Board Games Top 10: Featuring Claustrophobia 1643

The crown prince of horror board games takes a second seat today with a hot, new, up and comer featuring its own set of horrid and otherworldly creatures.

The Weekly Board Games Top 10

“The Hotness” on BoardGameGeek is a list of the currently most popular games, as based on views. This week brings us these winners:

It’s not big surprise that Arkham Horror is holding the top spot this week.  We’ve already talked about Arkham Horror a lot this week and prior, so non-fans of Arkham Horror rejoice (and please consider why it is you don’t like fun). Because this week we’ll be skipping over the top spot game to instead discuss Claustrophobia 1643.

Claustrophobia 1643

New Jerusalem is a man-made city built within the heart of the underworld. Within the tunnels below the city, hell hounds, troglodytes and demons unknown roam freely. It is up to the Redeemer, leader of the fight against the infernal forces, to quell these hellish beasts before they overrun the city.

Claustrophobia 1643 is an asymmetrical 2 player combat skirmish game with dice allocation and exploration mechanics. The game plays through a scenario book containing 20 different scenarios, with each one having different starting conditions and victory conditions.

While both players have vastly different characters, abilities and capabilities, they function similarly. Both players’ turns begin with rolling custom dice.

These dice will be allocated to the characters that player has in play, which will, in turn, dictate the stats of the characters for that round (as for the human player) or which abilities can be used and how powerful they will be (for both players).

As the human player explores the map, it will be up to the infernal player to decide tile placement. This can give a clever infernal player a nice edge when they are given the option to force a deadend to causing a tunnel to loop back on itself.

As each scenario is different, which units each player has available to them, as well as their individual goals for victory will differ with each scenario.

From Monolith

Claustrophobia 1643 – $79 – Kickstarter ends Nov 16

Author: Matt Sall

Matt has loved games of all kinds his whole life: board, video, war, roleplaying. He's worked as a writer for BoLS since 2017. He's worked as freelance editor for board game rulebooks and has designed many of his own games as well.