Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons
Publisher: Ravensburger
Designer: Mike Mulvihill; System Designer: Prospero Hall
Release Date: July, 2025
Number of Players: 1 to 5
Age Rating: 10 and up
Playing Time: 45 min.
ICv2 Rating: 3.5 Stars out of 5

I think it is safe to say that Dungeons & Dragons has moved beyond mere game to become its own sub-culture, emerging in nearly every imaginable medium from books, to comics, to film, and, in a sort of meta way, back into games again. A recent addition to the roll of Dungeons & Dragons themed games is Ravensburger’s latest offering in the Horrified series. But does it capture the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons, or is it merely a pasted-on theme?

Summary: I was only peripherally aware of the Horrified games, mostly from a life-long appreciation for the horror genre. In essence, they are cooperative games in which players rush about collecting resources to defeat iconic horror villains while simultaneously escorting helpless civilians to safety before the Terror Level boils over or the deck-based timer runs out and the monsters overwhelm everything. Each set in the series offers is own blend of monsters pulled from myth (Greek Monsters), folklore (American Monsters), film (Universal Monsters), or fiction (World of Monsters).

The Dungeons & Dragons set naturally confronts the players with iconic monsters from D&D lore, including the quintessential red dragon and beholder, the elusive mimic, and the hard-to-latch-onto displacer beast. Each monster has its own unique challenges that do a reasonable job of approximating the lore, be it searching to locate the hidden mimic, disabling the beholder’s eyestalks, or trapping the dragon in its lair for a climactic showdown. Meanwhile, each player assumes the role of a classic D&D character class, be it bard or fighter or thief, each with their own unique, if somewhat random, special power.

Originality: As the fifth title in the series, and designed with the restriction that it would be compatible with the earlier sets, Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons feels more iterative than revolutionary, but the developer clearly put creative effort into making each monster feel distinctive from the others, providing a variable playing experience depending on which monsters were selected for that outing. The theme was used to good effect, with the map featuring things like teleporters and underground dungeons as well as “NPCs” in need of protection drawn from the popular Waterdeep setting.

Presentation: In a nod to the horror-genre theme, the cover is very dark and menacing, the focus on the great red dragon lit by fire from below, the other monsters menacing the small party of heroes facing them from the bottom of the scene. The box feels solid and has a good heft to it, with the components shown to good effect on the back. I found the description on the box to be a bit too minimal, offering little in the way of a glimpse about gameplay. Opening the box provides a very nice touch, though, with the inner box sides and underside of the board evoking the toothy maw of a mimic ready to devour you as the first things you see.

Quality: The artwork is solid throughout the components and captures the theme and genre well. I very much like the “Horrified Haversack” component bag, its design and material such that it creates a free-standing container to draw tiles from. The four monster miniatures are nicely sculpted in a soft, durable plastic. The dice are excellent and the cards are good quality with a simple gloss finish. The tokens and tiles feel a little thin by modern standards, but not such that they feel cheap or poor quality to me. I found the rulebook to be a bit vague in places, and it probably would have benefited from a few more examples of play, but the gameplay is not overly complex so it was easy enough to pick up once we got going.

Marketability: Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons makes a game attempt, but ultimately I don’t feel that it really captures the essence of Dungeons & Dragons, so I’m not convinced that it is going to draw in a lot of die-hard role-players. But I also don’t think that is a massive detriment. Like other titles in the series, that is more of a framework to hang the monster-fighting civilian-protecting core of the game system while providing familiar yet distinctive foes for the heroes to work against. It plays quickly, filling that sweet spot for relatively short family-friendly games while offering a little taste of the Dungeons & Dragons world, and it has a reasonable price point for what is included.

Overall: We quite enjoyed playing Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons. It proved a nice, light, relaxing way to wrap up an evening. The variety of monsters offers a good range of challenges, with our dragon hunt literally coming down to the final turn of play for a tense but satisfying finish. The pace of play is quick, with very little downtime between turns. The system is easy to pick up, entertaining to play, and appealing enough that it would be intriguing to see how combining it with other Horrified games as hinted at in the rulebook would work out in the wild.

This is not a super-challenging game. Players who are looking for a mental challenge as one might find in other cooperative games are likely to be disappointed. There is a significant degree of randomness to the game, with dice-based charts dictating the effects of character abilities, a card flip determining when and how devastatingly the monsters attack, and even the resources required to make progress against the monsters appearing completely at random. It offers nothing akin to a role-playing experience, so those questing for that aspect of Dungeons & Dragons should probably look elsewhere.

But it does offer a little bit of tension, a goodly amount of casual fun, and its quick and easy to play, making it well-suited to the 10 and up crowd or a nice option for a summer vacation trip when the weather traps you inside (the horror!). And that’s why I’m giving this game 3.5 out of 5.