The Haunted House Review: Halloween special

Ghosts, skeletons and much more await you in this review, are you ready to step inside The Haunted House?

Contents

For Halloween night there is no more themed game than this! Show your courage and walk through the door of The Haunted House. You have to be the fastest to walk the creaking floor, retrieve the 3 Halloween pumpkins and run out of the house without letting your opponents steal them.

Game components | The Haunted House Review

The contents of the box are as follows:

30 creaking floor tiles
5 Player pawns
5 plastic footboards for our pawns
1 game board
1 die with numbers from 1 to 3
3 wooden pumpkins

The game board is illustrated on both sides, on one side there is precisely the base of our game and on the other there is a nice poster that depicts all the characters.

Let’s prepare the game and start the game | The Haunted House Review

The setup

We place on the table the game board with visible the side where the base of our game is. On the floor design we are going to lay the 30 creaking floor tiles face down and randomly. Then take the 3 wooden pumpkins and place them next to the board. Finally, each player chooses a character, puts the plastic platform on him to keep him straight and places him on the yellow door which is the starting point. You are now ready to embark on this scary adventure!

How to play

To choose the first player do a little screaming contest, whoever makes the scariest one wins and starts playing first. During your turn you must roll the die and you must move your pawn the indicated number of spaces; the movements allowed are to the right, to the left, forwards and backwards, but NON diagonally. When did you stop on one Creaking Floor tile you have to turn it over and do the action that is written on it and then leave it turned, whoever ends up on it later will also have to do the action written on the card. It may happen that you find one Pumpkin card, in that case take the wooden gourd with the corresponding number, your goal is to find all three and not have them stolen before you can get out of the haunted house.

How are pumpkins stolen?

When one player has managed to catch all three pumpkins, the others must return their pieces to the starting point. If you can reach the player who has all three pumpkins on his own space, then they come into your possession and you must reach the exit of the house as fast as possible. The player who lost the pumpkins and all the others must return to the starting point as before and the game continues like this.

Who win?

The game ends when the player who has the three pumpkins manages to reach the green door thus becoming the winner.

N.B. To reach the green line it is necessary to make a die roll that results in a number equal to the number of squares needed to cross the finish line and win.

Description of the cards | The Haunted House Review

There are 12 different types of boxes, let’s see them all in detail:

Pumpkin 1, Pumpkin 2 and Pumpkin 3: you take the wooden pumpkin match the number of the pumpkin written on the box. If the pumpkin is in the possession of another player, then nothing is taken
Lose a pumpkin: you have to place a pumpkin in your possession next to the board and if you have more than one, you choose which one to place. To be able to retrieve it, you must return to the respective box
Lose All Pumpkins: lose all the pumpkins that are in your possession, also in this case to recover them you need to go to the respective boxes
All pumpkins: it is the luckiest box of all! If you end up above you can get all the pumpkins that are not owned by other players, but you cannot steal them
Roll again: you must roll the die again
Swap two boxes: you can reverse the position of two squares, both covered and uncovered
Advance by one: move one square in the direction you prefer
Advance two: move two boxes in the direction you prefer
Stopping a shift: you must skip a game turn
Back to top: place your pawn on the yellow line
Secret Passage: this card allows you to go to a square of your choice, even a square occupied by an opponent to be able to steal the pumpkins. You can not go to the green door
Safe floor: nothing happens on this box

Conclusion

The Haunted House is another Little Rocket Games title that thrilled me a lot, both for the theme and for the game itself. Some writings on the boxes may remind you of The Goose Game and many may not like it, but trust that having to recover all the pumpkins and risk having them stolen makes everything more exciting. I liked the components a lot, but one thing made me turn up my nose a little and that is the plastic platforms for the pieces are too narrow and as much as you can be careful, it is inevitable that the pieces are damaged. The idea of making a poster with the characters was also nice, but if it was apart I would have preferred… it would have been nice to use as a decoration for Halloween.