Harrow County: A Board Game Review
If you’re slightly spooky at heart and love to read, you’ve probably heard of Harrow County, a comic book series written by Cullen Bunn and illustrated by Tyler Crook.
In Harrow County, a rural community in the 1930s, Emmy is the reincarnation of Hester Beck, a sinister witch who could create or destroy anything at will. Emmy, however, seeks a different path for herself, looking to protect the town that suspects and persecutes her.
I’d read the series several years ago, and even got a signed trade paperback from Cullen Bunn at a LibraryCon at the Springfield-Greene County Library. (*cough* brag *cough*)
Not long after Jess opened Village Meeple, I heard about the board game Harrow County: The Game of Gothic Conflict from Off the Page Games, based on the comic book series of the same name, and relentlessly began hounding her to acquire it.
Once she did, I made her play it with me no less than three times.
Harrow County is an asymmetrical 1-3 player game wherein you must protect or destroy the town, depending on the faction you’re playing for. The game is complex enough to include 13 pages of rules just for the two-player game of Chapter 1. More complex game play allows for the adding of a third player, whereas chapters one through three are primarily for two players.
I played on the side of the Protectors as Emmy for Chapter 1, while Jess played as Levi, a member of the Family, which seeks to destroy the Town.
The theme is a crucial part of Harrow County, because it has hundreds of pages of backstory. I think the design of the game delivered on that. The tree on the exterior of the box - which is part of Emmy’s origin - serves as a method for resolving combat in the game. Likewise, the bramble, central to the action in the first comic book, is important to defend as the center hex of the game board.
The choices of playable characters and their affiliations also honored the source material.
Subsequent chapters allowed us to change characters, though our abilities remained somewhat similar. I chose to play as the Skinless Boy (see previous comment about being spooky at heart), who, believe it or not, is one of the Protectors.
Bernice was another option, a nod to her friendship with Emmy, and her ability with iron nails an acknowledgment of her developing powers in the comic books.
The components of the game are of a high quality, and connections to the source material slither in all over the place. Actions each character are able to take are tracked through the turning over of Mason jars, which may seem like an innocent way to track turns, but is actually a callback to a snake doctor who collects snakes in jars.
Now that I’ve gone into detail about how well this game captures the tone of the comic series, you may be worried about attempting it if you’ve never read the books or have no interest in them.
Fear not! Though I do think it delivers for anyone looking for the perfect tie-in to an excellent horror comic book series, I think anyone who enjoys heavier game play would take to it like a member of the Family takes to a tornado.
But therein lies the rub for Harrow County: The Game of Gothic Conflict. Even after playing it three times, neither Jess nor I were sure we played it correctly. We had each taken the rulebook home and read it ahead of time before our first attempt, and we corrected mistakes each time we played, but somehow the Protectors always won. Neither of us felt confident it was a fair battle.
I think this is the type of game you would need to play quite a few times — clearly more than our three — to fully understand. Changing characters after Chapter 1 is exciting, but the characters’ abilities change, and the chapters themselves change the game play.
I’d recommend Harrow County: The Game of Gothic Conflict, for those into chunkier mechanics and more complex rulebooks. If you enjoy chess, you may enjoy this.
Don’t cut yourself on the sharp learning curve of this one. If you do, however, at least the rulebook is thick enough — at 40 pages — to staunch the wound.
