The Great Beast is Coming…

The village of Etharis has always been simple and peaceful … until now. The myths they’ve always shared as campfire tales have become truth. The Great Beast is real and is turning humans and animals into vicious aberrations. We’ll need a strong band of heroes to defend the village if we want a chance at survival. Are you up to the task?

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What Is It?

✨Theme – Horror
🎯Goal – Reach the end of the survival track before any of the following lose conditions: Reaching the end of the fear track; a hero is defeated; a map tile is filled with influence; you are unable to draw a Great Beast Card on the Great Beast turn
⚙️Cooperative
⚙️Variable Set-Up/Modular Boards – There are 16 scenarios with different set-up/lengths, and you can also adjust the difficulty of those
⚙️Variable Player Powers – There are 6 unique heroes and 6 unique classes you can mix and match for different combinations of abilities and actions
⚙️Bag Building – Players start with action tokens according to their hero and will add another token from their board each turn to expand their available actions, increase stats, and gain item cards
⚙️Dice Rolling (Combat) – You will often roll dice using certain stats for attacks. Aberrations will also roll when attacking you
⚙️Worker Placement – Players can use command actions to assign villagers to spots where they can take certain actions

Who Is It For?

👥1 to 4 Players – For me, it’s too long for solo. I think there’s more balancing to do with more players as you’ll usually have more monsters to deal with. I think I like it best at 2
👥Gamers Ages 14 & Up – It’s a medium weight game. I think it’s good for players familiar with handling multiple mechanisms at once
👥Fans of horror games, tower defense, cooperative games, and unique player abilities

PROS

🟢Aesthetics – A lot of cool art, a great vibe, and it all looks great on the table
🟢Components – Nice quality for everything – boards, tokens, minis, etc – including a nice insert to store everything
🟢Rules are well written and clear
🟢Turns are pretty snappy; rounds are very streamlined
🟢Detailed reference cards
🟢Great theme
🟢Loved that the transformation cards had some good effects too, so it didn’t feel as bad after already taking damage
🟢Variability – Lots of scenarios to choose from plus options for changing difficulty, so good replay value

CONS

🔴I wish I got to bag build a bit more – you’ll usually only get a max number of tokens based on how many rounds the game is
🔴Set-up and clean-up are a bit of a slog
🔴Would have liked a bit more variety in objectives

Final Thoughts

There are a bunch of mechanisms rolled into one here which can sometimes feel clunky, but I think this is well done. Gameplay is very smooth moving phase to phase and round to round, and everything is laid out well in both the rulebook and reference material to help keep players moving. I think the game has good moments of tension at times, which highlights the horror theme well. And beyond the mechanisms working well together, I think the game also just looks cool on the table!

I do wish I got to bag build a little bit more, and maybe that there was more “story” or “flavor text” elements to the different scenarios, but those are minor things.

Overall, it’s a great choice for any horror fans who like cooperative games and these mechanisms.

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Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 7.5/10

Designer – Peter Lee
Artists – Suzanne Helmigh (II), Ona Kristensen, Lucas Torquato
Publisher – Ghostfire Gaming
MSRP – $84.99
Website
Gamefound – Reprint