The 9 best Halloween board games you need for the ultimate horror game night in 2026

As a deathly chill descends outside and everyone gears up for spooky season, it's time to wrench the best Halloween board games loose from their crypts. But because this genre is overflowing with options like an obligatory bubbling cauldron, where do you start?

The GamesRadar+ experts and I have a few ideas. We've been reviewing and playing the best board games for decades between us, and that means plenty of creepy designs have crossed our table over the years. While all set an eerie tone, a few stand out as all-time classics. If you want the best Halloween board games to get your horror on, these should do the trick.

Personally, my go-to is always Betrayal at House on the Hill. I've been playing this series for well over 10 years, and I don't think I've seen a horror board game that strikes a better balance of accessibility with eerie scares. There are spookier alternatives or deeper options, but few are as easy to get into. Meanwhile, longtime contributor Matt Thrower's favorite right now is Unmatched: Cobble & Fog. This pits some of horror's greatest icons against each other in a duel to the death.

Quick list

Best Halloween board games

Have you ever wondered how long you'd last in a horror movie? This long-running series lets you find out. Inspired by fan-favorites and shlocky B-movies alike, it mashes up the best genre cliches into 50 unique scenarios. As the name would suggest, these aren't always you against the supernatural; sometimes, one of your team turns traitor. What follows is a compelling cocktail of tension and desperate last-stands.

Despite all those moving parts, Betrayal at House on the Hill is very accessible. After choosing your character and the reason everyone's visiting this haunted mansion, you begin exploring the house. Because rooms are randomly drawn from a huge pile of board tiles, the layout will always be different. These rooms also have unique powers or make you draw event/item cards, so you never know what will happen once you step across the threshold.

Draw enough cards and a scenario (based on the items you've unlocked and the reason your party came here) will trigger, pitting you against the house or each other. The result is a slowly building ramp of tension that explodes into a frantic race to the finish. While those missions aren't always as well-balanced as they could be, they're never less than a joy to play. As mentioned in our full Betrayal at House on the Hill review, that's what keeps you coming back time and time again; a need to see what happens next.

Love classic monsters and gothic horror, or want a game everyone can sink their fangs into? Horrified is your poison. Combining some of the hobby's most compelling mechanics into one team-based horror board game with old favorites like Dracula, it's deceptively simple yet masterfully done.

Dropping you head-first into a nameless but extremely atmospheric village that wouldn't look out of place in a Hammer horror film, your aim is to defeat roving monsters who would really like to devour the townsfolk… and you. The problem is, each monster requires a different tactic or mini-game to beat – and while you're working toward those objectives, they're trying to chow down on villagers. It's a tough balancing act; you'll often be forced to choose between innocents or getting the items you need to finish your quest. It's a delicious conundrum which we've enjoyed grappling with since it first launched in 2019.

While there are numerous versions (including a D&D-themed spin-off and this year's Ravenloft instalment), I still think the original is best. You can't beat a mashup featuring old favorites like Frankenstein's Monster, after all.

A cruise should be relaxing, right? Not in this case. Playing on our fear of what lurks under the waves, this is a holiday from hell. Set in the 1920s, you play as passengers making a long voyage across the ocean… but then unspeakable monsters start pouring from the ocean, directed by something enormous glimpsed through the dark. That's when traitors on board start wreaking havoc.

You see, this isn't just a co-op battle against creatures of the deep; there are turncoats amongst you, treacherous 'hybrids' that will do everything they can to sabotage your ship. Because you don't know who's who, you'll need to sniff out these traitors while trying to keep your vessel afloat. Oh, and don't forget about those monsters clambering aboard.

Although it's a long game, Unfathomable is one of my favorites due to that blend of adventure and high stakes deception (which helped it earn four-and-a-half-stars in my Unfathomable review).

Many horror games go for minimalism in terms of components, but not Zombicide, which is chock full of ghoul-icious plastic miniatures of both player pieces and different kinds of zombies. And you’re going to need them all, since the game demands you divide up at least six characters between the players who then need to work together to achieve a variety of scenario objectives while an ever-growing army of shambling undead stumble around the board, attracted by noise and blood.

The core gameplay loop in this new edition is pretty simple but weirdly addictive thanks in part to the sheer variety of things that can happen. In addition to picking scenarios, or possibly a campaign, a wide number of different enemies can spawn, each presenting unique challenges. Every character has a choice of upgrade paths and, best of all, the item decks you’ll dig through hold the ever-present possibility of awesome new weaponry to splatter all those undead with. This means that every turn presents new tactical challenges to solve and risks to take while the tension - and the number of foes - mount inexorably. We were certainly fans in our Zombicide 2nd Edition review.

