Plum Island? Oh, the horror! What it is, and a report of our game.

Game Play Overview

The Plum Island Horror is a boardgame by GMT games that is cooperative and features a race against the clock in order to win. By cooperative, I mean that the players need to work together in order to win the game. By a race against the clock, I mean that the players only have 9 turns in which to achieve their victory conditions.

I’ll briefly summarize the gameplay here. For details, you can read more on board game geek, the GMT website, or perhaps watch a Youtube video.

The game can host 1-4 players
The game board is a map of Plum Island, with key terrain features noted.
Each player has a faction of human team members that they control. There are around 6 members of each faction, and each team member might have special abilities noted on their faction card.
The game provides opponents called Horrors. Normal, garden variety horrors are represented by square tokens. The more powerful Horrors are represented by standees.
The game also provides round tokens for Civilians. Civilians would like to be evacuated from the island before the Horrors take over. Players can help them. Horrors can eliminate them or the players.
Each game turn consists of drawing a token from a bag to see whose turn it is (usually players or horrors). There are certain actions that each can take. In some cases, additional effects happen through the drawing of a Fate card from a deck.
There is also a deck of Event cards. There is a token in the bag that prompts the drawing of an Event card. Some fate card effects also prompt the drawing of an Event card. These Event cards are usually bad for the players!
The players win by evacuating a certain number of civilians off of the island, as long as the players don’t lose. The players lose if (1) they allow the Horrors to overrun a large portion of the island or (2) if they are allowed to convert the island to a toxic wasteland, or (3) if a player has all of their team members eliminated. So, the players need to prevent all of this by utilizing their character abilities and by working together with their team mates.

Our Game–An After Action Report

Summary. We won the game. But just barely.

Here’s the start. Some horrors are at the top, ready to begin their trek to the bottom. Civilians, represented by the circular tokens, are awaiting rescue.

Here’s an early trouble spot. Dr. McCoy is getting ready to be attacked by a stack of normal horrors, as well as by the Infected Sasquatch. Probably not going to end well for Dr. McCoy.

We found that a glass of wine helps calm the nerves and decide how to handle the horde.

At the start of Turn 7, everything looks ok. A sufficient number of civilians have already been evacuated. The biohazard track is well below the level that would cause us to lose. The overrun level is also well below the level that would cause us to lose. We got this!

Uh oh. I see the Horrors bearing down on our position.

Let’s cut right to the chase. We won, but barely. Biohazard track just a few points away from auto loss. Overrun just one point away from auto loss. 26 civilians evacuated. Whew!

Here’s some photos of the final game state. Player standees that are laying on their side are dead and out of the game. Black cubes represent hit points against our player standees. There sure are a lot of them! Fortunately we have the horrors bottled up pretty well, using the player bodies as shields, so that the horrors can’t advance further down the map and overrun the island.

Notice that there is only 1 square horrors token left in the tray. When the game needs to spawn a horror, and theres not enough available, the overrun level goes up by one, which would have caused us to lose.