Versus Mode: Claustrophobia x Hybrid

I see board games in the store and they always look so cool and then I buy them and bring them home, I’m so excited to open them, and then I play them, like, twice… This column is dedicated to the love of games for those of us whose eyes may be bigger than our stomachs when it comes to playing, and the joy that we can all take from games, even if we don’t play them very often.

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Welcome back to another installment of Versus Mode, in which we pit two board games with similar loglines against one-another to see which one comes out victorious! Back at the beginning of COVID, when I first started writing this column, I rekindled a lifelong obsession with dungeon crawl board games – a subject that I’ve written about quite a lot since then.

This included picking up used copies of several out-of-print dungeon crawlers, either online or through my friendly local gaming stores. Among these were 2003’s Hybrid from Rackham, a tie-in to their tabletop wargames Confrontation and Rag’Narok, and the 2009 Asmodee release Claustrophobia.

What links these two together, at a glance, is that they are both dungeon crawl games taking place in a setting that would be considered “dark fantasy,” with all that entails. What all does that entail? In this case, you could say that the settings of both games are what you would call “edgy,” in that way only late-90s and early-2000s things were.

These games would not have been out of place in Hot Topic when they were released, is what I’m saying.

In the case of Hybrid, this is an outgrowth of the fact that it is set in their Aarklash universe, which is heavily defined by the art style of artists like Edouard Guiton and Paolo Parente. For anyone who has played either Confrontation or Rag’Narok or even just seen the line of miniatures that accompany them, you’ll know that Aarklash is a world filled with distorted grotesques, and Hybrid is no exception.

Indeed, the miniatures that come with Hybrid can be used in those other games – which is precisely why my copy came with no miniatures at all, because someone had repurposed them for a game of Confrontation, most likely.

As it happens, Claustrophobia is also a dungeon crawler linked to a specific tabletop wargame, albeit this time one I’m less familiar with: Hell Dorado from 2006, a skirmish game about warring factions vying for control of the resources of Hell in the middle of the 17th century.

Claustrophobia is set in the catacombs beneath the city of New Jerusalem, a city built by European armies in Hell. Players take control of either a group of humans (a priestly Redeemer and several condemned criminals) or troglodytes and demons, and play through a variety of scenarios.

In this way, both Claustrophobia and Hybrid are more akin to such contained skirmish games as Space Hulk than true dungeon crawlers, in which players usually take control of individual heroes and go to battle either against a single “dungeon master”-like player, or against the board itself.

Nor are their aesthetics or their play styles the extent of their similarities. These are both games designed as entry points into more elaborate wargames and, as such, are heavily invested in their settings, their themes, and their narratives. They also have considerable existing artwork to draw on.

One example of where this comes into play is that the rulebooks for both games open not with a description of the game itself or the rules you’ll use to play it, but with color text telling a fictional account of the game world.

In Claustrophobia, this text only makes up the first page of the 24-page rulebook, taking the form of journal excerpts from the “Year of Our Lord 1634.” Hybrid is even more ambitious – the first six pages of its 48-page rulebook are turned over to stories and color text introducing you to the setting long before you are given any indication of what kind of game you’re about to play.

As I mentioned, the miniatures didn’t come with my copy of Hybrid, so I’ve never actually played it – or Claustrophobia either, for that matter, although the pre-painted plastic miniatures that accompany it are in the copy I got. (Sadly, while the pre-painted plastic miniatures have their strengths, they also have the downside that all the miniatures for the same things are identical, so that there are a whopping eleven identical troglodyte miniatures.)

One of the high points of both games, however, is the art on the dungeon tiles. In both cases, dungeons are laid out according to the missions or scenarios you select, but as is generally the case with dungeon crawlers, they are played across an array of individual room tiles.

These tiles are lavishly illustrated in both games, with differences of execution based on the different settings of the two board games. Because Claustrophobia is set in the catacombs beneath New Jerusalem, its dungeon tiles would not look at all out of place in a game of Diablo. One element that makes them stand out from many other dungeon tiles on the market is their use of narrow corridors and black space – the game is called Claustrophobia, after all.

Hybrid, on the other hand, takes place in the “lugubrious laboratories” of “Dirz the Heresiarch, founder of the Empire of the Scorpion.” Don’t know what any of that means? That’s okay – Aarklash is honestly kind of a confusing setting, at least when viewed from the outside, and I’ve never gotten far enough in to pierce the veil, so I don’t really know, either.

Suffice it to say that the dungeon tiles in Hybrid are less your standard high fantasy stuff and more nightmare H. R. Giger labs filled with snaking cables, bloody bones, dissection tables, and other things that would be right at home in an Alien sequel. Are you as likely to get quite as much mileage out of those tiles in other games? Maybe not, but who doesn’t love a good, grotty Alien lab?

So, which one’s the winner? I dunno, I haven’t actually played either of them! But they both provide an interesting insight into wargames past, and a moment in history when these kinds of things were trying to capture a piece of the tabletop pie – and when grimdark fantasy looked a little bit different than it does today…

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.