RPG Spotlight: ‘Ten Candles’ Has an Authentic Horror Movie Feel
If you like your games a bit macabre, want more roleplaying than dice rolling, and appreciate some mood lighting, light up the Ten Candles.
Ten Candles bills itself as “a tragic horror storytelling game.” It’s a game of storytelling and roleplaying over stats and skills where the mood you’re creating in the room is almost as important as the rules themselves. This uniqueness made the 2015 Kickstarter for Ten Candles very successful, more than tripling its goal with nearly 500 backers. And more importantly, makes for a game that’s interesting, compelling, and real spooky.
Ten Candles
The first thing you need to know about this game is that when they say “tragic horror,” they mean it. Characters in Ten Candles have a 100% fatality rate. So if you want a pretty good idea of what the general tone of the game is going to be, imagine your favorite horror movie. Do none of the characters make it out? Perfect, got it in one.
I’d list a few of my favorite extra-strength-bleak movies as examples. But in the interest of not lobbing accidental spoilers into the crowd, I’ll assume you have a pretty clear image in mind.
Game Prep
To set up the game you want 4 notecards per player, a fireproof bowl, and ten candles as well as a ten like-colored dice for players and a separate, smaller dice pool for the GM. On one of each of your note cards you write a positive feature such as strong, brave, or kind. Another note card gets more negative attributes like manipulative, greedy, or dishonest. These cards get passed around the table, and based on whichever descriptors you end up with, you design your character. They don’t need full backstories, you’ll only have them for a few hours.
With the other two cards, you write a goal your character has and on the fourth somebody else describes something awful they once saw your character do. Before you know it, you’ll have a character that is fleshed out well enough to drop into a horror movie scenario. From here you light up the candles, dim the lights, and start the game. If the room sounds like one of those bad-idea ghost-summoning posts from the spooky side of Reddit, you’re doing it right.
Game Play
The game is made up of up to ten scenes where each player and the GM take turns adding “truths” to the world and then narrating their way through. Players describe their characters’ actions and speak their dialog. But when it comes time to try something a little difficult, dice start to get rolled.
If a player rolls a 6 they succeed, but any 1s the GM takes and puts aside for the remainder of the scene. If you roll no 6s the GM permanently takes a die away from the player pool and adds it to their own. The GM only rolls to take over narration or outcome of a situation and if the GM rolls more 6s than the players, the GM gets to decide how things play out and the scene ends.
This may come across as a little confusing at first, but it sets up a series of very interesting dynamics. First, the players will start the game and the individual scenes with high odds of success, but every failure will bring their overall odds of success down further and further. And sometimes player failure give the GM a future boost. Second, it creates a situation where eventually characters will be desperate for even the smallest bit of an upper-hand. And this is something you can purchase in Ten Candles by burning one of your note cards. Be careful though, because once all of your cards are gone, so is your character.
End Game
At the end of every scene a candle is blown out, the remaining available dice are redistributed and you start the next scene. The game ends when the last candle is extinguished. What happens if you blow a candle out by accident? It’s gone. So just like a horror movie, in Ten Candles a wayward sneeze could spell out certain doom in.
I am enamored by this game. It reminds me of some scenarios in Betrayal At House On The Hill and Dread with its doomed-from-the-start tone. And Betrayal? My single favorite board game. When the players know they aren’t going to succeed from the start, the game goes much differently. It becomes much more about cooperation, roleplaying out scenes, and exploring the narrative space. And this can be very fun as you’re not competing to cross the finish line or aiming to “win”. There isn’t a finish line, the best you can possibly do is drag your entire team to the final scene.
That isn’t to say that this game isn’t specifically designed to be a stressful, frantic, desperate mess. It’s meant to be played in the dark as the candle slowly go out. And you’ll clearly get at least a little attached to your character before their last card is thrown into the fire bowl. But it’s that high-stress kind of fun that comes from watching a suspenseful movie.
True Horror Movie Vibes
Ten Candles isn’t a game for everybody. I could even see it being triggering for some and a source of not-fun-stress for people who don’t enjoy watching horror movies in the dark when they have the house to themselves. But D&D isn’t an RPG for everybody either, and that’s okay. This is a fiercely unique tabletop game that doesn’t pull its punches. But if you’re the target audience, you’ll still enjoy the fight.
Which bleak horror setting would you want to visit? Have you played Ten Candles before? Do you prefer a roleplay-emphasizing game like this one, or an RPG with more mechanics? Let us know in the comments.
Happy adventuring!
