I love board games. I actually met my boyfriend by playtesting his board game. So when he found Deck of Haunts, he effectively pitched it to me as being similar to Betrayal at House on the Hill, except that instead of playing as a survivor who might turn traitor, you just play as the haunt… ed house. Which is great, because that’s my favorite part of playing that game, and now I could skip the tedious “waiting for the haunt to start” part of the game and jump straight to the “kill all the humans” part of the game. And that’s exactly what Deck of Haunts aims to do–and when it does it, it does it really well. (There’s nothing quite like watching a whole crowd of humans walk into a Phobia Room as they all lose half of their sanity bar.)
Keep Haunting Me
Let’s talk about the good first, because there is good in this game. There is a lot of strategy and depth to Deck of Haunts. The humans who show up have different traits, which can be good or bad for you as the haunted house. Doctor’s kit, for example, restores one hit point to a random human in the room every turn. That’s obviously bad for you, as the house trying to murder all the humans. But on the flip side, there’s bleeder, which causes the human to take an extra point of damage if they took any damage the previous turn. One of the room upgrades even has a chance to add bleeder to any human who walks in. The success rate isn’t specified, but, in practice, it seems to be pretty high.
There’s also a lot of strategy to be had with what cards can do when you can play them. Your most powerful cards will typically only be playable on a solo human, meaning no other living humans can be in the room. Insane humans still count for this, giving an incentive to kill rather than driving them insane. If people enter in a group, one of your standard starting cards moves any human to a random room, which is great when you need to separate a sheep from the flock. (Or a shepherd–when the priests show up, they’re immune to all your normal techniques if there’s another non-insane living human in the room with them.) But that card could easily move the human close to your heart, and if they enter, you take damage.
Very helpfully, the game also tells you what the actual result of a card will be when you hover over it. There’s a very powerful card that says it does 3 damage to the original target and 4 drain to targets in adjacent rooms, but when you hover over a valid target, it will update that to show what the actual numbers are. Sometimes that means it says it will do 6 damage and 4+8+8+12 drain, or something even more ridiculous. Sometimes it’ll say it’s going to do 2 or even 0 drain, or damage to one of the targets, so if you missed a trait, you can see in advance and decide if it’s worth using anyway. (Sometimes it is.)
Lastly, and this one is hard to put into words–when the game is on, it’s on. When your house has turned into a rat maze and the humans are running around looking for the cheese, it feels great. When you can put a key room in a choke point that all humans have to walk through, and then you can see it go off, it feels amazing. And when a boss shows up and you kill him before he gets halfway to your house, it feels like a real triumph. This game has its moments where it really reaches those heights, where your deck’s engine works and you can break the game into itty bitty pieces to make it do absurd things in order to beat the even more absurd challenges that it hits you with. It has those moments.
When Good Haunts Go Bad
My boyfriend played a lot of the demo before this game officially released, and he told me that, at one time, getting a card after a night was separate from getting a room. I really think that should be reinstated, or something should happen to accelerate getting cards and rooms because the thing that feels the worst about Deck of Haunts is how slow it is to build your deck in this deckbuilder. If you focus too much on getting rooms, your deck will fall behind, and you won’t have the ability to take down humans, particularly the ones who can neutralize your rooms. But if you focus too much on getting cards, your house will be vulnerable, and you’ll be limited to one or a small handful of targets at a time because cards just don’t hit everybody.
There’s a lot of power in the rooms. But in a normal run, you only have 28 nights, and on some nights you’ll have to choose between getting and upgrading a card. Upgrades, as you might expect, are precious and game-changing, and it’s usually just not worth taking a new card instead of upgrading an existing one. But that means you have less than 27 chances to get enough cards and rooms. Enemies aren’t waiting. The progress feels bad. It feels like you’re arbitrarily stunted. Compared with Monster Train 2, which I reviewed not long ago and gave very high marks to, this feels like you’re playing with the base deck, or with no upgrades for your “train” for most of the game.
A few hours into playing Deck of Haunts, I started comparing it to Cultist Simulator. Both of them are roguelike card games that have a fairly long run time, and both of them feel really bad when you lose and have to start over. In CS’s case, that’s because (as I hinted at in my top ten list) there’s not enough progress that you carry over between runs. In Deck of Haunts, it’s because the first week or two of every run is really, really boring. Sure, it’s fast, and you can’t possibly lose during that time if you’re actually making any effort to play the game, but that just makes it more tedious going through the same set of levels over and over. Here’s one human. Here’s two humans. Here’s a human with a trait. Here’s a human who can come in through any room. Here’s a set of cops to signal that you’ve reached the actual game. It’s easy, but it’s boring.
Pretty early on it became basically impossible for me to lose before reaching the Stone Masons, which show up a little over halfway through a standard run. Getting through that first half of the run just doesn’t feel fun. There’s no way to up the ante for additional rewards, and there’s no change to the order of the enemy upgrades. And, because building your deck and house takes so long, even though there are a lot of humans with different traits, there’s minimal strategy to killing or draining them because you just don’t have enough options for how to do it.
Now, the game has introduced multiple ways to adjust the beginning. My favorite run of this game was when I switched from the default deck to a damage deck. (I didn’t realize until I was running that deck how much difficulty is added by having both damage and drain in a deck and being unable to focus on one.) The damage deck let me focus on just tearing down humans who walked in as fast as I could, and it made it worthwhile to use some cards I’d never bothered to try before because they rely on having multiple copies, or other combos, in order to work well. The devs added that damage deck as well as a drain deck, and they have said that, eventually, players will have the option to make their own starting decks. There’s also the chaos deck, which is a randomized set of cards you’ve unlocked.
Things That Go Bump in the Night
I wanted to like this way more than I ended up doing. On paper, it’s a game made exactly for me. It’s a small, budget deckbuilder where you’re trying to drive humans insane and/or kill them so that they’ll leave your Eldritch abomination heart alone. And, in case you couldn’t guess from my inclusion of Cultist Simulator on my top ten games, or my delight at Roots Devour, I really like being the Eldritch abomination. So Deck of Haunts was starting out halfway to the goal. And, for some periods of time, it got to that goal. The problem I run into with this one is that it struggles to maintain the balance of frustration and excitement that a roguelike lives on, and it struggles to keep up the fun of building a deck that a deckbuilder lives on. When it’s on, it’s on. But when it’s off, it’s worse than off. It’s boring.
But I said at the start of this that you should be watching this one, and that’s because the devs haven’t stopped working on it. They’ve already released the update with the alternative starting decks and indicated that they’re going to open it up later so that players can create their own starting decks as well. More recently, in celebration of Friday the 13th, they added brand new difficulty options, including (for those who have more masochism in their hearts than me) an all-new challenge mode with thirteen sets of thirteen curated nights, which are both more challenging and more fun than the first thirteen nights of a standard run.
There is a good game within this game, and if the devs keep updating and polishing, I think they’ll find it. It will always be, as my boyfriend called it, “a small-team indie deckbuilder with a little jank,” but there are some really good games in that category, and this could turn into one of the better ones. So, while right now I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, you should absolutely keep an eye on it for the future.