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Published Oct 6, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT
Matt Patches is the Editor in Chief of Polygon. A veteran culture journalist covering the nexus of Hollywood, gaming, and online entertainment, Patches was previously an editor at Esquire.com and a regular contributor for New York Magazine’s Vulture, Grantland, Vanity Fair, and The Hollywood Reporter.
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Erica Slaughter’s vicious battles with monsters are coming to your local dining room table.
Polygon can exclusively reveal that Tiny Onion, the production company founded by Something Is Killing the Children writer James Tynion IV, announced Something Is Killing the Children: A Gridstorm Game, a new 1v1 tabletop card battler based on Tynion and artist Werther Dell’Edera’s bestselling horror comic. The game is coming to Kickstarter in 2027, giving fans a chance to take on Erica and the Hunters (though with significantly less blood being spilled… we assume).
Gridstorm is built around a grid-based battlefield, where strategic positioning and character-specific card effects determine who survives. Each deck will feature a roster of characters and creatures from the comic’s increasingly expansive universe.
The game is the latest evolution of a franchise that has gotten considerably bigger since its 2019 debut. Something Is Killing the Children began as a five-issue horror miniseries about a mysterious monster hunter drifting into forgotten American towns. Nearly 50 issues later, the Slaughterverse has expanded into House of Slaughter spinoffs, a novel, a Webtoon adaptation, a DC crossover, and upcoming film and animated TV projects from Blumhouse.
“I view every sort of 15-issue chunks of Something Is Killing the Children as a kind of single Erica Slaughter novel,” Tynion recently told Polygon, describing the structure of the comic as something closer to a long-running genre franchise than a conventional monthly series. He compared Erica to Hercule Poirot: a recurring figure who carries readers into new tragedies rather than necessarily dominating every story herself.
That makes the game’s decision to let players inhabit both sides of the comic’s central conflict a natural extension of the world. “We’ve been playing our cards close to the vest on this one,” Tynion said in a statement.
The first card will actually arrive before the game itself: an Erica Slaughter trading card will be included exclusively with the Something Is Killing the Children #50 Cover C blind-bag variant, hitting comic shops Oct. 7. It will also be available at Tiny Onion’s booth at New York Comic Con this weekend.
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