Trashdome - Cutthroat Caverns VS Mall Of Horror

WELCOME TO TRASHDOME!

This is part of a series of bloody matches to the death. Show support for your favorite game so it will do better in the fight. You can support it by writing why you think its the better game and more importantly by betting on it. End your first post in this thread with the title of the game you're placing a bet on (i.e. voting for) so its clear to me when reading it later. You have until Friday when I tally the bets and declare the winner. Counting expansions or not is entirely up to you just as playing with them or not is. I will reserve my bet for any tie-breakers.

Although you should be familiar with both games, there is no rule that says you have to have played both of them. The only rule in Trashdome is this;

Two games enter! One game leaves!

Mall of Horror



Tough matchup.

Mall of Horror.

It has been a huge hit with my regular gaming group, and also made a great impression on other people that I've introduced to the game. With the cheatsheets from BGG, it's even playable by drunk gamers who haven't played MoH before.

Cutthroat Caverns looks like a good game, and I may eventually get around to buying it, but right now I'm burned out on everything involving medieval fantasy dungeon crawls. I'm kind of burned out on zombies, too, but MoH puts just as much emphasis on the tension between the humans.

Mall Of Horror

Easily in my top 20 favourite games. Lies, bribery, more lies, then hide.

LUV IT!

Would love to own both and have wanted them for a while now.

However, Cutthroat just looks so wonderfully implemented. Sure it's "another dungeon crawl" but implemented in such a unique way I think it looks interesting, fun and innovative.

Mall of Horror reminds me of thematic Lifeboats. Not a bad thing at all, and I loves me some zombie horror theme too.


Vote: Cutthroat Caverns!

MALL OF HORROR is ridiculously overrated. I _love_ the presentation, I _love_ that the game is more George Romero than Sam Raimi(i.e. more about how terrible people are to each other than zombies), and I think that there are some good ideas going on. But it's a pretty crap game once you get past all of that.

After four or five plays it's just unbelievably uninteresting and stupendously boring. The negotiations, such as they are, aren't that complex or tied to anything other than pushing somebody out in the hall and the occassional vengeance action. It's one of those games that feels like very little movement occurs and comes across as really static. Oh, you do move...from one room to another, over and over again. I'm really not a big fan of the whole secret dials to show where everybody moves kind of thing...that's as crap a mechanic to create conflict as anything else out there. "Oops, I bumped into you!"

It's pretty sad that a game with a silly theme like LIFEBOATS turns out to be much better than the one with zombies in it.

CUTTHROAT CAVERNS is great and the expansions have made it even better. It takes the dungeon crawl conceptual theme and changes it up drastically so that it's not the usual tactical move-and-attack miniatures game. It also feels more competitive and well, cutthroat than MALL OF HORROR.

Easy vote for me since I don't like MALL OF HORROR. CUTTHROAT CAVERNS '09!

Both games are just okay, so I'll vote for Cutthroat Caverns for replayability.

Mall is the more polished game, and does a better job with its theme. But, like the early rounds of Werewolf, it can be kinda arbitrary at times (just like its theme). I agree that Lifeboats does more with less. Mall is the kind of game that you are glad someone else bought because there's a couple of great plays in there, but no more.

Caverns is a bit out of control design-wise (character-specific fight cards; green items), but I love the core design as was one that I used in a subsystem for a game that I designed prior to CC where a gang of fantasy characters go up against a big creature, take damage if they extend the battle for too long, and the final blow gets (most of) the glory. Good dumb fun.

Cutthroat Caverns by a landslide.

MoH is an alright game and can be a great time but it just doesn't compare. CC is easily one of the best games to come out in the last few years.

Cutthroat Caverns is my favorite new game I've played in ages... absolutely a blast to play on every level. The expansion is great (I only have Relics and Ruins so I'm calling it THE expansion) and the amount of different games you can encounter is phenomenal. We haven't even begun to get bored with it yet. Mall of Horror was o.k., no one in our group felt the need to bring it out again. That's enough power for me.

Vote:

Cutthroat Caverns

Vote: Cutthroat Caverns

I like both, but my vote for Cutthroat Caverns is for it's replayability. Mall of Horror doesn't make it to the table very often.

Damn! I haven't played CC yet, and I kinda' feel rotten voting against it since it looks pretty good. I will say, though, that CC is going to have to be pretty good to top Mall of Horror for me.

MoH, in its genre, stands head and shoulders above such exquisite classics as Zombies!!!, Dawn of the Dead, and Zombie Town. OK, so those games are actually pretty bad, but they are the only other zombie games I've played that were any good. The rest of the incredibly over-crowded zombie genre is filled with absolute crap. So what does it say to MoH's credit that it was able to be better than a bunch of lousy games?

A lot, say I. MoH succeeds where so many others have failed so miserably at actually being similar to a zomibe movie. Obviously, if you like your games on the thematic side, this is great. More importantly, it's something that people, even if they aren't natural gamers, get right away. Maybe this hasn't been the experience for anyone else, but I find that as I'm explaining the rules to non-gamers, they'll often pipe in with "Ohhhh yeah, like in (insert some zombie movie here), cool..." That, to me, is worth a hell of a lot. That, along with the huge amount of threats and shit-talking required by the game makes it a really good party game, which is something of which we can always use a lot more. I usually meet my sister and her fella' for Poker and beers on Saturday nights. They're not really into much of anything game-wise besides cards and the odd video game, but every now and again they'll say "Why don't you bring over a board game?" On those occasions, MoH is exactly the kind of title I want because I know we'll have fun with it, and anyone who happens to drop by will probably have just as much fun watching and egging us on.

As a pure social game, and one with an accessible theme that doesn't require you to look like a complete fool (like Ca$h n' Gun$), MoH has no peer.

Vote: Mall of Horror (though I may regret it later)

After four or five plays it's just unbelievably uninteresting and stupendously boring. The negotiations, such as they are, aren't that complex or tied to anything other than pushing somebody out in the hall and the occassional vengeance action. It's one of those games that feels like very little movement occurs and comes across as really static.

I'll also admit that Barnes has a point here. This is definitely NOT a game you're going to want to play week-in-week-out with your regular group. It's way too much of a novelty to hold that sort of interest.

But you are being a bit unfair about the complexity of the negotiations, man. It's a zombie game, it really is all about being horrible to other people, and that's really all it should be about.

Cutthroat Caverns.

Cutthroat Caverns.

I thought this was going to go down like the Battle of Yonkers but it turned out to be more like Lionel with the lawnmower, where CUTTHROAT CAVERNS is Lionel.

Michael Barnes wrote:

I thought this was going to go down like the Battle of Yonkers but it turned out to be more like Lionel with the lawnmower, where CUTTHROAT CAVERNS is Lionel.

I don't think I like you guys anymore. (wipes a tear from his eye)