The Others is a horror-themed board game designed by Guillotine Games and published by CMON after a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2015.
The city of Haven, in Cornwall county, England, is the site of a clandestine war between the Hell Club and F.A.I.T.H. for the fate of the world. The Hell Club has the patronage of the Others, extradimensional horrors that draw power from the expression of human sins. F.A.I.T.H. (the Federal Authority for the Interdiction of Transdimensional Horrors) is a secret agency that watches for signs of the Others' corruption and moves in to put an end to it; their agents come from all over the world and generally have one reason or another to want to fight the Others personally.
One player controls the opposition and is called the Sins player. Up to four other players control agents of F.A.I.T.H. and progress through a story of linked objectives on a configurable board representing locations in the city of Haven. The Hero players win if they complete the current story, the Sins player wins if the Heroes get wiped out first.
The base game contains F.A.I.T.H's Alpha Team, the Pride and Sloth creatures, the Hell Club, and eighteen acolytes. Expansion boxes contain Beta, Delta, and Gamma Teams, creatures of Lust, Gluttony, Envy, Wrath, and Greed, the Sons of Ragnarok, and the Heralds of the Apocalypse. Two Kickstarter-exclusive sets were Omega Team and the Men of F.A.I.T.H.
The Others features the following tropes:
- Action Girl: All female F.A.I.T.H. agents by definition.
- Action Mom: Kwanita Larsen adopted Susan Miles after accidentally killing her mother in an MMA match.
- The Ageless: Morgana is a vampire, Karl and Skye are werewolves, Rajiv is possessed by a demon, and Rosario is... not understood.
- All There in the Manual: the base game contains one short story, while character profiles and other short stories describing the formation of FAITH and its first field operation are contained in the companion artbook The Art of the Others.
- Artificial Human: River, Rose, Thorley, and Nicolas are all results of the Hell Club's experiments in merging human DNA with the essence of the Others.
- Artificial Limbs: Scott Freder and Keanu Winters both have cybernetic arms.
- Asymmetric Multiplayer: One player controls the Sin monsters and the rest play the heroes.
- Badass Crew: FAITH agents are one and all badass in their own ways.
- Action Survivor: Adrian Miller was just a farmboy turned comic artist until the Others started a war over his family's land. He had to learn to defend himself quickly and ended up one of the few survivors of his family by the time F.A.I.T.H. intervened.
- Badass Biker: The Sons of Ragnarok are an outlaw motorcycle club who fight the Sins on their own terms. The members are all named after characters from Norse Mythology. The box warns civilians to stay out of their way and contact FAITH, as they're actually really effective at what they do.
- Badass Bookworm: Wilson Hendricks's doctorate is in engineering. He tinkers with guns. He uses them, too.
- Badass Preacher: the Kickstarter-exclusive collection "Men of FAITH" are five holy men from five different religions, all quite capable of delivering a righteous buttkicking to the forces of Sin.
- Brave Scot: Bob Walker, leader of Delta Team, was born in Stirling, Scotland, and would have been a Royal Marine had he not decked a sergeant during boot camp.
- Brawn Hilda: Nichole Tumibay is an ex-Marine and former competitive powerlifter.
- Eye Patch Of Power: Doctor Leah Solomon doesn't let her lack of depth perception get in her way.
- Fighting Irish: Skye Kwan.
- Heartbroken Badass: More than a few agents have lost loved ones to the Others, which motivates them to join F.A.I.T.H. and fight back.
- Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Morgana and Rosario wear stunning red dresses while they slay monsters.
- Killer Gorilla: Doc is a super-intelligent, super-strong Cyborg gorilla.
- Pop-Cultured Badass: Rose's experience with the world was almost solely through pop culture until she and Thorley escaped from the Hell Club. Now, she continues to consume media almost as fast as she consumes fish and chips.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Rosario has been several people in the past, with known history as far back as 1884.
- Benevolent Conspiracy: F.A.I.T.H. hides evidence of the Others' activities and their fights with each other on the justification that the world would flip out if it became known that transdimensional horrors exist and feed on our negative emotions.
- BFG: Both Wilson Hendricks and Julia Parfitt carry heavy guns.
- BFS: Karl wields the Sword of Spartacus, his grandfather's blade, which was stolen by Morgana and only recently returned to him. The Heralds of the Apocalypse also carry gigantic blades.
- Big Bad: a few. The Avatar of any given expansion is definitely the biggest threat. The Hell Club are thematically and lore-wise the biggest enemies that F.A.I.T.H. run into on a regular basis, and The Mayor is one of the biggest threats that F.A.I.T.H. deals with.
- Big Eater: Rose can eat up to a third of her body weight in a day, chalked up to a combination of her accelerated metabolism and simple stress.
