Skip to main content

Trails To Tremble By

Once again I have to ask what it is with the horror themed board games. I'm a fan of board games, and I'm a fan of horror, but why are there so many of them? I guarantee they're 70% of this blog at this point! Although, this is a weird one because it's technically not even got a board. That's right, this is one of those rarities that falls into that iffy category of "is it or is it not a board game?" and on a technicality level, yeah, I have a hard time qualifying it as such. But, this is the blog for board games, and it comes in a board game box and so that's that. But yes, this is not technically a board game, it's actually a tile laying game, which, and I can't believe I even have to SAY this...tile laying is not scary in the slightest.

According to Board Game Geek, the description is as follows:

"Each player selects 10 "spooky" tiles of either witches, monsters, ghosts, or buzzards, plus one crossroad and one tombstone. The first player then picks one of the 40 road tiles and places it in the center of the table. Each player then adds a road piece, making sure the road continues without a dead end or circling into itself. Every time you form a three-sided space, you fill it with one of your spooky tiles, making sure it does not block the road. After you have added 5 of your spooky tiles, add the tombstone, and then the rest of your pieces. The winner is the first to use all their pieces and add the Haunted House tile to the road."

The odd thing is, near as I can tell as I said before, there's no board to begin with, so to call this a board game proper is a bit of a stretch. In fact, it's actually kind of unique in that you sort of build the board yourself as you go. Instead of having a token player piece, you're creating the path to victory yourself. That's not something I think we've ever seen before now.

Essentially the goal is the same, you're still trying to reach an endpoint, in this case a haunted house specifically. Why you would be fighting against others to reach such a destination first is a question for an entirely different person, but who knows, maybe there's treasure in the house. Maybe it's one of those "Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" situations where someone's stashed a load of cash inside it and whoever gets to it first is the lucky winner. I don't know, I'm not the one out here trying to beat others to a clearly damned domicile. I'm just taking potshots in the dark at speculating their reasons for doing so.

The art of the box and the tiles as well is actually quite fun to look at though, I will say.

It's all very kid friendly, but that's not at all a bad thing. Let's remember that, especially back in this day, board games were mostly a lucrative kids market. But these look almost like something out of old Hannah Barbara cartoons, and I for one love 'em. That ghost especially is something I almost wanna get tattooed over my asscrack, like any good tramp stamp loving goth girl would do. With his collar and his tie, he looks like he's vaguely annoyed at his position within the afterlife. Like, he's dead, but he still has to go to work, and that's got to be a upsetting realization once you've crossed over I'd imagine. I also love the pseudo spooky green coloration of the tile backgrounds. It's really the perfect color for this sort of thing.

Ultimately, Trails to Tremble By isn't anything to really remember, if we're being honest. That isn't to put it down, either. It's got a unique concept of board building, the artwork is pretty solid, and it's a cute concept on the whole. But it's also not something that's ever going to stand out and be remembered as a classic. I think, if nothing else, it sits simply as yet another inclusion in the already overwhelmingly saturated genre of spooky adjacent board games. There's nothing wrong with it at all, but there's also nothing spectacular about it either, and I think that's kind of a nice place to sit, really.

Honestly, "Trails to Tremble By" sounds like the name of a podcast where two hosts discuss hikers who've vanished and were never found, and that sounds entertaining as hell.

Released in 1971 by The Western Publishing company (a more vague name for a board game producing company I could not fathom), the game has, as seems to be the case these days with these posts, no artist or designer credited that I can find, and that's a damn shame, cause I really want the people who did the art and design for this to know how much I love it. One of the worst sins a board game can make, and they make it often sadly, is not being visually engaging. There's nothing worse than not having any visual personality whatsoever, and thankfully this one doesn't suffer from that. This has a very distinct look, and I hope the folks who put in the time and effort making it are proud of their work, because they certainly deserve to be.

And I swear to you, whoever you are and wherever you are game designers and artists, one day I WILL get that angry little workplace ghost tattooed right over my ass crack, just to make you proud. Or wildly uncomfortable. Either way works for me, really. I just want a ghost tramp stamp.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dogfight

Dogfight is, right off the bat, presented by absolutely killer artwork. But it's also presented by a rather honest combination of words, "American Heritage". It's true, the only thing more American than fighting in a war is starting a war. It's our national past time. Baseball? Nah, fuck Baseball. War is what we here in the USofA strive for. Like Screamin' Eagles, we have yet another plane fight board game, but unlike Screamin' Eagles this one is based in World War 1 and not whenever the hell Screamin' Eagles is supposedly based. I'm gonna go ahead and say in the 80s, and the Cold War, just to make it more interesting. Released in 1962 by Milton-Bradley under their American Heritage line of the Command Decision series of board games, with art by Charles H. Hubbell, it's a 45 minute game that can have up to 4 players and, much like Screamin' Eagles two decades later, also utilizes cards because, well, it's a board game and you kind of ne...
1 comment
Read more

Conspiracy

What if I were to tell you that Conspiracy doesn't exist? That, in fact, Milton Bradley has denied it ever existing, and that those who have looked into the game, trying to determine its legitimacy, have suddenly and mysteriously gone missing. Would you believe me? Of course not, because that's ridiculous. But that's what conspiracies are, absolutely ridiculous things that nobody should believe. Then again, there was a period of time where conspiracies were much more fun. When they were more along the lines of "I think there's a giant sea monster living in a lake and the government is hiding its existence because they're afraid of mass public reaction" and less along the lines of "the government is inserting chips into our children to brainwash them into the queer agenda." One is plausible, one is ridiculous. And, in case you for some reason had to ask, the plausible one is the sea monster. I figured that went without clarification, but in thes...
Post a Comment
Read more

Electronic Mall Madness

Boy, growing up in the 80s/90s, as I did, if you asked where girls lived, you'd often get the response, "The mall!" because people just thought teenage girls lived and died at the mall. And while I did visit the mall a lot as an adolescent, I assure you it wasn't to take advantage of THESE GREAT LOW PRICED DEALS! It was more to either buy a book now and then, or escape my family, and often much more the second than the first. It wasn't about social interaction or spending money, it was about having the chance to actually get out of the house and away from the people who constantly wanted to hurt me. So to make a board game based on a mall, something that, these days, seems to sort of be in its death throes, is a pretty great concept that I'm all for. Even as much of a stereotype as "girls love the mall" might have become, let me tell you, as someone who was once a teenage girl, it's 100% true. See a stereotype is a stereotype often because they...
Post a Comment
Read more