Sally Face: Strange Nightmares Board Game Review

Sally Face, you’ve got the strangest little Sally Face,

Though people say you move with grace, 

From place to place, 

Solving demonic mysteries,

While avoiding all the Hysteries.. 

Ok, so that last line doesn’t make sense and doesn’t scan either, but that doesn’t matter because it’s all very quirky. If anything, Sally Face Strange Nightmares is very Quirky. It’s also weird and skirts around being slightly unsettling. It is on a level with Binding of Isaac in terms of unsettling. Which is ironic, because in terms of delivering a strange, weird and unsettling game, Sally Face is absolutely more competent that its much better known videogame intellectual property. 

Addison Apartments is in trouble. A continuing series of strange goings on including corrupted spirits and cops roaming the halls and rumours of a secret cult, have forced Sal and his friends to try to get to the bottom of the ongoing mysteries in a series of different stories that have to be tackled. Other people may call them stories, but what I call them is a deck of cards in a tuck box that SHOULD NOT be shuffled before you start playing that particular mystery. Each of the tuck boxes is riffing off a popular horror based franchise that isn’t exactly named directly, but the references are there and not entirely subtle. 

Presentation wise, Sally Face looks like an indie cartoon. Everything from the card art to the characters gives the impression on some kind of YouTube shorts series of cartoons that would have existing back in early 2010. It’s no surprise that this is based on a real life videogame of the characters that has a firm fan base. The style is simple and measured, and if the creator told you that they had designed, written, animated and developed every single aspect of the game, then you would nod in agreement, as you weren’t really surprised to find out that was a fact. That isn’t to say there hasn’t been effort made here, more like the effort that has been applied fits in exactly what was to be expected. Simple cell shaded line art is the order of the day, with backgrounds that wouldn’t look out of place in a King of the Hill or Beavis and Butthead episode. You get the idea. Character status boards looking like Sega Game Gear or Game Boy Advanced. I’ll admit that I found it all to be slightly cooler than expected. Sally Face takes up a reasonable amount of table space, once you lay out the floor of the apartment where the main action happens plus the various character cards, boards and standees.

As for playing, Sally Face uses the story deck to build up the situation for the mystery, until you are charged with taking action across the floors of Addison Apartments, then the next mystery card will set you a series of challenges that you have overcome in order to move the entire story on. Most of the mystery challenges involve you trading dice faces for progress, while trying to avoid rolling demon faces that will have negative consequences for your character and have you losing life or sanity. Anyone who has played a Yahtzee type dice game will be familiar with Sally Face’s main mechanics. You’ll roll dice, decide which ones to keep and lock in order to roll the right faces and place progress cubes on mysteries in order to clear them from the apartment floors. You’ll also need to trade in dice to remove spirits, cops and cultists if they get in the way of your investigative work. 

Once you’ve beaten the mystery challenges, and progressed enough through the story, you’ll get to the inevitable large battle finalé, where you will use your collected items and hopefully defeat the big bad. While I can here you groan slightly, because dice means random, and random potentially means too much random and therefore uncontrollable defeat. The Sally face can act as a wild card and coupled in with what each character offers via their speciality, bad dice rolls can be mitigated to allow you to survive another day. This game is designed to be played through and experienced and so while it can feel tricky and some points, you only get a complete failure if everyone loses all of their health and sanity, or the total level of corruption reaches its maximum levels.  The base game includes four different stories with a selection of random elements that will allow some repeated play, so there is certainly value to be had here. 

The biggest hurdle to enjoying Sally Face the board game is how deep you are involved in the associated IP. From the rulebook, it proudly states that the game was funded very quickly and reached well over $300k in funding. I’m sure that every one of these backers is a huge fan of Sally Face and that is why it did so well. However, playing through the game, I can’t quite help feeling that I’m missing something from the overall story, and every time a certain person turns up on one of the mystery or story cards, its meant to fill my fan boy cup just that little bit more. I’m meant to be recognising the significance of certain locations and of back stories that are merely hinted at. It doesn’t detract too much from the overall experience, but maybe you’ll feel like you’re eating a really lovely sandwich, but there’s just that extra bit that would make it great, that relies on your knowing the entire history of the baker who made the loaf to totally appreciate it. If you’re able to toss that to one side, then Sally Face will give you an interesting and fun, if not unsettling, dice chucking adventure type game.