Loosely inspired by 2023 video game Dredge, Deep Regrets challenges players to spend a week out fishing on a very strange sea indeed. Your initial trawls in shallow depths, governed by a push-your-luck dice roll, are likely to net you a variety of familiar species but there’s also a chance you’ll land something considerably more disturbing. And the deeper you fish, the greater that chance becomes, as does the degree of awfulness in what you bring to the surface. Returning to shore allows you to sell your catch to buy improvements for future expeditions or you can mount your favourite specimens for points.

The more horrors you witness, the more regret cards you’ll earn, which range from staining your best trousers to murdering friends for money. Between these and the fishing, you can build a delightful horror-comedy narrative while, mechanically, regrets drive you mad, getting you more value from mutant fish. Accumulate too many, however, and you'll lose your best trophy.

Adorned with fantastically evocative art by the designer, this is a game that, ironically, you’re most unlikely to regret spending time with.

If you're looking for a deeper, more strategic experience, it doesn't get better than the Nemesis series. While the masterful first instalment is harder to get hold of these days, the newer Nemesis: Retaliation is widely available – and as mentioned in our full review, "this might be one of the best horror board games ever made."

Basically, it's Aliens with the serial number scrubbed off; you play as a team of elite marines that drop into hell, facing down a horde of xenomorphs who are ready for an all-they-can-eat buffet. While your primary goal will vary (like killing the bug queen or destroying this facility), everyone has a secret, personal objective to work on as well. These often pit you against your teammates, so you're never sure whether you can trust the soldier who's meant to be watching your back.

Because the board is randomly laid out as you go, there's a real sense of stepping into the unknown as well. When combined with how brutal the aliens are (you'll be lucky to survive your stay), the tension is palpable.

H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos has proved an incredibly fertile inspiration for board games, but Arkham Horror: The Card Game is perhaps the most popular and acclaimed of them all. It’s a cooperative deck construction game; each player takes charge of an investigator delving into the horrid secrets of the mythos, with a unique deck of cards representing their skills and abilities in-game. As you progress, you add and remove cards from this deck, allowing your characters to grow in power and giving you the chance to tailor their playstyle as you see fit.

Initially you’ll throw these characters into the mystery scenario included in the box, a mix of modular map cards and choose-your-own-adventure style text paragraphs that, between them, create an intriguing, dynamic and surprisingly tough adventure. Things can spiral in a variety of different paths that lead to further scenarios, giving you reason to replay this core set. Eventually, you may want to buy expansions to continue the story but usefully, this new "chapter two" box resets the narrative, making this an ideal time to dive into the expanding story.

While most creepy board games pit relatively ordinary folk against otherworldly horrors, this one casts everyone as literary haunts and haunt-hunters from down the ages. Take your pick from Jekyll and Hyde, The Invisible Man, Sherlock Holmes and, of course, Dracula and see how they face off against each other. The Unmatched series is all about battles between titanic figures from myth and pop culture, and the four characters included here can be mixed and matched with other entries in the franchise, should you so desire.

For such an ambitious scope, the rules are very simple. You get two actions per turn from a choice of three: draw a card and move on the point to point board, play a card for its effects, or play a card to attack. The smart design comes in the unique deck each character draws from, giving them their flavour and special powers. Holmes, for example, peeks at and manipulates his opponent’s cards while Jekyll and Hyde chooses a form with different abilities each turn. All four play very evocatively and very differently, ensuring you get tons of replay value trying different match-ups from the same box.

Another game based on Lovecraft’s works, the original Mansions of Madness saw one player running the game’s nightmare monsters against the rest of the players, creating an immediate balance issue since the creatures of the mythos are, by definition, too powerful for humans to handle. The second edition outsourced all that work to an app, leaving the players working together to solve the mystery of each scenario, and the game eminently more solo-friendly.

While app-driven games can be controversial, as you’re left to the mercy of updates, it does an incredibly good job of not only running the game but helping build a creepy atmosphere with vivid descriptions and sound effects. The added dynamism means you can have varied conversations with non-player characters and allows it to present puzzles that would be impossible in a physical game. It also seeds the scenario with random changes each time, making the game replayable even once you’ve revealed its core secrets. At the same time you get the delightful physicality of a board game, with miniature representations of the various horrors you can encounter, and the social aspects of working together, which you’ll be extremely glad of when the terror begins to build.

Want a more roleplay-heavy horror game? This modern-day D&D horror adventure feels like Resident Evil mixed with Control, and it's perfect for Halloween.