Always been in meat.

In honor of Halloween and the fact that three distinct Texas Chainsaw Massacre games have come out in 2023, I present the first of a slightly different type of post: a triple feature! There will be no intermissions. Chainsaw go brrr.

As of right now these are the only TCM games I’m aware of. Next year has some sort of escape-game coming to shelves as well, but I don’t feel like waiting. I’ll be discussing these in order of Bubba-ness, from “yeah I guess this is Texas Chainsaw” to “this may actually give you goosebumps”. Any given one of them may be your favorite to actually play; the second one in particular was very well liked by everyone who touched it. Let’s rev this thing and ask the infamous TCM2 question: how good are you?

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Sumo Nottingham/Gun Interactive)

I wrote about some of my issues with the TCM video game a few months ago. I won’t reiterate them all here, we have a lot of ground to cover with the others. That said I will give it some acknowledgement, even if it is the worst of the 3 games to come out this year.

There certainly has not been another asymmetric multiplayer game quite like TCM. Exactly 7 players, 3v4, with unique characters in all slots? That’s a wild premise and the game does manage to make it work on some level. On release players were running frantically, trying to figure out the game’s various escape methods in real time as the family struggled to navigate the mazey maps. It was a good time, albeit a janky one. But that honeymoon has ended and what remains is not so rosy.

The problem here is that it’s too little skin stretched over too large a frame. Sumo would like people to return to this game again and again, but leveling a character is only worth doing once since you can respec at will and play whichever build you please. Said builds are interesting, sure, but they also rely on semi-random unlocks that people just reroll over and over until they get one that’s borderline or actually broken. Given the glacial pace of updates for the game including bug fixes this fractured the playerbase, to the point where unless you run an exactly 7 person private lobby you’d be hard pressed to get a game where the intended experience is experience-able.

Put simply, it’s a game with foundations too brittle to support the playerbase it wants. Now that the game has been left to breathe a bit, it’s become increasingly clear that they aren’t prepared to make the changes it needs to help it survive long-term. No Halloween event, DLC with gameplay content indefinitely delayed (and for an additional fee), and a general lack of urgency to please casual or competitive players unless the audience is just really into paying $15 for skins. Per Steam Charts its player count has plummeted on the platform, and it’s reasonable to guess that similar has occurred on others. The game is bleeding, and nobody is left the victor.

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE BOARD GAME (Scott Rogers/Trick or Treat Studios)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the movie I mean, I need to specify) – predates my beloved Halloween by 4 years. There’s no room to argue that it’s in some small part responsible for the slasher genre no matter how different its structure is. Sure it has a lot to say about class, how the rich tend to throw rural areas away the moment their profits dip, and the impact of generational violence, but it’s also a movie about a scary man with a chainsaw and can be enjoyed on that level. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Board Game is for the fans who think the later movies in the series were good too, and it will not disappoint them.

TCMBG is a cooperative push your luck game where you wander through the Sawyer/Slaughter estate, put tokens into a bag, and are constantly chased by Leatherface because he doesn’t like when you touch his tokens. The system is simple, almost feeling like some sort of unreleased retro title that just got reprinted, and I mean that in a complimentary sense. You’re looking for enough gas canisters (player count -1) and the van keys, but there are like 50 spots to look so it takes a bit of effort, and boy that chainsaw is sharp.

The most notable mechanical piece is the aforementioned luck-pushery. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before – draw collected chits from the faux-leather bag, resolving the good and the bad, stopping whenever you think is best. If you ever draw 3 of a kind (other than extra actions which are typically the best thing) you’re done drawing. What’s brilliant is how you’re often pushing each other’s luck rather than your own. Leatherface is a simple lad and only chases the nearest player, not the active one. As such you’re often risking the lives of your friends, not your own, when you decide to get greedy or are just particularly unlucky. I’ve had numerous instances of players asking each other for permission to keep pushing, or being shocked when someone keeps pushing despite Leatherface getting ever closer, and those moments are primo.

