​Spectrum Games is proud to announce the imminent release of Manos: the Cards of Fate, a card game based on the 1966 cult classic, Manos: the Hands of Fate. Widely considered the worst movie ever made, Manos chronicled the plight of a family of three who found themselves stranded at a lodge and terrorized by a creepy, jittery caretaker named Torgo and his sinister boss, the Master, as well as by the Master’s hellhound and his wives.
 
Manos: the Cards of Fate is a two-player game wherein one player is the “Manos player” and the other is the “family player”. The family player controls Michael, Margaret and little Debbie, and must find a way to escape the lodge once and for all, while the Manos player seeks to capture them before that can happen.
 
Jackey Neyman Jones, who played Debbie in the film and penned a book titled “Growing Up with Manos: the Hands of Fate”, has been a great supporter of the project. “The varied projects inspired by Manos have always been fun for me. This one is especially interesting because, although it can't change the awfulness of the film, the family will finally have a chance to escape their 50 year fate.”
 
According to Spectrum Games President Cynthia Celeste Miller, “The idea for this game was born from the realization that the two police officers in Manos had absolutely no impact on the story. No impact at all. They never found the family or even came terribly close. They just mostly wandered the backroads, pestering necking teenagers. And when they finally thought they heard a gunshot, they quickly waved it off. Being a game designer, the explanation that popped into my head as to why they police officers didn’t impact the story was that ‘the Manos player won the game before they could find the family’. That made me wonder what it would have been like had the ‘family player’ won the game instead. With Manos: the Cards of Fate, you and your friends may very well find out!”
 
The game will contain over a hundred cards and will be available on DriveThruCards in December 2016. The price is TBA.

Spectrum Games is part of the big DriveThru RPG Halloween sale! All of our Slasher Flick and Macabre Tales products are being offered at a huge discount!  

Click here for the savings!

​Also, keep your eyes on this site and our social media sites for a fantastic announcement on Halloween. The Master would approve!
 

Spectrum Games is proud to announce the release of Stories from the Grave, a roleplaying game that emulates anthology-style horror comics, television shows and movies.
 
According to Spectrum Games President, Cynthia Celeste Miller, “I fell in love with anthology-style horror when I was a young girl, starting with Creepshow. That love continued with the old EC and DC horror comics, as well as with HBO’s Tales from the Crypt series, among others. It occurred to me that this style of storytelling might make for a very different gaming experience, both in terms of the rapid pacing and the types of characters that these tales typically focused on.”
 
• SftG is built around making it possible to play out several short stories in a single setting, with each one feeling exactly like the kinds of tales spun in the comics, shows and films of the genre.
 
• The game is powered by a heavily modified version of the Intention System (the ruleset used for Retrostar). It’s simple, narrative and encourages players to have plenty of control over how the story progresses.
 
• The system is fast and easy to learn. In fact, the actual rules take up just over 12 pages.
 
• Character creation is a very simple matter that takes 15 minutes or less.
 
• Players are rewarded more for making the story more entertaining than for "staying alive". As anyone who is familiar with the source material can tell you, many of these stories focused on truly reprehensible people who ultimately get their just comeuppance.
 
• Players can acquire help from a communal pool of Grave Tokens that can be snatched up and used to lend a hand... but not without a price. After all, one of the main themes of anthology-style horror is that you can never get something for nothing.
 
• The Grave Keeper has plenty of tools at their disposal as well, including Story Frames that can be used as the foundation for virtually any tale imaginable. Every effort has been made to keep it easy to set up and run games of Stories from the Grave.
 
• You’ll find details for many of the most common Story Frames, including “Careful What You Wish For”, “Consequences”, “Hapless” and more.
 
• The rulebook contains a full-blown sample installment (aka adventure) to get you started with.
 
• An exhaustive 8-page “example of play” covering the entirety of an installment will help players and Grave Keepers to better grasp the finer points of the rules.
 
• Evocative illustrations from C. Michael Hall, Bradley K. McDevitt, Nolan Segrest and art taken directly from “public domain” horror comics of the 1940s and ‘50s.
 
You can purchase Stories from the Grave here.