Review: Maple Island Massacre by Aaron Best

I stumbled upon a new solo RPG recently on Bluesky, and as readers of the blog know, I love solo games. You can check out all my solo RPG content here – I made a whole series for them because there are starting to be so many. Most of the previous games that I've reviewed have been journaling games; this one is not, which puts it a little outside my usual solo fare.

Maple Island Massacre by Aaron Best, available on DriveThruRPG, is more of a game than a writing exercise (which is what a lot of solo games end up being). It feels very reminiscent of the Final Girl board game series by Van Ryder Games, so if you've played those games and want something a little more rules-lite that is less of a time commitment, Maple Island Massacre will be right up your alley. Like Final Girl, Maple Island Massacre is a horror game. You're playing as a survivor, fighting against a slasher villain--think Michael Myers, or the bad guy in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Also like the Final Girl board games, Maple Island Massacre is hard. I played three quick rounds and lost the first two--one by a lot, and the second very narrowly. I'll talk more about this later in the review.

You can buy Maple Island Massacre on DriveThruRPG using this link!

Mechanics Overview

Like most solo RPG zine-sized works, Maple Island Massacre is easy to play and quick to figure out. You generate 2 stats, with Physical being more useful than Mental. You also have an increasing counter in your "Luck" score, which influences your search rolls.

In order to defeat the bad guy who is hunting you down, you have to find his heart, buried somewhere on the island. So you're moving around the island, searching for the heart in various spots. On his turn, he moves towards you. Combat ensues if he catches you, and besting him in combat is difficult. He'll respawn if he dies before you can find and destroy his heart.

Maple Island Massacre uses a d20 roll-under mechanic as its core. So for combat, for example, you roll a d20 and need to roll equal to or under your Physical Score in order to hit. On a hit, you can flee or damage the villain; on a miss, he damages you.

Nothing here is complex, which makes the game easy to pick up, and most of the game's depth comes from a variety of tables. When you search for the Heart, you also cause an event that can be helpful (you find a better weapon! You find medicine to heal yourself!) or incredibly, potentially lethally harmful (the villain finds you unexpectedly, moves to your location regardless of where they are on the map, and initiates combat).

Balance and Difficulty

Despite its simplicity, this game is hard. In both of my first two games, I rolled pretty badly for my stats, particularly Physical – which determines your health. In the first game, I died before I'd even found the heart, thanks to rolling that "the villain finds you and moves to your location" early. He proceeded to wreck me and my low health. In the second game, I found the Heart and destroyed it, got the villain down to one health... and then could not land a final hit, and he quickly ate through my low health. In the third game, I rolled better for health, plus it took long enough for me to find the heart that I had successfully acquired a more damaging weapon and therefore was able to best him.

While the game is challenging, and close fought in my experience even when I won, that feels right for a slasher. If it were too easy, the victory would feel cheap. There are a lot of paths where the villain kills you, and only one avenue to victory--that feels right for a horror game.

It is winnable, but you need to roll well for stats and then not roll something bad in the middle of your search.

Atmosphere and Vibes

I was not expecting this game to work as well as it did. Horror is tricky to pull off, in my experience, and I was playing on my couch in broad daylight. I wasn't exactly setting the right tone.

But the game's mechanics do help build an atmosphere of suspense. The Engineer--the villain--moves slowly but continuously. If you want to "get away" from him, you need to use all your actions to move, so you won't have time to search. You need to search for any shot at victory, which means that the Engineer is going to slowly gain on you.

Second, there's a lot of ground to cover as part of your search. This promotes a sort of frenetic pace as you're trying to search before the Engineer successfully catches up to you. You're being dropped into the third act of the slasher film after most of your companions have already been killed, which means that you're jumping straight into that third act pace.

The simplicity and deadliness of the combat also work to the game's advantage. Being caught by the Engineer is close to a death sentence; there are rules for escaping from a combat, but I've never pulled it off in three games. As a result, there's a real fear, sparked by a desire to not have to restart, about letting the Engineer catch you.

Gripes

The main thing that I wish this game had is also from Final Girl: Best has created a fun and simple framework, and I'd love to see more horror flicks represented in the playsets. Maple Island Massacre even has a page for rules and a page for setting (where the tables are for search results, gear, and the map); it seems ideally set up to build more playsets inspired by different slashers. This is very possibly on the designer's agenda since the game was released just this February, but I'd love to see more.

Second, I think a second set of eyes would have been beneficial just to double-check the wording. There are a few small errors that add to the confusion when first figuring it out (most annoying: the Engineer starts on space 20, but there is no space labeled 20. I've been putting him on space 2, assuming that the extra digit is a typo). Some rules aren't where I'd expect them--they're on the playsheet when I expected them in the book, or vice versa--which means that there's more flipping back and forth than I want in a 3-page set of rules.

But other than those gripes--and one of those gripes is "give me more", which is not really a complaint and more of a praise--I can't find much to complain about.

Conclusion

Maple Island Massacre is a tightly-written, well-paced genre emulator for a slasher. It's on the border of "role-playing" and "board game" because there's not much of a story or opportunity for characterization. But I think that is ok, and it is not the goal of the game. It is a great game for experiencing the challenge of surviving a horror villain; you don't need an emotional, slow-paced journaling experience in order to get what you want out of a slasher experience.

Again, I think the best comparison is the board game Final Girl. The games are similar in genre, tone, effectiveness at creating their vibe, and difficulty. But where Maple Island Massacre shines is that it is faster and more understandable. Where Final Girl requires an hour or so to put together and strategize, I played 3 complete cycles of Maple Island Massacre in about the same amount of time. Admittedly, the first one was short because I died so horrendously so early, but still. It is quick, easy to play, and involves way less setup. The cost for that is some of the tactical options of Final Girl, but this lack of tactical options enhanced my feeling of powerlessness in the face of the Engineer coming to kill me.

Overall, I really loved Maple Island Massacre, even though it is a very different experience from my usual journaling-focused solo RPG experience of Classified! or Ex Novo.

You can pick up Maple Island Massacre for a mere $3 on DriveThruRPG.

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