Social Isolation Report Day 7 – Haunt the House

Day 7 – Haunt the House

Day 7 of social isolation. I played Haunt the House. Haunt the house is a bluffing, set collection game. It’s from KTBG, or Kids Table Board Games, and their games are designed to be for the whole family.

In the game, everyone is a ghost haunting the same house.  Now, I’m guessing being a ghost gets pretty boring, so there’s a competition for when ghost hunters come looking.

Each player gets their own deck of scare cards. These are different types of scares represented by symbols on the card. Now, in a game there are different rooms and different ghost hunters that appear in them.

• The ghost hunters have symbols on them and this is what it takes to scare them.
• The rooms have an ability that you can preform when you play a certain scare there.

On a players turn, they can do two things. They can scare a ghost hunter or use actions.

Scare – The player shouts Boo. They flip over any invisible scares and see if the ghost hunter is scared. If the scare is successful, every player that helped contribute a correct invisible scare either gets a skull point or a phantom. If the scare fails, all invisible scares are discarded.

Actions – A player can do two actions on their turn.

• Draw up to 3 cards. Only if their hand size is 0 or 1.
• Play a visible, face up card, on a room.
• Play an invisible, face down card, on a room. Face down cards do not need to match the symbols needed to scare the ghost hunter. This is the bluffing aspect.

Phantoms – These are ghosts you can play during your action turn as a free action. They can be positive or negative points at the end of the game. You can only gain the points on phantoms you’ve played.

When a player reaches a set number of scared ghost hunters, the round is finished and scoring is completed. Count skulls you have, then each icon on the ghost hunters and your secret icons are scored. Basically, you count the icons and square it. So 1 icon is 1 point, 2 icons are 2 points, 3 icons are 3 points, and so on. Player with the highest score wins.

I liked the artwork in this game.  The different actions each room has, and then the playing a card face up or face down on the room. There were times I thought I’d be able to scare a ghost hunter, only to find out it was all the wrong cards face down. I liked that players are rewarded if they help worked on a scare.

Day 7 completed. Maybe 16 more.