While I’m busy writing up a detailed ruleset, here’s an overview and brief description of each of the game phases to give you an idea of how the game will work.
Objective
Uncover and collect body parts from the graveyard. Once you have the right assortment of parts (a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs), you’ll reanimate them into a fearsome monster! Send your monster into the village to terrorize villagers, gaining their fear and respect and earning victory points. You can also conduct experiments on your monster to gain dark scientific knowledge, upgrade your castle to make it more foreboding (and gain bonuses and victory points), and buy and sell body parts on the illicit black market.
The game ends when two rounds are completed—by emptying the village of people or depleting the graveyard of body parts—and the scientist with the most victory points wins!
Phases
There are five phases in the game: Graveyard, Black Market, Laboratory, Castle, and Village. Each turn, players will take turns choosing from the available phases, and each player will take actions associated with the chosen phase. Players can’t choose phases that have already been chosen in the same turn. Once every player has had a turn to select a phase, the turn ends and all phases become become available to choose again.
Here are the five phases:
Graveyard
The graveyard is where you collect the body parts to build your monsters. Body parts come in four shapes: heads, torsos, arms, and legs—all of which you’ll need to reanimate a complete monster. These four parts come in three different forms:
Standard Parts
Standard parts are the bread and butter of your monster operation. They’re dealt face down from the graveyard deck. You’ll uncover closed graves to reveal these parts, and use your monsters and minions to dig the them up for you. Standard parts come in three flavors, which provide different attribute bonuses when used to build a monster:
- Fresh: +Health
- Rotting: +Science
- Putrefied: +Terror
Special Parts
Special parts provide unique bonuses and abilities to the monsters you create. They’re mixed into the graveyard deck along with the standard parts, and are acquired in the same way. Some special parts provide immediate bonuses when they’re used to reanimate a monster, others grant your monsters abilities that provide you with choices for a potential strategic advantage.
Skeletal Parts
Skeletal parts allow you to build your monsters quickly without waiting around to find the right parts. They can be taken freely from the boneyard, so you can choose exactly which parts you need. Unlike other parts, however, they don’t provide any additional bonuses to your monsters—they exist simply to keep your monster machine running in high gear.
The Graveyard in Action
Black Market
The Black Market
Laboratory
Your laboratory is where the magic happens. Here, you’ll discard the body parts you’ve collected to reanimate a variety of original monsters. You’ll also perform unnatural experiments on your more interesting monsters to gain arcane knowledge, represented by blue research cubes. Finally, you’ll apply that knowledge to make scientific discoveries in the form of research cards, which grant you a plethora of bonuses and upgrades.
Research Cards
Castle
Home is where the heart is … and the kidneys, and the spleen. Each player has his or her own castle board and may spend gold to purchase important castle upgrades. These improvements will not only make your castle more imposing, but will grant you victory points and important bonuses to further your strategy.
Castle Board
Village
If all goes according to plan, the village is where you’ll unleash your monsters to strike terror into the hearts of the locals, and hopefully, win their respect. The more fearsome your monster, the more villagers you’ll be able to scare, and the more victory points you’ll score. Beware the angrier townsfolk, though: they’re armed with pitchforks and torches and will damage your monsters, eventually destroying any that aren’t sturdy enough.
The Village
