Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Available on Steam
Developed by Mantis
Published by Dangen Entertainment
Have you ever desired to be a haunted house? Deck of Haunts will feed that desire, as well as many hapless investigators who want to discover the horrible truth about what you are. There is a dark heart beating at the center of this old mansion on a blasted hill, and it needs to feed on the souls and sanity of those who dare enter it. This is a digital card deck-building game that combines with a construction simulator. This game presents a significant strategic challenge. Good luck! It starts easy and becomes deviously hard.
How Deck of Haunts Works:
In Deck of Haunts, you are the entity in the house that hungers for fresh meat and souls. Your bell tower rings its bell to lure the unwary to your doors. There, you will run these unfortunate people through a gauntlet of deadly rooms that you have set up for them. Meanwhile, you pepper them with hexes, spells, and traps. All this killing and soul sucking attracts more powerful investigators. The police will arrive in larger numbers than you may be able to handle. Your timing and selection of cards will determine whether you can prevent them from eventually breaking into the literal heart of the house and destroying your source of power.
Deck of Haunts is a deck-building game. Pesky people will start poking their noses past your portal. They initially arrive in small, untrained groups. These are easily dispatched. (Yum! Yum!) However, each successive turn brings a new wave of better-equipped and more highly trained individuals. The game starts you off with a set number of cards, simple spells at first. You accrue more powerful cards as each level passes. Then, you are given a choice between adding to your deck or gaining a new dastardly room type to add to the house.
Your goal is to create a twisty Winchester Mystery House full of literal dead ends, funnelling the searchers where you want them. You can kill them, or drive them insane. Either way, you get their souls. Unfortunately for you, many of these folks have an instinct about where your vulnerable spot is, and they will push towards the heart. You also only have a few cards in your hand, and a similarly low resource pool that limits the number and power of cards that you can play. As you customize your deck, you will be trying to get out more powerful cards as often as you can, with as little magic as possible.
The Look and Sounds of Deck of Haunts
This game sets the mood very well. It’s spooky, and the cards are simple and evocative. Each room has a distinctive look, and conveniently, the basic rooms have a pattern that indicates rooms that don’t contain any powerful effects. You’ll need to convert as many of the Guest rooms/Kitchen/Living Rooms into deadly spaces as soon as you can. There is a randomness to each game that may dictate what rooms you can build and what synchronistic combinations you will have at your disposal.
The investigators are small animated “meeples” with few defining characteristics from each other, besides their sex. However, each has a portrait and a name, along with any relevant attributes they may possess. You’ll want to pay close attention to those attributes, as they will dictate who the weak links and powerful characters are. They also periodically make amusing statements in comic book bubbles. I particularly like that one of them announced “ZOINKS!”, and I knew Scooby Doo would need to be nearby.
The audio has a nice ominous score running in the background. Despite the constant music, the audio loop does not overwhelm the gameplay. The sickening crunch of hitting the investigators with a damaging spell is very satisfying. You are such a mean house! There is violence, and some of the cards are pretty disturbing, but this is by and large a PG-13 game. Those of you familiar with the popular board game Betrayal at House on the Hill will be right at home here. Pun intended.
Evaluation of Deck of Haunts
I got sucked into this game immediately. I am familiar with deck-building games, and this is similar to, but not nearly as complicated as Magic: The Gathering and the endless card variants of that game. Consider Gloomhaven as a closer comparison. Fewer cards with stricter strategies. Strategically, you can pick different routes. A direct damage kill shot approach is the simplest way to play, and success will come quickly. But, eventually, you will run into prey that don’t kill so easily, and will swarm you faster than you can shoot them. A sanity-draining strategy has a slightly lower payoff, but with the tension function of the game, it has powerful multiplying powers.
Like all “card” games, luck of the draw will always be in play. And the investigators who show up can vary greatly. I have had some games where I felt that I had a nearly impregnable fortress, only to be badly outflanked. That highlights a weakness of this game. Rinse and repeat. You will fail often, and you will benefit from losing in that you get to keep your deck for your next run. However, each time you die, the mansion resets. Frustrating!
So, if you like your video games to play like board games or card games, Deck of Haunts will be a huge winner for you. The game draws you in, like the chiming of the bell tower. Deck of Haunts is also addictive. It is a turn-based system, allowing strategic thinkers to carefully map out their plans. Highly recommended for tactical game players.
Currently this game is available for $19.99 on Steam. It was released in May of 2025, and like all Steam games, it has already had a slew of updates and patches.