Can we call 2024 the “Year of the Chainsaw”? Well, I'm doing it! October marked fifty years since Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [sic] was released, and it has since become a monolith… a marker along the way in any horror fan's journey of discovery. Interestingly, this wasn't many people's introduction to “one of the most bizarre crimes in American history“ as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, another landmark film, was based on reports of the same criminal and his unspeakable deeds.
I'm talking, of course, about Plainfield, Wisconsin's own Ed Gein—farmer, grave robber, murderer, and unfortunate thrall to his domineering (and probably mentally disturbed) mother. It could be argued that few isolated loners have had such an impact on media and popular culture, either directly or indirectly and, as some become undeniable classics of the genre, they influence other expressions in related media.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Board Game, released in 2023 by Trick or Treat Studios, pits one to four players against the Slaughter family—Leatherface, Cook, Grandpa, and the Hitchhiker—all controlled by the game. Characters cooperate to find their missing car keys and enough gas to get their van moving and be on their way as quickly as possible!
For design duties, Trick or Treat Studios tapped Scott Rogers, a former Disney Imagineer, and designer of other games such as Alien: Fate of the Nostromo and several Marvel Villainous expansions. Surprisingly, Rogers hadn't seen the film yet when he was contacted. “Trick or Treat Studios President Chris Zephro said to ‘not be a chicken‘ and just watch the movie,“ says Rogers. “First of all, I was surprised at how… greasy… the film was. There are very few films with such a visceral feel to it, but TCM is one of them. The game's art by Terry Wolfinger captures that feeling perfectly.”
That's some sound advice from Chris Zephro, and Rogers is right in pointing out Terry Wolfinger's excellent illustration work for the game. Rogers had another interesting reaction upon his initial viewing: “I was surprised that I sympathized with Leatherface. There's that moment where the kids first invade his house, he's dispatched them and he's looking out the window, afraid that there might be more. I felt oddly sympathetic with Leatherface's fear at that moment.”
Trick or Treat Studios' Director of Business Development, Joe Stoken, comments on the decision to approach Rogers about designing the game: “We had played his Alien: Fate of the Nostromo game, and in that, you had encounters where the Alien could be lurking around any corner and it did a great job of supplying the type of tension we were trying to create for TCM.”
In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Board Game, players can choose to play characters from the film: Sally, her brother Franklin, Kirk, Pam, or Jerry, if you want to stay strictly canonical. If not, there's also the Sheriff and even Big Ed, the truck driver who, along with his rig, becomes arguably the most important deus ex machina in film history. He certainly is where Sally and the Hitchhiker are concerned!
The game board shows the Slaughter family farmhouse, several rooms of its interior, as well as the surrounding environs. Players start on their broken down van, just across a stretch of highway and separated from the Slaughter farm by a patch of brambles. Players move through four phases on each turn:
First, you can take up to two free move actions, advancing along several routes in interconnected spaces. Each of those spaces starts the game with a facedown token. When you end your movement on a token, you'll reveal it. If it's your car keys or one of several cans of gas needed to leave, that's terrific!
You'll place that token on your character board, which can hold up to two. If you don't have room, you'll have to leave it behind, but face up, for another character to grab along the way. If it's any other kind of token (and I'll get to those shortly), it'll go into a cardboard tray made to resemble a greasy (and pretty disgusting) container from a barbecue restaurant.
Second, is the “Draw“ phase and the “meat”, if you will, of the game. You'll take what's known as the “Hideous Draw Bag,” made to look like it was stitched together from pieces of leathery skin (animals, probably… right?), and begin drawing out tokens one by one, deciding after each draw to either stop or continue drawing more tokens.
“Horror is very hard to pull off in board games,“ says Rogers. “Almost everything is right in front of the player. You can hide information in card decks, in books, or under tokens but I like draw bags the most. They're very visceral. Reaching into a bag for something unknown can be a fear, especially if you think what's in there is bad.”
So why would you decide to stop or continue? Well, this is, at its heart, a push your luck game. At the very least, you can go “bust“ upon drawing a third identical token (except for “Action“ tokens. More on that to come) and your Draw phase will end.
One token, a pile of bones, does nothing special when drawn except to increase the likelihood of going bust, and you'll find a lot of them lying around the Slaughter farm.
An eye token (Sally's, as a matter of fact, from the unforgettable dinner scene) will allow you to choose a currently facedown token anywhere on the board and turn it faceup. This will give you and the other players some much needed intel when deciding where to go in their search.
