Anyone ever played/heard of dread? It is essentially a tabletop horror game, minus the number crunching elements. More of a story game, not a dungeon crawler. The core mechanic is a jenga tower.
Basically you have a handful of characters you're playing, but no stats or anything. There is a host telling the story. Whenever the players need to make a check, if something bad happens, or they try to do something difficult, the player must pull from the jenga tower. Whenever the tower falls, bad shit happens, usually a dead player. The tension of pulling from a wobbly jenga tower + some mood lighting and a scary story makes it very nerve wrecking to pull, knowing you might be slashed to pieces if you fuck up. I played it recently with some friends, was very fun.
We weren't entirely in the horror setting, but the game was set in NYC, 1929. We had a barman, a private-eye detective, and a rich dude who owned a ford factory. When we started playing none of the characters knew each other, so the first half of the game or so was played in the bar. Eventually there's a murder and shit goes down. The game got kinda silly towards the end, but it was a lot of fun. Even if it wasn't a traditional horror setting. Really the jenga tower and lack of stats makes the story telling much more important, it also gives physical tension when people are attempting to do the impossible.
This is a video series of people playing it if you wanna see what it can be like. It's kind of interesting, I only watched part of it though. The voice recording in this is kinda shitty, some are too loud and too quiet. Ends up in you cranking up the volume to hear the host speaking and then get an earful of the guy by the mic screaming.
