The Plum Island Horror Review
boardgamequest.comWe review The Plum Island Horror, a cooperative board game published by GMT Games. In The Plum Island Horror, players are working together to protect the people from rampaging horrros.
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover… and they are probably right. I’ve read some great books with some awful covers (I’m looking at you, 50th-anniversary edition of The Hobbit). Regardless, when I saw the box cover for The Plum Island Horror come across my inbox in one of GMT’s marketing emails, my interest was immediately piqued. It has a cool retro comic book vibe to it and I knew I needed to dive in for a deeper look. And that’s what we are here to talk about today.
The Plum Island Horror is a cooperative board game for 1-4 players that takes about 2-3 hours to play (no matter what the box says).
If you’ve ever played a game from GMT Games, then you will have an idea of what you are in for. Their games are deep, complex, and not aimed at the casual audience. That being said, The Plum Island Horror is one of the less complex games from GMT (but still has a lot going on). So I’m just going to give you a high-level overview of the gameplay, if you want the full ins and outs, you can download a PDF of the rulebook here.
The Plum Island Horror takes place over 3 days, each of which are divided into 3 rounds each (morning, afternoon, and night). Each round is divided into 3 phases: The Hunger Phase, Activity Phase, and End Phase.
The Hunger Phase only happens at the start of a night round and requires you to feed each of your units 1 supply. Easy enough.
The Activity Phase is where things get interesting. Each player’s faction (of which they are all unique) has a turn order token in a bag. The Horrors have 4 tokens themselves: 3 fate tokens and an event token. To see whose turn it is, draw a token from the bag. If it’s a player, they can take 1-3 actions depending on what round it is.
At the start of a player’s turn, they get an adrenaline phase, which lets them move each of
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