Let’s Party: Killing Cute Monsters Cutely in Here to Slay

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.

———

In this column, I have written repeatedly about the important role that artwork plays in shaping the experience of board games. Usually, however, artwork is something that develops after at least some aspects of the game itself are already in place. In some cases, the artwork even overwrites an existing game idea and makes it something new.

Rarer is the occasion where the art comes first, but that’s exactly the case with Here to Slay. Prior to the 2020 Kickstarter that raised a whopping $3 million to fund the production of this modest little game, the artwork of Here to Slay was already gracing t-shirts, thanks to artist and designer Ramy Badie.

In 2012, Badie abandoned medical studies in order to focus on his artwork, and he started by launching TeeTurtle – a website where he sold his charmingly cartoony artwork on t-shirts. “Working out of a small apartment in Baltimore,” the website for TeeTurtle states that Badie “handled every role – designing, marketing, customer service, and packing orders by hand.”

Over time, the company expanded into a variety of additional areas, including games and plushies. Their reversible plushies became one of the bestselling toys on Amazon, and in 2017, the company launched a Kickstarter for their first board game: Unstable Unicorns.

The success of that Kickstarter led to the creation of Unstable Games – and to a whopping nine more Kickstarters and counting, among them the 2020 Kickstarter for Here to Slay.

Here to Slay combines Badie’s plush-friendly artwork style with familiar rudiments of Dungeons & Dragons for a “competitive role-playing fantasy strategy card game that’s all about assembling a party of Heroes and slaying Monsters (and sometimes sabotaging your friends, too).”

Within Here to Slay, you’ll find familiar classes such as Fighter, Ranger, Thief, Wizard, and Bard, all of them played by variously anthropomorphic animals, not to mention familiar – albeit cutified – monsters, including a wyvern, an owlbear, a dragon skeleton, a giant spider, and a “Mega Slime,” among many others.

The game involves drawing cards to assemble and equip a party of heroes, and then using those heroes to slay the various monsters. Despite all my talk about the artwork in Here to Slay so far, however, I didn’t actually pick this game up because of Badie’s art – unlike a lot of the other games I’ve written about here.

Instead, Here to Slay found its way into my collection after my spouse played it at a game night at their work. As you might be able to guess from that – and from the miniscule size of the box itself – Here to Slay is a much simpler game than many of those that we’ve covered here.

The rules aren’t even contained in a booklet. Instead, they are covered in a simple, folded insert that amounts to the equivalent of around eight pages. The goal of the game is to be the first player to either slay three monsters or build a party that includes one of each of six classes.

To do this, you have a variety of card types, including heroes, items, magic, modifiers, and challenges. The first three are fairly self-explanatory, while the latter two either allow you to modify dice rolls (your own or another player’s) or try to prevent another player from playing a card.

You roll two dice whenever you attempt to use a hero’s special ability or when you try to slay a monster (as well as at some other times). Usually, you’re trying to roll above a target number. For example, you might have to roll an eight or better to slay the Warworn Owlbear. Roll too low, however, and not only will you not slay the monster, but you’ll also suffer some sort of setback that represents the monster’s counterattack. (Some things flip the script, however. The skeletal dragon is slain if you roll low, and punishes you if you roll high.)

Monsters also have certain requirements that have to be met before you can even attempt to slay them – usually a certain number of heroes, sometimes a certain class – while slain monsters add special rules that apply once you take them out.

It’s a simple, charming game that matches the simple, charming artwork that has always been the company’s trademark. But just because Here to Slay is simple doesn’t mean that Unstable Games isn’t ambitious.

At the time of this writing, a new crowdfunding campaign is underway for a much more elaborate game called Here to Slay: Dungeons. While Here to Slay took the concepts of dungeon crawling RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons and applied them to a simple card game, as so many others have done before, Here to Slay: Dungeons is an attempt to bring the same cutesy aesthetic to a full-on dungeon crawl board game, complete with vinyl miniatures, dungeon tiles, and more.

In fact, Here to Slay: Dungeons is so ambitious, that it’s spread across three different boxes, which can be purchased separately or in a set. These boxes contain different heroes, different dungeons, and different monsters, including several familiar faces from Here to Slay, and plenty of new ones as well.

It’s a lot to unpack, and while playtesters quoted on the Gamefound site claim that Here to Slay: Dungeons is still more accessible and family-friendly than most dungeon crawl board games might be, it’s not very likely that your spouse will play it at their next work game night…

———

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.