Background

I bought Psycho Killer on a whim after promising myself that I should really stop buying board games. I convinced myself with my typical We need something new to play when we get together, maybe I should buy it, and so I did.

Lately, the party games I've bought have been on the social deduction side which I love but I've been trying to find something new lately for our group's heavier drinking days. While it's funny to see Person A argue why Person B is the murderer during a drunken haze,  it's such a slog setting up and at some point no one is really taking the game seriously.

So when it came to find a new game, it had to be "fun" and have a "tolerable" setup while drinking.

Thankfully, Psycho Killer met both.

Setup

Super easy. Depending on the amount of players (2 vs anything else), they changed slightly. With 2 players, you take of non-knife weapons then just shuffling the cards. For 3 or more players, you take out the black cards, shuffle, deal, shuffle black cards in, and then ready to start!

The Rules

3 or more Players

The box comes with the rule book, but they also have a nice video in Youtube that explains the rules very well!

But if you're like me and just need to see another video, I strongly recommend Frank N Dice's video here!

2 Players

Unfortunately, the 2 player rules are not explained in the video or in their rule book. The only way to read the 2 player rules are at their website. Fortunately, their easy as there are only two changes:

• The player with the most injury points is Left For Dead.
• You start with no cards

That's it!

Gameplay

A person plays however many cards they want (if any) and end their turn by drawing the top card from the deck. The game is over once all 5 psycho killers are drawn and the winner is the person with the least injury points. The games usually last about 10 minutes but it really depends how well you shuffled. On a good shuffle, for us only 3 cards were left before we pulled the last psycho killer and the game lasted almost half an hour!

Their are 6 types of cards:

• Survival
• Selfish
• Power
• Healing
• Predicament
• Weapon

And depending on the type, it can either: mess you up (Predicament), heal you (Healing), mess other players up (Selfish), help you plan your next moves or avoid the psycho killer (Power), remove unwanted cards (Survival), or just be cards you need to get rid of ASAP before the Psycho Killer is drawn (Weapon).

For more in-depth look into the cards, look here.

The Bloody Mary expansion is the same except you switch all Psycho Killers to Bloody Mary's and the weapons are switched to drinks. 1 injury = 1 sip of your drink, so I was pretty buzzed after only one game and horrible luck. (I'm a lightweight admittedly.) Additionally, it introduces character cards where the only way you can get rid of this card is if it either is shuffled back into the deck or given away to another player. I had the role Bartender and was forced into getting everyone drinks until I finally gave it to another player.

They do have an optional rule were the person who pulls a Bloody Mary adds a sip of whatever they are drinking into a cup in the middle. The last pull the fifth Bloody Mary drinks the whole thing. We don't play with that rule since our drinks are vastly different, and we're pretty icky about mixing them.

Extra: Packaging

The packaging of this game is so good. I love the VHS aesthetic! Definitely gives it this old school horror film vibe. The box feels sturdy, so I'm not scared of this box looking like crap anytime soon.

Extra: Music

They also made a Spotify playlist (featuring Thriller by MJ and other artist) but I opted for a different vibe (Halloween Theme, Cthulhu by Gunship and Corin Hardy) so if you're into that instead, I would just go to Halloween Theme's Song Radio .

Final Thoughts

Psycho Killer is a fun strategic game that gives you the chance to mess with your friends. If you draw the Psycho Killer, you can just play the Slam the Door card and force the next player to draw the top card to finish their turn. Unless they have a Dead End card which just ends their turn and reverses the order so now its back to you drawing that Psycho Killer. (Yeah that did happen to me.)

My group loves this game and I can definitely see this being a heavily played game in our game nights. I saw that they have two other incoming expansions (Zombies and Gore) so I can't wait to pick those up!

Make sure to checkout/buy the game here!