You play as meddling kid wandering too far into a creepy haunted house. You knew you shouldn't touch anything, but like any protagonist in a horror story, your curiosity got the best of you and now you've accidentally awoken an evil presence in the house. You'll have to undo the curse to escape with your sanity or forever be haunted!
It's a fast, easy-to-learn game that uses push your luck "set destruction." Decide how risky to play as you venture deep into the haunted house. Do you take first choice of the items and risk attracting haunts, or play it safe? Collect the right items and you can dispel some of your curses.
On your turn, choose a part of the haunted house to explore by placing a meeple in one of the 3 rooms. Each room has 5 placement spaces. The deeper you go into a room the more likely you are to get the cursed item you desire, but be careful! The further you go, the more ghosts will haunt you.
When 3 meeples have been placed into a room, the ghost dice are rolled. Depending on the result the placement of the meeples players will gain ghosts tokens. Next players will take cards from the room, depending on their meeple's position.
At the end of the game. The player with the most ghost tokens is haunted! They will gain curses equal to the number of ghosts they have collected. Players will then add up the curses from their ghosts and their item cards.
The player with the fewest curses wins!
- portable, quick-session mood
- toy factor with glowing dice tower
- replayability via varied setups
- light depth may limit experienced players
- toy-factor horror with light suspense
- haunted mansion, playful spooky tone
- vignette-driven, modular setup
- Dixit vibe with a spooky twist
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- dice tower centerpiece — Box unfolds into a dice tower that doubles as a display element
- Dice-driven resolution — Roll dice to resolve actions and outcomes
- variable relics and setup — Decks and relics are varied to alter play each session
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- 13 games that we think you should check out for this Halloween season.
- This is one of the more immersive games I think we have on our list today.
- It's almost more of an activity than a game.
References (from this video)
- Thematic and creepy artwork
- Dice tower and glow-in-the-dark dice
- Compact box with magnets
- Horror/haunting with cursed items
- Haunted house with cursed objects
- room-based, dice-driven resolution with push-your-luck elements
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- item/die-driven scoring — Resolutions involve dice pools and scoring based on curses and goals.
- room-based placement and resolution — On turns, players place meeples in rooms; when a room has three meeples, it is resolved via dice determined by the room's contents.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- our goal is to make this world a better place one boy gamer at a time
- I really like this game because of the theme
- the dice actually glow in the dark
- let it go, move on, brush it off and get on with your life
- you don't want to let negativity steal your joy
- we are going to bring you more voices