Blood Yule update 1.1 is out now!
Feast your eyes upon a full suit of winter-themed monsters, ghouls, and abominations with the new 1.1 update to Blood Yule. This update pulls all of last Christmas’s additional bonus foes and items together in a single ruleset, as well as throwing some new items into the mix as well.
This seasonal smörgåsbord is the perfect game to treat your friends to some pick-up-and-play horror party fun. Grab your copy here and, if you already bought it, the update is free.
You can read more about the changes on the devlog.
Both Blood Yule and the base game Bar the Windows, Bolt the Doors are available at 25% off throughout December 2022.
Design approach: Blood Yule’s monsters
Bar the Windows, Bolt the Doors provided a great formula for creating enemies for GM-less games which run themselves based on ‘if x, then y’ conditions. When I went into Blood Yule, I had already played with a lot of variations of this in the original game, and I wanted to try something new.
It would be easy to follow the basic template, where a foe has basically three types of act:
An attack act which is triggered if an outsider is in the same room
A movement act which is triggered if an outsider isn’t in the same room
An act which destroys a barricade if there is one in the way (an important action considering the game is called Bar the Windows, Bolt the Doors)
For Blood Yule’s monsters, not only did I want the above acts to be implemented in new and refreshing ways - from the effects of attacks and who they target, to how a foe can move in new patterns - but I wanted to make sure the dynamic of play was fresh each time as well.
The ‘meta’ of many original foes is to run away from them as far as possible, put as many barricades up as possible, and use your spare time recovering and getting items as much as you can.
In Blood Yule, I tried to create conditions which would encourage different strategies. For instance, the flaming fir-tree produces fire which spreads and harms outsiders, so it’s important to extinguish it or to use barricades to halt its progress. A dramatically different example is the waif, which makes one of the outsiders its favourite, and the others must try and rip them apart so the waif doesn’t draw too much power from them.
I hope you enjoy playing against these foes, and finding fun new strategies to defeat them - or at least see your characters perish in dramatic and hilarious ways in the attempt.
-Nathaniel