YOU Are the Maniac! – Game Overview and Review
In the world of horror board games and card games, there is a glut of games where you and your fellow players portray the victims. The mechanics of the game itself act as the villain, or another player takes that role. These asymmetric games can be quite good, but they leave many players aching to be the bad guy, the maniac, and go after innocent (or not-so-innocent) victims to their blackened heart’s content. For those players, I present YOU Are the Maniac! (YATM for short). This wicked card game is designed to scratch just that itch, except with a chainsaw.
Photo Credit: Tiffany Hahn
COMPONENTS:
As a simple card game, YATM doesn’t need to shine very hard in the area of components. The four decks, Victim, Maniac, Plot Twist, and Final Girl, are printed on casino-style card stock, resulting in sturdy cards with a nice SNAP! when you shuffle them. The colors, particularly blood red, really pop, which is always nice. No washed out, muddy colors here. Your victims will have a hard time hiding in the shadows. The four decks have very distinct back designs, which makes clean up at the end of a game simple. The art on the face side of the cards is appropriately nightmarish, if not a tiny bit amateurish. Some of the characters are downright SUREAL. One victim, poor “Saul the Stoner” looks so outrageously deformed, his card provides enough horror to last the entire game. Victim cards are the cards you are fighting to collect throughout the game to give you points. Maniac cards allow you to manipulate the rows of Victims and allow you to take/kill the Victim card with the highest value. Plot Twist Cards alter the direction of the game to your advantage or to your opponent’s disadvantage. The Final Girl cards represent special victims that you face at the end of each round (which the game calls “movies” – there are three rounds or “movies,” so you a playing out a “trilogy”).
Believe it or not, one of the coolest components for the game is the box itself. It is very intentionally designed to resemble one of the old Cannon Films paper VHS boxes you would have pulled off the shelf and your friendly neighborhood video store when you were a kid. The edges of the box are designed to look worn and rubbed white, with cracks and tears at the corners and scratches from shelf wear. I have to hand it to the designer for nearly fooling me into thinking the game was packaged in a video box from the days of horror yore.
SETUP:
Setup is a breeze. Shuffle the four decks, Victims, Maniac, Plot Twist, and Final Girl, and deal out 12 Victims in two rows of 6, with the first card closest to the Victim deck. Place the Maniac, Plot Twist, and Final Girl decks below the Victim card area. Hand out 7 Maniac cards to each player and you are good to go…kill to your heart’s desire.
GAMEPLAY:
As mentioned earlier, the game is played over three rounds, with each round being referred to as a “movie.” A movie is completed when all 12 Victims plus a Final Girl have either been collected (killed) or have survived (moved to a Survivor pile to be dealt out as Victims in the next movie!). When it is your turn:
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- Play a Maniac card. Some of these cards move Victims forward or backward in the line of 12 Victims. The goal is to get them to the Kill Spot, the No. 1 position in the row next to the Victim deck. Other Maniac cards are Mask or Weapon cards, which you have to play later in your turn to claim a victim.
- Move in for the Kill. Grab the Victim card from the Kill Spot next to the Victim Deck. If it has special instructions (drawing of Plot Twists or other guidance) on the card, carry them out.
- Optionally play a Weapon and/or a Mask card to achieve the kill. No weapon or mask = no kill (the Victim goes to the Survivor pile).
- If the Victim was killed, add the card to your Collection for point scoring later. You may want to sort them by Victim type (Bimbo, Athlete, Fodder, or Suspect) for ease of scoring at the end of the game. Do the same with your weapons and masks, as well as any other special cards that give you points.
- Clean up the mess. During this phase, move the remaining played Maniac and Plot Twist cards to their discard piles.
- Draw back up to a full hand from the Maniac deck.
When you have to draw Plot Twist cards, some of them are Nemesis cards. These cards force you miss the kill and place the Victim in the Survivor pile. You can defeat the Nemesis with special Defeat a Nemesis Maniac cards, though!
At the end of a “movie,” when all of the Victims have been killed or have escaped to the Survivors pile, you face the Final Girl. Killing the Final Girl in a movie is similar to fighting any other victim: you optionally play a Maniac card, but you HAVE to turn over a Plot Twist card and you HAVE to play a Mask and a Weapon Maniac card to defeat her. If not, she, too, goes into the Survivor pile to be faced again in the next movie.
At the end of the first movie, you deal out another 12 Victims, starting with cards in the Survivor pile and then moving to the Victim deck. You face a Final Girl, you move on to movie 2, play that round out, move on to movie 3 and then the game ends. Three movies and the audience is DONE with you.
WINNING:
At the end of the third movie, after the Final Girl has been offed…or has survived, you determine your score. Each victim in your Collection has a score value in the lower right of the card (on a bloody fingerprint). Add these scores up. Some Maniac cards may give you extra points for certain types of victims, how many victims you have, or how many weapons and masks you have. The player with the highest point total at the end of the game wins!
FINAL THOUGHTS:
YATM is one of the hardest games to rate for me in a long time. I like the quirky art, the perfect box, and the 80’s slasher movie theme, which is REALLY strong here; but, there is a big issue that a lot of reviewers have touched on. YATM is very much a re-skin of a previous game called Guillotine, from Wizards of the Coast. Both games are focused on moving victims down a row toward a Kill Spot, where they are snuffed and saved to score at the game’s end. Both games have a mechanic allowing players to move Victims up and down the row to allow you to kill Victims of higher value. Guillotine had a French Revolution skin. YATM has an 80’s slasher skin. If the two games were EXACTLY the same and I had no ethics whatsoever, which game do you think I would pick over the other? Yeah, you’re right: I’d pick YATM. That said, there are enough unique mechanics to give YATM a fair win over Guillotine for me, regardless of the re-skinning issue. I enjoy the Plot Twists the give the Maniacs certain advantages during a turn. I like the Maniac cards that reward you for trying to kill only a certain type of Victim. Hell, as weird as it is, I just plain like the box the game comes in! Lame, I know, but I do really dig it. In the end, rating this game comes down to which theme you like more, as well as a few other game mechanics, and not much else; hence, my somewhat low rating. Had YATM possessed a few more highlights, even just slightly more professional artwork, it would be the clear winner in this fight. YATM swung for the neck but only made it half-way through. In a cheeseball horror movie, we want to see the head come all the way off, and that doesn’t happen with this movie/game.
PRODUCT DETAILS:
Designer/Artist: Todd Wahoske
Publisher: Counterculture Cards/Golden Games
Published: 2013
Players/Playtime: 2–4/45 min
RATING: 2.5/5
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