- Bigger Is Better: The Avatar, the Four Horsemen, Nicolas, the Mayor, and Apocalypse are slightly larget to much-much larger than any of the hero units, and their dangerous nature matches their size.
- Body Horror: Every monster is some sort of tentacular monstrosity, from Acolytes (normal people twisted by the power of the Sins) to towering Avatars of Sin.
- The Call Knows Where You Live: the Others killed Bradley Holcomb's family. This put him on the path to encountering F.A.I.T.H. Most of the other agents lost loved ones to the Others, giving them personal reasons to join the organization and take the fight to them.
- Cast from Sanity: Sort of. You can deliberately corrupt your character to gain bonuses, however if your character has max corruption and gains another, that character takes a wound instead, and a mandatory corruption doesn't give any bonuses.
- Cephalothorax: Greed abominations are blobs of flesh with a gaping maw, four stumpy arms, and two stumpy legs.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: models are cast in different color plastic. Heroes are blue-white, acolytes are beige, sin creatures are grey, and the Hell Club are red. Heroes themselves have different colored bases to denote their roles on the team: the leader is yellow, shooters are blue, bruisers are red, and fixers are green.
- Combat Tentacles: Nearly every Sin creature has tons of wriggly tentacles erupting from its flesh. Acolytes usually have one big tentacle in place of an arm. The Crawler, Rose's symbiont, manifests as two long tentacles that erupt from around her elbows.
- Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Wilson Hendricks has an uncanny resemblance to Philip Seymour Hoffman.
- The Corruption: Player characters may suffer Corruption when fighting Sin creatures. They may also choose to accept Corruption to gain bonuses to their next dice roll. If the character's Corruption track is filled, any new Corruption causes Wounds instead. Leah taps into this Corruption in the short story "Test of FAITH" to chase down the Sloth Controller.
- Creepy Twins: Gourd and Vex are a pair of ugly, deformed twins who are largely responsible for the Hell Club's genetic abominations. They are consistently depicted in the artwork as close together, either holding hands or sitting in one another's laps.
- Cult: The Hell Club obviously.
- Creator Cameo: artist Adrian Smith appears in-game as Omega Team's Adrian Miller.
- Critical Failure: Because of the way dice rolls work, both players can end up being screwed out of an action. F.A.I.T.H. players don't have blank sides to their dice, however if a F.A.I.T.H. player is in combat and rolls an insight, the die roll is basically moot as it doesn't do anything in that scenario. Similarly, one could roll anti-corruption, defense, and attack during a Cleanse roll, however only insight works in this kind of roll. Since Sin players primarily only use rolls for combat, the Sin players dice have a blank side, and by law of averages it is highly possible for your acolytes to roll 2 of them to the detriment of doing nothing. Even worse, F.A.I.T.H. players can roll defense and anti-corruption, meaning the Sin player can just get instantly screwed out of doing any damage at all, and failing to corrupt the target.
- Damage Reduction: The defense stat for players decides how much damage they can be dealt before they actually have to take a wound, and monsters don't take any damage or die unless the damage they are dealt is at least their defense stat. Additionally, F.A.I.T.H. players can roll additional defense in combat, further reducing their damage.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Most agents have one. In Corruption Stories, the Sins player hands out a Dark Past card to each character. When a character has full Corruption, the Dark Past card is revealed and it takes effect.
- Deal with the Devil: The Hell Club's plan is to summon the Avatar of Sin for their own benefit.
- One of the Sin cards gives a player an extra turn for giving the Sin player 2 extra reaction tokens.
- Demonic Possession: the Thuggee forcefully bound a rakshasa named Rajiv to East India Company troubleshooter James Hedges and set him loose in England, where he killed until Morgana caught him and suppressed Rajiv's consciousness.
- Detect Evil: Rose and Thorley can sense the presence of the Others.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The players often must defeat the Avatar of Sin in any given fight. Additionally, the Apocalypse expansion has you not only smacking the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse off their perch, but the Apocalypse itself.
- Dirty Cop: Haven's police force is thoroughly corrupted by the Others with the notable exception of the Commissioner, who will help the heroes by giving a hero holding his token an extra die in any fight. The Beta Team box comes with possessed cop acolytes; they can inflict wounds on lone heroes in the same area.
- The Dragon: The Controller of Sin is a powerful monster in control of the Sin player. Strong, but definitely second-best to the Avatar itself.
- The Hell Club is this to the Mayor.
- Dual Wielding: Bob, Freder, Heimdall, Kurt, Wengsi Wong, Tyr, and Brad. Bob, Freder, and Brad take it up a notch by making it Guns Akimbo.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Others and their minions.
- Elites Are More Glamorous: some F.A.I.T.H. agents are retired (or "retired") special forces.
