Matthew BaileyObviously, the content of the Chucky films is totally not suitable for young children, but surprisingly, Chucky: The Game is. Apart from the image on the box cover and the general theme, it’s actually quite suitable to play with the family. Obviously, it’s up to you if you’re happy with the content, but in true Little Board Gamers style, I’m going to tell you if you can play this with your kids, and it’s a resounding yes, you can. And actually, it’s a pretty decent game that, if I’m being honest, I expected to be rubbish.
Chucky: The Game is a co-operative game where you are trying to find the Chucky card after you find a weapon card, in that very specific order. Essentially, there is a Chucky card, and this is the one you have to attack with one of the three weapons, which are also on cards. You put these three cards into a deck along with spooked cards, safe cards, and hiding spot cards, shuffle them all up, and then make a five-by-five grid.
On your turn, you can look and turn over a card, and depending on what it is, a number of things happen. If you turn over an empty card, you can choose to draw another adjacent card, or you can take one fear token. These come into play later, which I’ll explain in a minute.
If you find a hiding spot, great news, you get to remove two fear tokens.
If you turn over a spooked card, you take one fear token, plus another fear token equal to the number of empty spaces you revealed that turn, and then you provoke.
Now, provoking is one of the coolest bits of the game. The game comes with this really cool Chucky figure where he’s sitting looking normal on a little yellow box, and much like a game such as Crocodile Dentist or Pop-Up Pirate, you press the button the number of times you have to provoke. If you get unlucky, Chucky will suddenly jump up, raise his knife, and you take damage. Five damage to the group and you lose the game.
As this is such a small game and not that expensive, I was shocked that it came with such a cool little figure. If I’m completely honest, the reason I bought this was because I wanted the little Chucky figure to sit on my desk at home, being a massive horror movie fan. But the fact that I got a game I can play with the kids out of it that actually works really well with children was a big plus.
If you find a weapon card, you can attack an adjacent card, hoping to find Chucky (which you need to do twice to win the game), or you can provoke once and then use that weapon’s special ability, which in most cases gives you more options as to where you can look for Chucky.
If Chucky is found accidentally, you take damage. Alternatively, if all three weapons are out, then you have to reset a row and column of either Chucky or one of the weapons. You remove the nine cards that form the row and column, shuffle them up, and lay them back down, moving everything around. This leads to a really cool moment where you start to work out which cards might be Chucky or weapons, and which cards definitely aren’t. Keeping track of these is one of the main strategies for doing better in the game on future runs, and it’s something we really enjoyed discussing as a group.
Obviously, I know some people are never going to get this and have no interest in it, simply because it’s based on an adult horror film. But much like Alien: Fate of the Nostromo, Chucky: The Game is surprisingly family friendly, both in terms of its content (apart from one slightly scary Chucky card and the concept involving weapons) and its gameplay.
So I’ll leave it up to you, but if you’re a fan of the franchise, or even if you’re not and just want something Halloweeny, this is a really good, relatively cheap little co-operative card game that also gives you a really cool figure.
