Saw board game takes Kickstarter miniatures to a grim new level with a life-sized severed hand
You’ll be able to take on the traps alone, or with - or against - friends.
The upcoming Saw board game has carried over the morbid tone of the movies into its Kickstarter campaign, offering up a life-size severed hand in its Collector’s Edition.
Saw: The Jigsaw Trials was revealed by Dicebreaker last month as the first tabletop adaptation of the long-running horror franchise, pitting up to six players against the deadly traps of Jigsaw in a competition to be the last one left alive.
In a twist on the movies, here it’ll be the players themselves who are constructing the traps, collecting cards representing different mechanisms, objects and escape methods - for instance, a bathtub full of acid that must be escaped by pulling a lever - in over 2,000 possible combinations. The cards are arranged to form a bit of narrative about the players’ deadly creations, in the same way that series villain Jigsaw rasps to his victims about their increasingly elaborate situations.
To get out, players can use the tools found by searching the workshop - such as a screwdriver or, yes, various kinds of saw - to make up for their characters’ weaker traits, or choose to suffer the traps’ torture and take damage to their body, tracked by individual limbs that can go from being injured to broken or even amputated. If the players lose too much blood, they’ll succumb to their wounds - which can’t be healed, this being Saw and all - and be eliminated.
As well as being playable in a competitive multiplayer mode, The Jigsaw Trials will include a single-player mode that will also allow for co-op gameplay, as one or more players simply try to pass a set number of challenges by overcoming randomised traps. The solo mode will include seven scenarios, providing scenarios for each of the game’s six playable characters and a final ultimate trial against 13 random traps.
If the theme wasn’t quite dark enough for you, the Saw board game’s Kickstarter campaign offers up a £65 Collector’s Edition containing a life-size severed hand. The hand - pre-painted in full bloody detail - can be displayed on a blueprint to recreate the artwork from the standard £45 edition’s box.
The Jigsaw Trials’ crowdfunding campaign shot past its £10,000 goal in a mere 14 minutes, and is within touching distance of raising over £100,000 at the time of writing with 20 days left to run. The game will arrive, severed hands optional, in July of next year.