Beast + The Great Hunt: the hunt is back on, but four players only this time

A year ago I found myself in the woods of some Nordic world with the deeply unpleasant feeling of being watched. Around my table: three hunters, one invisible tracker, and that low, creeping tension that built with every turn. That was Beast, and I hadn't managed, since then, to recapture that sensation of being both predator and prey, somewhere between Brotherhood of the Wolf and a game of Werewolf where the wolf could actually bite you. So when Don't Panic Games announced the Beast was returning in a brand-new campaign, The Great Hunt, let's just say I caught the scent of blood.

One small catch before we go further. The Great Hunt is not a standalone game, it's an expansion for the base game Beast. If you're new here, this article is for you: we'll start from the foundations, then crack open the new box.

Beast, back to basics: a Nordic thriller on your table

A quick look at where it comes from. Beast was born at the Swedish outfit Studio Midhall, funded on Kickstarter before landing in a French edition from Don't Panic Games. The pitch fits in a single image: a mythical creature settled into a wild region long before the settlers arrived, and it fully intends to hunt them down. So one of you plays the Beast, lurking in the northern forests, while the others take on the Hunters sent after it. The Beast wants to survive and spread chaos, the Hunters want to bring it down before the final night.

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Nothing new on paper, except that everything lives in the mechanics and the tension. Concretely, a game is split into days, and each day follows the same cycle. At Dawn, everyone, Beast included, takes part in a closed draft: you get a hand, keep one card, pass the pack to your neighbour, and so on. Then comes the Day phase where, on your turn, you play those cards for their effects. A clever little wrinkle: every card carries two panels, a blue one reserved for Hunters and a red one for the Beast, and you can only trigger one of each type per turn. The same card therefore tells a different story depending on which side holds it. Finally, Night resolves the day's contracts, cleans up the markets and lets you invest your precious Grudge tokens, the currency you spend to level up your character.

The heart of it is asymmetry paired with hidden movement. The Hunters move in plain sight, while the Beast plays in the shadows: its moves stay secret (quietly logged behind a screen) until it attacks, reveals itself or gets flushed out. But it leaves a trail, and the moment a Hunter steps onto a recently crossed space, a Footprint token appears. That's where all the flavour lives: the Hunters cooperate, deduce and coordinate to trap the Beast in a pincer ("did it come through here? shall we drop a trap?"), while the monster pops up three spaces away, snatching a sheep on its way past. What sets Beast apart from most hunt games is that the Beast isn't doomed to run: it has real claws, it can strike, and that changes everything.

Add a gorgeous art direction, Aron Midhall's dark, mystical linework that alone conjures a hostile Nordic-folktale mood, and you get an experience that owes as much to a character-development game as it does to a Scandinavian film noir.

Beast (base game) · Designers: Aron Midhall, Elon Midhall, Assar Pettersson · Art: Aron Midhall · Original publisher: Studio Midhall · French edition: Don't Panic Games · Players: 2 to 4 (best at 3+) · Playtime: ~90 min · Age: 14+ · Price: 80 € · French release: 22 September 2023

Beast: The Great Hunt (expansion) · Designers: Aron Midhall, Elon Midhall, Assar Pettersson, Albin Larsson · Art: Aron Midhall · Publisher: Don't Panic Games (French edition) · Players: 4 · Playtime: ~240 min · Age: 14+ · Price: 45 € · Mechanics: semi-cooperative, asymmetric Beast vs Hunters, chapter-based narrative, modular

What The Great Hunt changes: a real campaign, not just an add-on

This is where it gets interesting. Where the base game gives you one-off confrontations, The Great Hunt rolls out a genuine narrative campaign. Humans thought they had triumphed by killing the Beast, except they unleashed something far worse. A nightmare descends on the Northern Expanse: everywhere, the townsfolk share the same dream, of a dark palace where a banquet of rotting flesh awaits them. The hunters Assar, Iona and above all Esmeria then follow the trail of the mysterious Feathered King and a plot that threatens all of humanity. It's a tale of betrayal, death and unholy rebirth, and trust me, the atmosphere is enough to keep you up at night.

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Concretely, you string together a series of linked chapters, full of twists, fantastical creatures and cruel turns of fate, all carried by a 59-page storybook. This time the contract is "story-driven": multiple paths, choices, objectives and rewards that unfold one into the next. And above all, six different endings. In other words, the story doesn't replay the same way twice: depending on your decisions and how the chapters land, you'll discover something new on the next play. For a fan of narrative games, that's exactly the kind of promise that makes you want to reset everything the moment the last chapter closes.

A neat bonus: the expansion is modular. It slips in two new characters compatible with Beast and its other boxes: Esmeria, captain of the Great Hunt, and the enigmatic Feathered King, a Beast whose "unborn" side promises cold sweats. So you don't keep them locked to the campaign, they enrich your whole Beast collection. On the component side, the box delivers: a Hunter board, a double-sided Beast board, thirty wooden tokens, seven Skill cards, six standees and, best of all, six miniatures to embody the whole cast.

And the theme, let's talk about it. A night hunt, creatures and northern legends, constant tension: hard to dream up anything better to bring out by candlelight on the 31st of October. This is exactly the game you keep warm for Halloween.

Where it stumbles: four players, no more, no fewer

One reservation, and it's a real one. The Great Hunt is played with four players. Not "up to four", but four. You may run into a "2 to 4" listing at some retailers like Philibert, don't rely on it: the publisher, Don't Panic Games, clearly states a four-player format, and it's the publisher that has the final word.

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The snag is what that implies. The base game happily handles 2 to 4 players, even with a perfectly defensible two-player mode where one person pilots two hunters. By locking to four for a campaign that runs close to four hours and spreads across several chapters, the expansion asks you to gather a fixed, available, complete group, session after session. Anyone who has ever tried to line up the same table of four adults across several evenings knows exactly where the shoe pinches. It isn't a design flaw, it's a deliberate choice for the campaign's balance, but it's the real constraint to keep in mind before you reach the till.

Two more caveats, inherited from the base game and dishonest to gloss over. The rulebook, beautiful as it is, does its job well for onboarding but sorely lacks a FAQ the moment an edge case comes up, and they do come up, given the sheer profusion of effects. And the Hunters' side stays a notch more scripted than the Beast's, more exposed to the luck of the draft: a hand short on attacks or Grudge, and your turn can fizzle fast. Nothing dealbreaking, especially now that a scripted campaign finally gives the whole thing a backbone, but worth knowing.

Verdict: for trackers who love a story

The Great Hunt takes what already made Beast strong, the fine-grained asymmetry, the razor-edge atmosphere, the chilling beauty of the art, and gives it what it most lacked: a real narrative backbone, a campaign with stakes, memorable characters and six endings that beg to be replayed. If you love narrative games as much as I do, it's a near-essential companion to your base box.

So keep it for those who already own Beast, who relish the idea of a story that unfolds over time, and above all who can count on a loyal quartet ready to head back into the forest several nights running. Gather that table, kill the lights come late October, and let the Beast do the rest.

Rating: 9/10. A single notch below flawless purely because of that four-player format that limits the chances to get it out. On everything else, atmosphere, storytelling, components, replayability, it's a model of the genre.