1756: City of Slightly Less Horror Than Usual

We played the board game City of Horror earlier today. I’m never quite sure whether or not I genuinely like this game as, frankly, it’s a horrible little game that actively encourages its participants to backstab, lie and cheat one another under the pretenses of working together to survive a zombie apocalypse.

At least, that’s what I thought it was prior to our game today.

A little background for those unfamiliar: City of Horror casts players in the role of several zombie apocalypse clichés and tasks them with surviving from midnight until 4am — just four turns, which doesn’t sound like all that much — until the arrival of the rescue helicopter, at which point the survivors need to take an antidote in order to survive, and whoever has the most points worth of surviving, non-zombified people remaining at the end — plus any bonuses — wins the game.

Now, what normally happens with this game — which we tend to play with our full regular group of five people — is that we start out with relatively good intentions, but before long someone does something unpleasant. It might be a little white lie that gets a character killed; it might be refusing to help in a dangerous situation; it might be completely reneging on a deal previously made, since there is no rule that says you have to keep up your end of the bargain when you make an arrangement with another player. Ultimately, there is only one “winner” on points, and so much of the interest in the game comes from determining how to get yourself into an advantageous situation while simultaneously making life awkward for other players.

It’s an interesting game in that it’s highly social and based on interaction. The mechanics are relatively simple, and a lot of the time things boil down to taking a vote on things — whether that’s choosing who gets thrown out of the window to sate the zombies’ hunger this turn, or who gets the supplies that had been air-dropped into a particular location. There’s a surprising amount of flexibility, and the game is wonderful for creating emergent narratives surrounding the various characters, all of whom are B-movie archetypes of various descriptions.

Now, the interesting thing that happened today is that we played it short one regular team member — the one who is often at the centre of the backstabbing and unpleasantness that typically accompanies a game of City of Horror. This may paint him in a somewhat unfavourable light, so I’ll qualify this by saying that he’s actually a very nice guy with a fine sense of humour, but something about this game brings out something very primal in him; a desire to win without caring who he has to tread on on the way to the top.

Halfway through the game we played today, which was, as previously mentioned, lacking this troublesome teammate, we realised that none of us had lost any survivors. This is particularly unusual, as City of Horror is a somewhat cutthroat game, even if you’re cooperating fully with one another and not attempting to screw one another over. But we’d somehow made it to halfway through without anyone causing anyone else’s death, and without any unfortunate circumstances leading to anyone’s death, either.

We jokingly suggested that we should try and make it to the end of the game with everyone surviving. No-one around the table was initially sure whether or not everyone else really intended to hold true to this promise, but as the game continued, it became clear that people were actively working together rather than against one another. Discussions happened about the best course of action. Information was shared that could easily have been kept secret. Opportunities to get one up on the other players were cast aside in the name of cooperation and collaboration.

This doesn’t mean that there was no tension, of course. There was mistrust, somewhat mitigated through some of the game mechanics that allow you to take a degree of “insurance” against anyone messing with you. In my case, I came into possession of some information that would have been of use to the group as a whole, and I was very tempted to lie completely about it — an action that would have probably got several of my opponents’ characters killed. And in the last turn, it would have been extremely easy for one player to run away with things and take the complete victory.

The strange thing is that these things never happened. We cooperated and collaborated right up until the end, and the eventual result was that all sixteen characters who started the game were still alive at the end — well, with the exception of one, who didn’t have an antidote and consequently died after we’d “won” as a group.

It was a peculiar experience, unlike anything I’ve encountered in City of Horror before, and I really enjoyed it. One of my tablemates, who typically prefers competitive games rather than cooperative experiences, commented that he didn’t find it quite as fun as usual, but he was impressed that we’d managed to maintain our uneasy four-way alliance up until the end. Mostly, it was interesting to see that it is possible to complete a game of City of Horror without anyone dying, because the game’s general difficulty level makes it seem as if that simply wasn’t the case.

But, well, it turns out it is. I don’t know if we’ll ever see that happen again, because after all the nastiness of City of Horror is one of its main gimmicks that makes it appealing to our group. But for now, it was good to see that even given plenty of opportunities to be assholes to one another, we all took the noble route and helped one another out to ultimate victory.