherwise, you'll have to call them “the slightly louder than a Whisperer,” and that doesn't have quite the same ring to it. The Whisperer is, for my money, the more fun of the roles to play, but then I’ve always liked being the one that brings the chaos, and generally, I find being the bad guy in hidden traitor games a lot more fun, so take that opinion as you will. The game does a good job of making its villain feel like enough of a threat that you feel like anything could happen as it moves in on you. It moves faster than the players, so you know that at a certain point, there’s no escape; it's going to catch up with you, so you’d better keep your corruption in check; otherwise, possession may be in your immediate future.

The control meter is a fun little device that helps the game ramp up as it goes on by making the Whisperer more powerful as the rounds tick by. Moving up that track makes it easier to get the echo tokens, ensnare players, and even gives them three actions and the ability to perform the same action twice. Now, that may not sound like much, but trust me, being able to move twice is great on its own, while still being able to do something else as well. It could be the key to possessing someone and letting them get away. Imagine all the times in Pandemic when you said, “Argh, if only I had one more action.” Yeah, now you get it. It’s a lovely touch that, like a movie, the villain powers up over time, but it also helps the game move along and stops the players from playing it casually because now the Whisperer is able to achieve their goal more easily. 

Not so Brightview

Personally, we found the board to be a touch too dark. Couple that with the shadows used and the fact that tokens cover a full square, and it leads to a bit of confusion, especially as a couple of sections were maze-like. Don't get me wrong, I’m not knocking the art; it's great, but if you don't have great lighting or are looking at the board from certain angles, you might find yourself backtracking now and then. I will say that the rulebook has a great picture of the map with all the borders outlined really clearly, which is something I wish more rulebooks would do, but I also don't want to have to reference the rulebook for things like that if I don't need to. As I said earlier, this is a prototype, so it's possible that this could change as the campaign goes on.  

The Brightview Haunting is a new, interesting take on the one vs. many genre and does a good job of incorporating its horror inspirations into the game. If any of this sounds interesting, then check out the Kickstarter campaign (links above) and see if this is for you.