Tonally the game is a bit strange, bordering on wacky. I almost wonder if TCM 2’s more comedic cast would have been a more appropriate source material choice but I doubt it would’ve sold as well. For one it opts to refer to the family as the Slaughters, something that wasn’t done until later on in the franchise. Between the video game calling the non-family players Victims and TCM Slaughterhouse (the other board game, more on that one in a moment) calling them Trespassers, it seems notable that this game just refers to them as “players/characters”. It’s not interested in taking itself overly seriously. You’re here to play TCM-What-If-Simulator and that’s what you’ll get. It knows what it is, and it’s good at being that.

After several plays we’ve found this game impressive, not for any given mechanical function, but for its ability to tell stories. One of our best sessions had us turning over almost every tile searching for the keys only to discover that they were in the Killing Room, the absolute worst spot on the map. After spotting them, Franklin, who is in a wheelchair if you weren’t aware, heroically sacrificed himself by Tokyo Drifting into the Killing Room, snagging the keys, and getting them as far as the front yard by ramping through the dining room window before crashing and being dragged back inside to his doom. By contrast we’ve also had games where a handful of bumbling morons just get chain-a-mole’d by Leatherface without ever finding the keys in the first place. Both extremes have had us laughing, bemoaning the characters’ horrible fates while adding plenty of color commentary. Players have commented that it was reminiscent of Camp Grizzly, only more fun to actually play, and I’d broadly agree. Shorter and actually in print, too!

Between this game and ALIEN: Fate of the Nostromo, Scott Rogers has proven his ability to adapt the essence of a license into an appealing and approachable board game. This is a fantastic Halloween event box, one that perfectly captures the tension of a slasher always nipping at your heels and the bad decisions that situation can inspire. It’s also won over non-TCM fans I’ve played with more easily than either of the other games, telling compelling stories each play regardless of the outcome. And I really like it! Easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys a theme-first co-op experience. But as good as it is, it is not my favorite Bubbagame.

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: SLAUGHTERHOUSE (Prospero Hall/Funko Games)

It’s been argued that the original TCM movie is far more “artful” than many of the films it inspires. As I mentioned earlier it’s a movie containing a lot of thoughts, though maybe not a lot of arguments, on challenging topics via the lens of cannibal madmen. Horror has always been a place where people immediately turn to push the boundaries of their medium, often serving as the testing ground before what works is taken and applied to other genres. You need only look at the influence of survival horror on action games as a whole (Resident Evil 4, anyone?) to see this play out in video games, and we’d be here all day if I got into the broader topic of horror movies so I’ll spare you.

Am I saying Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Slaughterhouse is the Resident Evil 4 of board games? Ehhhhh. I’d like to for SEO reasons but no, that’s presumptuous and maybe a bit of an oversell. Let’s go with Resident Evil 3: it’s iterating on foundations found elsewhere in its genre (asymmetric Ameritrash dice chuckers), but doing so with so many new ideas and refinements that it has immediately cemented itself as best in class.

TCM:S is shockingly experimental despite being published by the company that makes those awful vinyl paperweights. For one thing, it has no winners. Characters may perish terribly or escape with long-term CTEs from hammer blows, but the game is uninterested in considering either outcome a “victory”. The trespassers (1-4 players) will attempt to escape after finishing the scenario’s objective, and the Sawyers (a single player) will try to stop them. Simple as.

That framing in and of itself warrants some focus. Regardless of which of the game’s 5 scenarios you play, all of them center on the Sawyers dealing with a home invasion. Granted one of them is just some heatstroke-stricken folks looking for gasoline and stumbling in through an unlocked door, but most of them are openly hostile, with young adults taking photos as a dare or vengeful friends and family committing arson as retribution for the family’s prior acts. It casts the Sawyers in the most sympathetic light of this year’s 3 games, and that uncomfortable “no heroes, no winning” framing setting you on edge is exactly what the game wants its players to sit with.

