Mall of Horror: fun game bad place to shop.

After getting into board gamming, I started having a group come over to play. Their number vary from a couple to a lot of people but the more we played a problem started to arise: We didn’t have enough six player games.


I scoured board game geek looking from the best games to fill that gap and I came across a gem. It looked fun, light, and had a theme I could love. The problem arose when I tried to find a copy. After two months of searching, I have it, Mall of Horror.

Mall of Horror is a negotiation game by Asmodee. It plays in around a hour and supports 3-6 players, but I have found six players is the when this game shines.

The game is apparently out of print and, according to the communication with Asmodee, is not being reprinted anytime soon.

Components
The pieces to the game aren’t anything that your going to be talking about for some time. It comes with wooden tokens for the players characters, a board, some dice, a box to cover the dice, some cards, 6 voting dials, and a good number of plastic zombie figures. Everything is functional for the game, and they did a good job bringing out the theme (especially in the cards which look like Polaroid pictures). There insert in the box even that holds everything the way it should be. The only real beef I have with the components is the lousy rules which were translated from French and it shows. Luckily, there are some good player aids available to fill that gap.

Game play
The game plays out very simple: everyone moves a character, zombies are added to the board, and people vote on whose getting eaten. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until everyone is in the same room or only four characters are left.

There are some additional rules about what can be done in each room and what abilities each character has but the game would still be dry as four day old toast if it didn’t have so much player interaction. The deals, the betrayals and the alliances are what make this game worth playing.

Conclusion
The game is everything I expected. My group enjoyed the first play so much that we played it again that night. The only problem I had with the game was that players can be eliminated and have little to do for rest of the game. Granted this may not be the game for everyone. If your players holds grudges, this is the wrong game. If your players are on the dry side, this is the wrong game. If you have players, that are into making deals just to backstab at the right and you can laugh about tit afterwards, you will love this game.

Final score
It looses one point for the bad rulebook and one for the player elimination. 8/10