- The End Is Nigh: The game features a series of hobos who parade around with these signs warning of the doom that comes, and indeed it is coming as the Sins of the Apocalypse are coming down to destroy Earth. Funny enough, said hobos are part of the problem as they're corrupted monsters.
- The End of the World as We Know It: The game is essentially about the world being on the brink of destruction every day by the spontaneous appearance of monsters on a regular basis, and should you fail to stop it during your mission, the Sins of the Apocalypse will rise up and demolish the city before taking down the world.
- Enemy Mine: Morgana and Karl had been fighting each other for centuries until she called a truce so they could team up to fight the Others.
- Evil Former Friend: Doctor Gan was Leah Solomon's mentor until the experiment that summoned the Others corrupted him and cost her an eye. This can be done to a player character if the Traitor card is drawn, or playing the corruption story that ends with the Sin player summoning a F.A.I.T.H. Agent (Or one of the Sons of Ragnarok) as a powerful avatar-power monster.
- Evil Is Bigger: Nearly every Avatar is double the height of any of the F.A.I.T.H. agents. Grin is significantly larger than any other piece by both height and size due to his huge upper body. The Four Horsemen and Apocalypse take this to the extreme, as the Four Horsemen dwarf nearly every Avatar by at least a head, and Apocalypse is double the size of any of the horsemen.
- Extra Turn: All characters have 2 turns per round, but there are ways to obtain extra turns through character abilities or city actions, although once an extra turn token is spent, a new one must be obtained.
- Face–Heel Turn: If you're playing a corruption story, every character is dealt one of seven Dark Past cards. The player that reveals card 7 becomes a monster with 5 attack and 5 defense (no ability), and immediately is placed under the control of the Sin player. This can be crippling if the character in question had a particularly helpful ability to win the map.
- The Faceless: Eagle wears an opaque helmet covering his upper face and a big bushy beard covering his lower face. Wong wears a full-body suit. The Pride controller wears some sort of hazard suit with an opaque visor, though the tentacles breaking through it stretch the validity of "faceless."
- Facial Markings: Calavera's extensive tattoos include a stylized skull on his face.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: the Four Horsemen are the subject of the Apocalypse expansion, wherein the Hell Club opens their gates and summons forth the Heralds of the Apocalypse to destroy Haven.
- Fragile Speedster: Kanga can move 5 spaces per turn, greatly outspeeding her teammates. Unfortunately, she is practically the only character with no defense, and dies easily against bosses.
- Fun with Acronyms: The Federal Authority for the Interdiction of Transdimensional Horrors.
- Genius Bruiser: Doc and Thorley.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: A corruption story is played with the Dark Past cards labeled 1 through 7. 1 is the best, labeled "Clear Conscience", however it is the only one that doesn't harm the character. 2 is "Slightly Troubled", and your character is damaged due to something that is bothering their mind. 3 is "The Guilty One" and causes the apocalypse track to raise when revealed. 4 is "Former Hell Club" and the player remembers their past and takes either 3 wounds or 3 corruption. 5 is "Psychopathy Trigger" and the player goes nuts, damaging themselves and all nearby players for two wounds. 6 is "Suicide Pact" and kills the player at the end of the round. Finally, 7 is "the Tainted One" and your character is forcibly taken control of by The Sin. All of these cards are activated by using corruption or being too corrupted by the enemy.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Doctor Leah Solomon was a pioneer in the field of multidimensional physics, but her last project cost her an eye and allowed the Others to leak into the world again, corrupting her mentor Doctor Gan.
- Good Shepherd: Augustine Gastineau is a kind French Catholic priest who joined F.A.I.T.H. after its agents rescued him from post-quake Haiti and the rampage of the Others through Port-au-Prince.
- Hologram: technology in the 2020's incorporates holographic displays. The Megatheatre in Haven has volumetric displays instead of traditional flat screens.
- Half-Human Hybrid: A number of F.A.I.T.H. agents are humanoid, but not fully human. Kanga is a human-leopard hybrid.
- Heroic Sacrifice: When facing against Envy, all players must take a corruption unless the player who got an upgrade takes a deliberate wound.
- This is a valid win strategy. The rules clearly state that if the players would lose the game but manage to simultaneously clear the last objective, they win. As such, a player can rush their character to assured destruction in a room of 5+ enemies with attack boosts if they can at least accomplish the final objective.
- Hobos: One of the acolytes that the Sin player can choose is the Corrupted Hobo. They're not particularly strong (not that any of the acolytes are), but their ability allows them to be summoned once per turn to the board in a non-ranged fight and disable an upgrade that the player has for the remainder of combat.
- Impartial Purpose-Driven Faction: F.A.I.T.H. exists solely to fight the Others. It has limited political recognition from the UK government and is mostly privately-funded.
