Horror is a genre that, unlike others, sort of thrives on repetition. Also unlike other genres, this repetition isn’t necessarily a negative. Between three DRACULA films I’d have a hard time choosing a favorite between the 1931 Universal edition, the 1957 Hammer one, or even the underrated 1970 Jess Franco adaption because all three do something entirely different.

Reimagining, reinventing, and re-contextualizing of horror ideas in all mediums- including board games keeps centuries-old terrors like vampires and werewolves fresh in our minds and keeps them current. One of the things that make traditional horror concepts and symbols timeless is that they speak to and comment on certain elements within the human psyche. It’s one of the things that separate a lot of modern horror, which relies on effective but base shock tactics, from classic horror that depends largely on atmosphere, a sense of dread, and a mounting of tension between our frame of reality and something lurking outside of it.

With those thoughts about horror in mind and with Halloween just days away, I find myself approaching the review of Flying Frog Productions’ latest game A TOUCH OF EVIL almost more from the perspective of a life-long fan of classic horror than as a board gamer. Out of the box, I will say that A TOUCH OF EVIL more than earns its place among great horror board games such as FURY OF DRACULA and ARKHAM HORROR despite an awful lot of borrowed mechanics, almost clichéd adventure game tropes, and an embarrassingly awful visual style that calls to mind photographs from an amateur DARK SHADOWS costume party.

But there also isn’t any other game on the market that has such a novel setting (the post-colonial America of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne) But that’s kind of how it is with horror in any medium—sometimes you have to overlook deficiencies in quality, literacy, and narrative cohesion to get at those golden moments when the genre totally works and even if for just a view minutes you’re totally immersed and that supernatural something almost- fleetingly- feels tangibly real.

The adventure board game is another genre that thrives on repetition and lives and breathes by those magical moments where the collective narrative created by the players and in-game situations transcends the base mechanics to become something great, and this is a quality that really shows in A TOUCH OF EVIL. Between the desperate race that the characters must undertake to track down the chief villain (who may be a Scarecrow, a Spectral Horseman, a Vampire, or a Werewolf), the evocative flavor text on the cards, the hugely thematic presence of a council of six Town Elders who all harbor secrets and directly affect play, and the suggestive and spooky encounters the players face as they explore the lonely, haunted village of Shadowbrook and its environs the game succeeds like few others in terms of creating a sense of a living game world, of completely contextualizing the game’s events and player interactions. It’s an element that really differentiates A TOUCH OF EVIL from any other game where players draw adventure cards, roll dice, and gather items.

You’ve practically played this game before and the last thing I care to do in this review is give the reader a comprehensive recap of the mechanics because for one thing, they aren’t very original and for another I think they’re totally secondary to the theme, narrative, and atmosphere the game offers. To sum it up, two to eight players all get a character with special abilities and unique attributes and on your turn you roll a die, move to space, and encounter whatever is there in terms of minions or printed-on-the-board events.

Hit points, stat boosts, and all the other trappings of RPG-style adventure board games are present and handled in a simple, accessible fashion. The game offers competitive, cooperative, and team-based play with automated systems handling the antagonist and his affiliates, such as a per-turn “Mystery Card” draw, unique Minion charts for each of the villains, and an ever-advancing Shadow Track which ends the game in player loss if it runs out. The die system is a simple pool-based mechanic where you roll X number of dice where X is your skill rating, looking for fives and sixes to count as successes. There is a currency in the game which strangely abstracts both information (like the clue tokens in ARKHAM HORROR) and money. Anyone who has played any adventure game published in the last thirty years could almost play A TOUCH OF EVIL without reading the rules.

However, for good horror- and good adventure board games- to be successful in terms of staking out the things that make it unique, different, and modern it has to offer something new and fortunately A TOUCH OF EVIL has a couple of twists up its sleeve that keep it from being overly derivative. The Town Elder concept is absolutely genius and really speaks to the attention to theme this game features; players have the opportunity throughout the game to investigate the randomly-assigned secrets of the ruling class and may reveal that they’re drunks, cowards, voyeurs, or even in league with the villain themselves. Or they could turn out to be the villain. There are also Mystery Cards that cause living Elders to interact and interfere with other game elements- the town Reverend can burn all the books in play out of panic or the Magistrate can confiscate all the guns in the Town market deck.

The chief function of the Elders is to give the players a little extra muscle when it comes time to track down the villain to his lair for the final showdown- players get to pick two to accompany them so it pays off to know ahead of time if they’re going to wind up running back to town. The other really ingenious and highly thematic mechanical concept is Lair cards, which must be purchased by the players using the investigation tokens they’ve gathered during play.

Early in the game, they’re prohibitively expensive but as the villain shows its hand more and more and the Shadow Track advances they become less expensive. It adds an interesting time pressure element not only due to the fact that players lose the game if the Shadow Track runs out, but in competitive and team play games there is a definite race to the final showdown that demands attention. With a lair card in hand, the player can march his character out to the Abandoned Keep, the Covered Bridge, or wherever the monster might be hiding, pay another fee to find them at home in their lair, and a fight-to-the-death showdown commences. All that’s missing is a burning windmill, pitchforks, and torches.