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Halloween is coming up fast and everyone is thinking, “What one shot should I run for this spooky holiday?” Well, put your dice away. Leave the detailed character sheets in the binder and put on some spooky music. Next, get a pad of lined paper and a few pencils. Dim the lights. The last thing you need to play one of the most tension filled horror games on the market is a Milton-Bradley game focused on family fun. That’s right. You need a Jenga board.

Dread forces the idea that rolling a dice when your characters life is on the line is not enough. It doesn’t evoke that feeling of…What’s that word? Oh yeah, Dread. This game inspires tons of it. Not only is the Jenga tower the sole means of conflict resolution, it’s also scary to do so when the collapse of it means your removal from the game. Furthermore, the mechanics of pulling a block and placing it on the top (tries unsuccessfully to fight off the theme song from the commercial from the eighties) gets harder and harder to do until the whole thing ultimately crashes to the table in a clatter. It’s easy to fit into a game where the stakes get continually higher like any good horror movie. If you’ve never played Jenga before, it’s a game where steady nerves and steady hands go a long way towards success, but of course the very act of pulling blocks from a wobbly tower makes you twitchy. Dread reflects that terror into its story and game mechanics perfectly.

Let’s start talking how this works. Say there’s a conflict where you want to fix your car with a minimum of tools before you are axe murdered. If it were easy and your character were trained, no problem, don’t bother pulling, you fix it. But on the other hand if you’re under stress and have no idea how cars work, then yeah, pull a piece out. If you get it out and on top safely, you fix it. If you chose not to pull, you don’t fix it. If you pull but the tower collapses on you, then maybe your car follows suit. That’s the basics. It gets more complex depending on pretty much every factor known to man, but that what it boils down to. There are ways to make it easier, harder, or even when you’re fighting with another PC the book manages to cover it. Now, this might sound like a long term campaign is out of the question. And you’re right. It probably is. You’ll get a lot more out of Dread running it like the Hellraiser movie series than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There might be one or two characters that survive and move onto the next ordeal, but chances are it won’t be everyone unless you’re running a very strange game of Dread. You might wonder, “What If my GM wants us to pull all the time? Won’t we all die really fast?” Well, sure. But if you’re Gm is out to kill your characters off, it’ll happen in whatever system you’re using. Also, there are helpful hints on what you can do to salvage a situation where people fail on the first few pulls of the game as well. Remember, it’s ‘removed from play’ not always ‘killed to death’.

The only part of the game that excludes the tower is character creation. The GM hands you a sheet of premade open-ended questions that you answer in the voice of your character. These questions work best when they force you to answer really personal issues. For example, “Why did you kill your father?” might seem like a really closed question as it forces you to kill your father, but there are so many ways to answer it that just about any character could emerge from that one query. Maybe you had to before he killed your mother, or maybe you just hit him with your car by accident. Who knows? Not only can the GM tie the plot into all the characters with ease (How do you know Dr. Watson?), but it allows for incredibly open characters with a wonderful amount of depth. Additionally, if you can’t think of any really good questions, there is a running tally that runs along the bottom of every page in the book of fabulous and thought provoking questions to use in your games.

Even the layout of the book is fantastic. I couldn’t want more from this book in anyway. There are helpful side bars that answer questions, clarify rules, or even just help with general advice and they are on every single page in this book without seeming like clutter. Also, at the start of every chapter, there are little slices right out of different horror short stories. They’re great reading and really make me what to know what happens next. Of course, the answer is simply running Dread. There is no setting per say to Dread, but whatever horror movie you can think of you can run with Dread. It’s a narrow niche, but hoo-boy does it fill it well. The book is also filled with stuff entirely unrelated to Dread but focusing on GM tips, how to work the characters into the plot really well, and alternatives on using something other than the Jenga tower. At the end of the book, there are also entire chapters devoted to playing Dread in different ways: Suspense, Supernatural, Madness, Morality, Mystery, and Gore. There are also three well thought out scenarios in the book. One is a romp in the woods with a werewolf, another is a Friday the 13th sort of affair, and the last one takes place in space and is a nod and a wink to Aliens.

All in all, Dread is a fantastic read. Its mechanics, fabulous advice on horror games in general (I mean, c’mon, there’s an entire chapter devoted to the different types of isolation you can find in the genre), and wonderful character generation are not to be missed. If you need a way to play tension filled, fantastic Role Playing Games that you and your group will remember for a long time, pick up Dread and give it a run for its money. It’s well worth it. I mean, they make Jenga scary. How can people do that?

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