Regardless of which side you’re on you’re going to be chucking a lot of dice. Almost everything worth doing in TCM:S is going to require what’s essentially a skill check. Its dice (hideous knuckle-looking things, I love them) are numbered 0/0/0/1/1/2, meaning every action involves flipping some slightly lopsided coins. It gives both sides a sense of swinginess, often fumbling but occasionally delivering blowout moments: digging through all of the Sawyer’s belongings in one go, knifing a hostile family member in the gut to immobilize them for a turn, or of course, chainsawing someone right down the middle. You will roll them bones and you will like it.

So what’s actually happening? Typically the trespassers are trying to find items in the Sawyer estate, get them to specific spots on the map for a task, then get out. Going into further detail would be a bit of a waste but each scenario feels distinct both mechanically and thematically despite the deck-digging, like a more focused version of the TCM video game’s 4-way split. It’s in the turn-to-turn interplay where this game sets itself apart, as almost everything the trespassers do generates some amount of noise tokens which will convert to fear at the end of their turn. Fear is the Sawyer’s currency, the means by which they get everything done. It’s an elegant, thematically solid system that finds a way to reward both sides. You can sneak around and generate minimal noise, leaving the Sawyers to pick their battles carefully. Alternatively, being quick and efficient saves turns but also more noise, and you will dread handing over a fistful of tokens that they’ll beat you to death with later.

Said deathbeating is one of the game’s most interesting elements. Like TCMBG you only start with one family member, only this time it’s Cook/The Old Man and he don’t take no pleasure in killing. Which is to say he can’t! He can maim, and he can yell at the intruders to generate fear or even drag them around, but he can’t finish the job. His kin need to arrive to really turn up the heat, and that only happens when the panic meter gets high enough. First Grandpa, waking up wherever he sees fit, who essentially acts as a sentry. Then Hitchhiker, zooming around the perimeter of the house and creeping through windows, straight razor clutched in his teeth. Lastly – so much so that he may not even appear in every game – Leatherface, who is the foil to Cook in every way as he effortlessly cleaves through trespassers. If Bubba is on the board it is already too late for everyone to escape. He is terror incarnate, exactly as he should be.

And the combat itself, while simple, still presents mechanical innovation as well as thematic grounding. This game doesn’t have “health points” or anything so abstract. Rather, each success rolled by an attacking Sawyer gives them a flip of the injury deck, chock full of debuffs applied to 4 different body parts. They only ever get to apply 1 at a time (except for Leatherface because he has a damn chainsaw) but harder hits grant more options, meaning injuries are more likely to stick. It’s as quick as it is clever, with every injury significantly hampering that trespasser to the point where their team may well decide to cut them loose when it comes to the actual escape.

That’s the final piece I want to highlight: escape. When the objective is finally finished the escape condition can be met by any combination of players, including individuals. For some scenarios that can just mean running away from the house, but for others that means something as final as leaving in a car. Any trespassers who meet the condition can just go. Escape. Leave their friends. It achieves everything the video game wanted to: the tension between survival and altruism, deciding in the moment what your friends’ lives are worth when weighed against your own.

It’s this tone, this mood, this game’s sinister aura, that makes it truly notable as one of very few great tabletop horror games. Unlike the other board game this is not a pick for your sugared up Halloween party, it’s too focused and brooding for that. Hell, there’s a very real chance Bubba won’t even show up in some plays! An incredibly bold design choice that aids the game’s narrative, but also likely won’t deliver on what your average player wants a TCM game to be. Instead this is a fit for your dedicated game group that wants to dig into a title. It rewards replays, both with unlocks via achievements and with its own depth, in a manner we rarely see from boxed horror titles.

TCM: Slaughterhouse isn’t just a great TCM game, it’s an original and excellent design that succeeds at pushing boundaries in directions we rarely if ever see in the world of licensed adaptations. A good licensed game captures the source material, but a great one delivers on the emotional highs and allows players the ability to create their own stories in the setting instead of just remixing the established one. TCM:S is the latter and I can name precious few competing games on its level. We deserve more games like this.