We're All Going to Die Here: Reintroduction

Posted by Thorin Tabor on Sept. 20, 2018, 6 a.m.

Welcome to the latest post in our weekly design series, wherein I talk about the design of one of our upcoming games or review the design of one of our past games. The goal of these posts is to have a frank discussion on game design, both what works and what doesn't.

Today I want to talk about a game that we haven't written about in several years: our comedy horror card game, We're All Going to Die Here.

Spoofing the Horror Genre & Basic Concepts

If you're at all familiar with the horror movie genre, you're probably familiar with many of its clichés. Somewhere a group of teenagers venture into a spooky old house in the woods, where they encounter something horrific, and one-by-one they're killed until only one of them survives.

Yeah, it's been done to death, but that's kind of the point, as We're All Going to Die Here plays off and pokes fun at these clichés. In it, each player takes on the role of the victims, who wanders around the spooky locale getting into all sorts of trouble. Meanwhile, the monster picks off the victims one-by-one until only one survivor remains.

But this is not a game about surviving to the end of the night. This is a game about dying in the most hilarious and cliché way possible.

Over the course of the game the players will gain or lose two types of points: cliché and spotlight. Each round, the monster will kill the victim with the highest cliché, while the others will survive a little longer. Players who lose their victim aren't out of the game, but instead take on the role of shades, who make the remaining rounds all the more hazardous for the surviving victims.

In the end, it's not the necessarily survivor, but player who gathered the most spotlight who wins.

Design Goals

That's the basic premise, but now let's take a look at how that translates to the design goals that we've laid out for the game. The design goals are:

• Capture the feeling of the horror movie genre in a way that makes people laugh. Every card should play off a recognizable horror movie cliché.
• Play should be fast-flowing and quick to resolve. I want the entire game to run maybe 20 to 40 minutes, tops.
• The game should be easy to pick up and play with minimal instruction. I want the entire game rules to fit on a single card - ideally on a single side, but I'll settle for front and back.
• I want the game to have enough meat that veteran gamers can make choices that matter, but I don't want to paralyze casual players with those choices.
• I want to use the effects imposed by different combinations of victims and monsters to increase the game's replayability. Each monster card should fundamentally alter the game in some way and each victim card should give the player an ability to alters their optimal strategy.

In a future post I plan to examine some of the design decisions that we've made and how those have faired thus far in playtesting.

Conclusion

That's it for the reintroduction to We're All Going to Die Here. I hope it's been useful to anyone interested in game design or who might be interested in the games we have in the works. Tune in next week for the next post in the design series!

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