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JAWS: The Game

Horror movies are a great source of inspiration for games. The bigger the horror movie, the more potential for success the game has, and when you take something like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and make it into a game, provided it’s a fun game, you can pretty much well guarantee you are onto a winner.

Jaws is the blockbuster film from the 70s, based on a book by Peter Benchley, that launched Spielberg’s career and has had several video games based upon it, such as Jaws Unleashed on the Playstation 2 and PC and Jaws: Ultimate Predator on the Nintendo 3DS, not to mention a Super Nintendo game called simply Jaws, that came out in 1987, but more recently several board game companies have swam up to the licence and eaten it with much ferocity. We have had the inevitable Jaws Monopoly, the Funkoverse Strategy Game: Jaws (which comes with two smaller sized Funko Pops to appease the worldwide cult of Pop fans), and this game, from Ravensburger, titled simply Jaws.

Ravensburger make some amazingly thematic board game (if you haven’t tried Villainous, give it a go. It is Disney themed but lots of fun), and Jaws is one of those games that follows the basic plot of the film. This game is a three versus one game, with three players playing Quint, Brody and Hooper as they attempt to destroy the fourth player, who plays the big shark. This game is right in fashion of the current video game trend of have one vs many games like Dead by Daylight (also coming soon as a board game) and Evil Dead the Game.

This gameplay is divided into two halves. This first half of the game, on one side of the board, has a map of Amity Island and sees the human players attempting to stop Jaws from eating swimmers and at the same time attempt to locate the shark with location barrels. Each player has a series of things they can do in their turn which is thematic to the character, as is their extra special abilities, like Hooper’s fish finder for example.

Quint and Hooper spend their time searching for the shark by placing location barrels in the water, which the shark attempts to avoid, whilst Brody shuts beaches and delivers more barrels to the docks for them to use… Brody’s piece doesn’t go in the water because you know, Brody doesn’t like the water.

You might be asking yourself,’ but how does the shark avoid being located? Doesn’t the player have a piece on the boards?’ The answer to that is no, the shark player uses a separate notebook to record where on the map, signified by map locations, and doesn’t place their piece on the board until they have been spotted. They move around eating swimmers secretly, only revealing where they are if they go through a space with a barrel, or if they are spotted from the beach by Brody, or when they chow down on a beach goer.

Each turn, an Amity Event phase card is revealed which shows a special ability one of the players may have in that turn, but also deposits more swimmers in the water!

This first part of the game is finished when one of two things happen: either the shark ends up with two barrels attached and their position fully revealed, or they eat nine swimmers. How the Act Two of the game plays out is decided by how successful either team have been. If the shark eats more swimmers, it gets a higher amount of special ability cards in the second act, but if the humans stop them early enough, they get extra gear to stop the shark.

For the second act sees the board turn over to reveal a sunken version of the shop The Orca, where undamaged images of the ship overlays are placed on top. Cards are issues to either team regarding their success in the previous act. For example, if the shark ate five swimmers before having two barrels attached, they would receive six shark ability cards, and the crew would get seven pieces of crew gear.

Each turn the shark attacks the boat and the crew prepare themselves for the attack. The shark player reveals each turn where they MIGHT attack, giving the crew an opportunity to be ready to defend, and play continues as the shark either slowly sinks the boat, attacking the crew and having them lose their life points, or the crew are able to kill the shark with lucky dice rolls in combination with their gear.

Obviously there is a lot more to this than my summary here, and I suggest you take a look at Becca Scott’s How to play Jaws YouTube Video ( How to Play Jaws – YouTube ) before purchase if you want a better idea of how to play.

*The Jaws board game instruction manual*

Thematically, this game is amazing. The pieces all represent their characters well, and the dividing of the two acts is a clever way to play the game. The instructions are clear and concise and well-illustrated, with some great examples of play.

The game is lots of fun and that to be expected from designers Prospero Hall, who gave us the previously mentioned Villainous, as well as other thematically on-point games like Horrified, Fast and Furious: Highway Heist and Godzilla: Tokyo Clash.

I do have to say I have one problem with it and that is the player count. This is a three vs one game, and whilst I appreciated that the instructions say that it can be played with one player playing all the crew, or two players sharing one crew member, but it is much less fun. When three players are the crew there is a lot of discussion as to what to do next, where with one player, they sit studiously in silence for several minutes while they decide what each crew member will do. As the shark player, knowing where you are in act one and watching as three people talk about how they are NO WHERE near you is a great deal of joy, and that’s what games are all about, right? Fun and interaction!

Score: ***1/2

HORRIFIED

HORRIFIED is from Ravensberger games, and designed by Prospero Hall, the game design team behind Ramen Fury, Villainous, Jaws and the Funkoverse games (amongst others), and in this game, the players play a variety of heroes, who are helping defend a village against the threat of a collective of monsters from the Universal Monster movies (Dracula, the Wolfman, the Monster of Frankenstein, the Bride of Frankenstein, the Mummy, Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Invisible Man).

The objective of the game is to beat the monsters by achieving a variety of objectives before they terrorise the town too much, shown by the ‘Terror track’, which goes up every time time they kill a hero or villager, or if you run out of cards in the ‘monster deck’.

The game is set up by the players selecting their hero, each who have a variety of special abilities, and what monsters they wish to fight. The instructions suggest that in the first game you play you should use the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dracula. Also each player gets a ‘perk’ card which allows them a little extra something special, like a movement bonus’ once per game. Also, 12 item tokens have to be distributed to their respective locations.

Each turns sees one player performing how many actions they can do, as declared on their player card, which can include move, collect items, guide villager, deliver items to various locations (which will provide you the tools to defeat a monster),defeat monster, exchange items with another player or your special ability.

After the player has taken their turn, a monster card is revealed from the monster pack and indicates various threatening things the monsters can do. Basically, most things they do, if not deflected by a player, causes the terror track to go up by one, which you don’t want to happen. The monster cards also increase the amount of items on the board, and can also reveal the location of a villager, who may be killed by the monster if you don’t save them by taking them to their safe house…. yep, yet ANOTHER mission that if you fail will cause the terror track to increase!

Each of the monsters has different condition to defeat them:

Dracula – smash his 4 coffins hidden throughout the board

Creature from the Black Lagoon – send a boat to the lagoon by delivering items to the camp

Invisible Man – deliver clue items to the Precinct

The Frankensteins – stop them from meeting until they have both learned to be ‘human’ by giving them items as gifts

Wolfman – find a cure by delivering items to the laboratory

Mummy – solve the puzzle by delivering items to the museum

After you have solved these quests, the simple thing to do next is to kill the monsters, usually by landing on their space with a particular amount of items tokens, or in the case of the Frankensteins, getting them to meet so they can fall in LOOOOOOVVVVEEEE!

This is a co-operative game, but for those who love to play buy don’t get an opportunity too often to get together with other gamers, this also has a solo mode. The miniatures for the monsters are also pretty cool and are dying for a lick of paint.

It would be remiss of me to not point out the awesome art work, reminiscent of the great artwork from Basil Gogos, the artist behind the covers of the legendary horror movie magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland.

This game is a great alternative to board game legend Pandemic from Matthew Leacock and plays very similarly but with the far less scary threat of the Universal Monsters rather than, in a Covid-19 world, a killer virus. It’s also a fair bit easier, though I must say my gaming group smashed a two-monster game, but got smashed by the three-monster game. Actually, people who like Pandemic will either think this is a great alternative or far too derivative. We love Pandemic at my place and having a Universal Monster alternative for the horror aspect of it, is pretty cool.

Score: ****

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JAWS: The Game

Board Game Review: Horrified