Deck of Haunts sees you expanding the horrifying influence of a haunted house, playing cards to frighten your victims.
Reminding me more than a little bit of Ghost Master (a game where you would drop ghosts with specific placements rules around various locales to terrify the people inside), this game gives you the ability to set up a haunted house as you see fit. Built around the mansion’s sickening heart, you will steadily create an array of murderous and confounding rooms meant to keep nighttime explorers from sneaking a peak at your pulsating core. Since they’re all so terribly curious, though, you can attack their sanity or physical health with an array of effects on each turn to stop them from getting there.
That said, you may have a handful of great things that will scare them off – say by creating fires or frightening images – but you only have enough energies to play a handful of cards each turn. Given the amount of people that are snooping about, you will have to carefully plan out your scary tactics in order to maximize how much fear, pain, and madness you can sow among the group. The various explorers also have specific rules in play as well – a priest isn’t as easy to frighten as a bored teenager. Sometimes you need to separate people from their allies to have the greatest effect. So, do you play cards that will break the group apart or do you try to whittle them down with frightening events?
While many roguelike card games require this tactical play, something about taking on the role of a haunted house and using your abilities to frighten people to death just made it far more fun for the horror fan in me. Keeping your heart from being found too many times can be a steep challenge, but something about managing all of the creative ways the developers have put into the game to unnerve your opponents kept a smile on my face even if I was losing.
Deck of Haunts is available now on Steam.
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