Twisted Cryptids review: "This gorgeously weird monster board game warms my Halloween-loving heart"

If you've an affinity for the strange, mysterious world of cryptozoology, Twisted Cryptids is a board game that not only lets you encounter but embody these misunderstood freaks of nature. Vying for a spot in your library next to the best board games, this competitive game of hide and scare-the-pants off some humans will have you lurking, luring, and scaring away all manner of people in an attempt to become the legendary cryptid you've always wanted to be.

The game is an inspired combination of basic deck construction and hand management mechanics with area movement elements that sees players constantly fighting a riot of auto-shifting board pieces. Twisted Cryptids is a super luck-based game, but the fun comes in clocking your opponents' goals and clawing back control, half blind, through hilariously desperate take-that action.

Twisted Cryptids features & design

• Lure, attract, scare & extract humans to achieve rigid goals
• Shift attention between your cryptid's hiding spots, reacting to constant changes
• Push back against opponents' conflicting goals, or give a fellow cryptid some leeway

Twisted Cryptids is a tug of war between shy cryptids who want to feel seen… but not too seen. Choosing their favorite cryptid to embody, players try to predict and affect the migration of three different flavors of human: hikers, hunters, and researchers. Their goals lie in corralling them into certain areas, with each player working toward their most beneficial combo to build up their Myth level when an encounter inevitably happens at the site with the most humans milling about.

In order to decide their most beneficial combo of humans, players compile three stacks of sighting cards, each relating to a numbered hiding spot token. While you can look through these stacks at any time, their order and hiding spot assignment remains rigid. Combined with the potential to gain seven points per "real deal" you keep hidden and a choice of a hidden trait that could net bonus points of over 20, sighting cards dictate the bulk of your goals throughout.

Once everyone's goals are in place and the initial humans are on the board, players place their hiding spots, with no individual players hiding in the same spot twice, and no more than three players hiding in each area. This is a great way to keep play spread out, and prevent players monopolizing a single area.

Play moves through several phases over five rounds, which makes the things much easier to parse. It helps that the rulebook is well laid out, despite some things that would have been nice to mention earlier on – does anyone actually read the entire rulebook before starting play?

Anyway, once you're set up, the first player reveals an event card that has them moving humans about the board in unpredictable ways at dawn. During the day phase, players can affect those positions by playing (or discarding to use their unique cryptid power) from a hand of five action cards, up to three times in turn. Action cards often come with a choice, and can do anything from scaring specific humans away from a hiding spot, to luring adjacent humans toward it, to attracting new humans from the rest area beside the board. Mean-feeling cryptids might get some humans extracted from an adjacent area just to hinder other players' potential scores.

With play revolving around hiding spots, players need to be constantly aware of the scoring potential of each hiding spot, along with which area has the highest concentration of humans as that's where an encounter will happen during the dusk phase. Revealing the top sighting card of any stack that corresponds to a hiding spot in the encounter area, players take turns to tot up points and enact the action on their sighting card.

During the night, players re-hide any revealed cryptids in a different spot, unless that stack is exhausted, at which point its hiding spot token is retired. Once you're all hidden again, the first player moves around the table, and there's a chance to refresh action cards and draw back up to five ready for the next churn of the chaos engine.

The art design may not suggest 'chaos,' but it's delightfully offbeat. As you may be able to tell from the photos throughout this review, Twisted Cryptids is incredibly distinct with a strong, engaging visual identity that is downright gorgeous.

Gameplay

• Chaos of random movement captures how I imagine cryptids feel: constantly cornered
• Choosing own goals increases replayability, but feels futile first time around
• Players are always aware of the stakes, but tension is a little lacking

With the board in constant flux, players need to react in the moment, with a certain level of genius required to form any kind of strategy. Bar pairing sighting cards with similar goals in the same stack, plotting ahead isn't easy, but it's not meant to be. Since events can cause mass migrations that are all but impossible to reverse, the method of blindly setting your own goals at the start can feel futile on a first playthrough, especially as the rulebook doesn't make it entirely clear that your hiding spots will move around until later on.

Despite heavily random elements, the ability to shift focus between hiding spots and change the flow of humans in small ways gives players just enough agency that a badly ordered stack doesn't have to ruin their entire game. There's always some way to push toward your goals, even when it seems your plans are thwarted at every turn. Plus, the addition of hidden traits allows for a slightly longer-form strategy, calling players to pay attention to the type and number of specific sighting cards used, which can really turn the tide for a lagging player.

The first player acting as shepherd for any tie-breaks means there are no arguments over where pieces should be moved to when an event has more than one potential outcome.

With all this card-based action affecting the central board, and rocketing players along a visible track of Myth points, players are aware of the stakes at all times. This means tension increases naturally toward the final round, though there's no other design effort implemented to this end. It can result in a slightly anticlimactic end unless players decide to save their higher-scoring cards for later.

Should you buy Twisted Cryptids?

Twisted Cryptids is thematically strong, with gorgeous, unique illustrations for every individual sighting card giving it a real sense of individuality. Despite the most basic balancing method of copy-pasted scoring for every cryptid, the initial goal-setting stacks give it some great replayability, and some real ownership over your cryptids goals.

The feeling of futility really encourages take-that action, even some collaboration when goals align, and with several tactical layers there are enough ways to gain points when you're feeling trapped. It's one for reactive players, rather than plotters, but there's some fantastic moment-to-moment action that does well to capture skittish, bush-lurking cryptid culture.

Ratings

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Twisted Cryptids

Our reviewer is an experienced board game and tabletop critic with years of work under their belt, so they put that knowledge to work analysing the rules and playing Twisted Cryptids repeatedly to see how it fared under different circumstances. This also helped in judging longevity, and allowed time to compare the game with competitors.

To get a better idea of how we test board games, see our guide. It's also worth visiting the full GamesRadar+ reviews policy for a broader overview.

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