Being a total Scream fan is about 90 percent of my personality. Everything about the 1996 slasher is perfection, and I can talk to you about it for hours if you let me. I didn't know anyone else felt like me until TikTok, and now my FYP is basically just fans theorizing new movies, horny Ghostface cosplay, and tangentially related #booktok recs (thank you, Molly Doyle). That's also where I saw a sneak peek of Scream the Game.

Adding a Scream board game to my life was an obvious necessity. Now I can trap my houseguests into talking about the movie without just forcing them to watch the entire franchise with me (though I would be happy if we did). Funko's release is aptly timed, with the fifth and sixth installments released in 2022 and March of this year, and the seventh in the works.

The game is fast-paced, with about 20 minutes of total gameplay. You're trying to be quick, so I often jumped at the phone calls that came through the app (more on that below), because I was so focused on finishing. That makes it feel a little more like you're actually in a Scream movie. You'll need at least three players—which I usually dislike, since most of the time it's just my husband and I looking for something to relieve our boredom. But this just isn't as fun with two people.

The mission is to have every player survive the movie by completing scenes. Players get scene cards, consisting of either the Macher house, high school, pool hall, or hospital. Each card has three to five items that you need to collect in order to finish the scene—keys, cell phones, popcorn, blood, and Stab DVDs. (Stab is the in-universe slasher film that first appears in Scream 2.) Each turn, you'll either draw a new item card or trade with others to collect your items. When you finish, draw a new scene card. Every scene card must be completed to end the game, and while there are 24 cards in total, some of them are only for four or more players, so you should remove them before you start the game if you don't have that many players. If one person dies, Ghostface wins. I like that you're working together to beat Ghostface instead of trying to beat each other.

No one visits a hospital until Scream 4, and the pool hall doesn't appear until Scream 5 (which is technically just called Scream), so if you're unfamiliar with the movies later in the franchise, some of the elements may be surprising to you. Though the franchise is newly expanding, I wish the scenes stayed true to the originals, with more from the OG films—maybe a Stab movie set?