A photo token will allow you to take a look at the top card of the “Search“ deck and decide if you want to place it on the top or bottom of the deck. Search cards are mostly helpful, one-off rule breakers that can really make a difference at a clutch moment. You can place bad ones or those you aren't looking for on the bottom while placing the cards you really want on top because, as with the other tokens, once you draw your third photo token, your Draw phase will end.
However, you'll get to take the top card from the Search deck before that happens. Also, every time you look at the top card of the Search deck, you'll move the truck standee one space farther along the blacktop. It'll wrap around the board, coming back again as it goes by, Frogger-style, but if any characters are in its way, they'll be pushed to another space. Slaughter family members hit by the truck will be removed from the game with the exception of Leatherface. He just goes back to the Killing Room inside the house.
Two tokens are as bad as you might imagine: Slaughter tokens and Leatherface tokens. When these are drawn, they go onto one of two tracks, which determine the actions of the family members. A Leatherface token will first cause him to move. Each space on his track has a number of spaces he'll move every time one of his tokens is revealed during a player's Draw phase and an amount of damage he'll do if he ends that movement on a player's space.
At the end of a player's turn, if the Draw phase ended due to three identical Leatherface tokens being drawn, one of those tokens is placed on Leatherface's track, covering the leftmost space, leaving an increasing amount of movement and damage he will do when he moves and if he encounters a player.
Slaughter tokens, when drawn, activate the other family members, Grandpa, Cook, and Hitchhiker, in that order. Each of them has an increasing number of spaces to fill with drawn tokens before they'll make their appearance. Once Grandpa's track is full, he'll be placed in the dining room (naturally), and any player unlucky enough to enter that room will get two damage markers placed on their board ('cause Grandpa is “the best killer there ever was”).
When Grandpa is out, Cook is next. When his track is full, he'll be placed on The Diner, one of the named spaces around the board. After that, every time a Slaughter token is drawn out of the bag, Cook will move to the next named space clockwise. If a character is there, they'll be moved immediately to the dining room, where Grandpa awaits!
After that, the Hitchhiker will be moved to the van and that's unfortunate because players can't win (i.e., leave) with him there. You'll have to use a “Push“ action on your turn to shove him out the door and onto the blacktop (and, hopefully, into the path of Big Ed's rig!)
The last type of token is the Action token, which, once players stop drawing or they go bust involuntarily, they'll get to spend on several possible actions already discussed: Move (to an adjacent space on the board), Push (another character or Slaughter family member to an adjacent space), Search (the deck), or Pick-up (an already revealed token on the board).
Once all the actions are spent, any tokens drawn (except for those placed on Leatherface or Slaughter family tracks), as well as any picked up off the board during a Move action and placed into that gross barbecue tray, are collected and tossed back into the Hideous Draw Bag and handed to the next player in turn order.
Also, if your turn ends while your character is on a space in the brambles, you will place a damage token on your board. Each character can take up to three and, once filled, you won't get your two free move actions at the beginning of your turn. You can still use Action tokens drawn from the bag to spend on a move action, but those two freebies really come in handy, especially when you don't draw as many Action tokens as you were hoping and you have other things to do!
If you have three damage tokens on your character board when you run into Leatherface, the worst of all possible situations, he'll immediately grab you and take you to the Killing Room, where he's got a meat hook with your name on it.
You now have a terrible choice to make: either let that character die or try to wriggle your way off the hook. If you choose to die, draw an appropriately titled “You Are Dead“ card and find out what happens to your remains. Then, grab another character from the side and begin again from the van. The good news is you know where any gas or keys you had on your old character now lie: the space where Leatherface snatched you up!
If you instead decide to attempt an escape, on your next turn, you'll skip your free Move actions and begin drawing tokens out of the Hideous Draw Bag. If you manage to draw four Action tokens, you're in luck… well, you're off the meat hook, anyway and can proceed as normal on your next turn. If you draw a Leatherface token, your character is dead.
Bear in mind that, if there are ever Three On a Meathook, the game is over and all players lose together. In order to win, as mentioned earlier, players must collectively find the right number of gas cans and the keys, then get the characters that hold those items to the van. As that happens, and the Hitchhiker isn't in the van with them, everyone immediately wins, even if all the characters don't make it back to the van. It's a tough conversation to have around the table, to be sure. The consolation? You get to draw a “You Are Dead“ card and find out if your bones have been turned into a wind chime.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Board Game is available from Trick or Treat Studios and wherever hobby board games are sold. Take a look at the game in action below.