- Innocent Bystander: civilians are caught in the crossfire and stories will have you rescuing them.
- Kill Sat: The Orbital Strike token allows a player to instantly kill an Acolyte or Abomination upon activation.
- Last of His Kind: Morgana is the last known vampire, the rest having fallen in battle with the Others almost two thousand years ago.
- Lowered Recruiting Standards: these got Keanu Winters into the US Army.
- The Masquerade: F.A.I.T.H. hides their actions from the public, though some government officials are aware of their existence and actions.
- Mayor Pain: Tancred Maximillian Cheng, two-term Member of Parliament, is one of F.A.I.T.H's most dangerous opponents.
- Mysterious Past: F.A.I.T.H. knows almost nothing about Zhi. He came from a Tibetan monastery and appears to be in his late thirties, but he refuses to give a straight answer to any question about his history.
- Multinational Team: FAITH teams are composed of agents from around the world.
- No-Sell: Sin creatures can only be killed if the Hero player rolls enough hits to take them all out in one fight. Any leftover damage is discarded, so this can happen if you roll four hits against a two-wound acolyte and a three-wound abomination; the acolyte goes down but the abomination ignores the hits that would have applied to it.
- Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Leah Solomon is not only a physicist, but a genetic engineer responsible for the creation of Doc and Kanga.
- Our Monsters Are Different: when the Others last invaded over two thousand years ago, they became the source of most mythological creatures.
- Place of Protection: places of religious significance are capable of cleansing Corruption.
- Power Limiter: Wengsi Wong's suit is designed to keep her chi-absorbing powers in check and she can discharge it through her swords.
- Race Against the Clock:
- The F.A.I.T.H. agents are in a rush to stop the Hell Club from succeeding, and implications are that they don't have much time to stop it.
- The Sin player gets use of the Apocalypse Board, a small board that changes depending on if you're using the Apocalypse expansion version or the base game version. It fills up easily and can give the Sin player great benefits and powerful abilities. The F.A.I.T.H. players are essentially in a huge race against time to end the game quickly before the Sin player becomes nearly unstoppable.
- Ragtag Band of Misfits: The Sons of Ragnarok are good at what they do and are not legally endorsed by F.A.I.T.H. whatsoever.
- Really 700 Years Old: a few characters are much older than they look: Morgana and Karl are over two thousand years old, and Skye, Rajiv, and Rosario are over a hundred.
- Seven Deadly Sins: Each Sin has its own representation in the form of hideous, gribbly monsters: a Controller, Abominations, and a mighty Avatar. The base game comes with Pride and Sloth, while the rest are expansion boxes. Morgana explains to the FAITH agents that Christianity was developed as a tool to shield humanity from the corruption of the Others, which is why the Seven Deadly Sins map to the seven types of the monsters.
- Sinister Minister: corrupted priests and nuns are among the Others' acolytes.
- Small Girl, Big Gun: Polly has mild achrondroplasia and a grenade launcher.
- Super-Soldier: the US Army put Keanu Winters into an experimental "superior soldier program" to enhance his abilities, but his first field operation ended with his unit wiped out and his arms eaten.
- Super-Speed: Rose can enter a state of massively-heightened perception. It's the primary cause of her Big Eater status since it burns through calories to stay in that zone. She managed to keep it hidden from the Hell Club until she escaped from them.
- Timed Mission: the Apocalypse Track counts down depending on conditions described on the chosen Story Board, giving the Sins player more bonuses as the mission drags on. At Apocalypse level 7, every Hero takes two Wounds and two Corruption at the end of every round.
- In the Apocalypse expansion, it's replaced for a special version that powers up Apocalypse himself and gives the Sin player eternally regenerating Horseman monsters. Each Horseman has 4-5 attack and defense, and Apocalypse starts at 4 and can get as high as 10 at Apocalypse level 7, basically making him a dangerous chore to fight and nearly guaranteeing he kills his target at the end of each fight.
- Tiny-Headed Behemoth: Grin, The Brute of the Hell Club, wears a gimp mask on his comparatively tiny head.
- 20 Minutes into the Future/Urban Fantasy: Armand Rainey was three when Hurricane Katrina hit and he's currently twenty-three, putting the setting of The Others in 2025.
- Vampires Are Rich: Morgana bankrolls FAITH. She's had two millennia to build a fortune and is the owner of Raven Corporation.
- Was Once a Man: Acolytes are all unfortunate victims of the Hell Club's meddling with forces beyond their understanding. Averted with Skye Kwan, who is a born werewolf and not infected. Morgana states that Acolytes cannot be rescued or rehabilitated; once the Corruption has them, they're lost forever.
- Younger Than They Look: As creations of the Hell Club, River, Rose, Thorley, and Nicolas are all about five years old, chronologically.
