Description

Build and run your own haunted house in this worker placement/tile placing hybrid game.

Get together with up to three of your friends and compete to see who can build the best and scariest haunted house and frighten the most guests without accidentally scaring them to death. There's plenty of player interaction as you can connect your houses up to theirs, swap guests from their queues to yours, raise and lower the fear level of various guests with effects cards - all to keep players on their toes and ruin the most well laid of plans.

Your workers can head into town to research new house tiles, recruit more workers, promote their house and attract guests, or collect the necessary resources to build their house.

The workers also double as scarers! They can head into the house to help scare guests in the correct directions or they can work the queue at the front-of-house to prime guests for a more frightening experience. But be careful! Many guests have special attributes that can throw a wrench in things like "Screamer" - this guest will raise the fear level of every adjacent guest when they become scared! Use these different abilities to play guests off one another or interrupt other player's plans.

The only way to get cash is by admitting people to your house, they pay the second they come in whether they have a good time or not. As a guest enters, you'll slot them into a standee base with a rotating dial to track their fear level.

If guests have a good time, you can invite them to come back. If guests die, they take up precious storage bays and prevent you from storing the necessary resources to build up your house. If you kill too many guests, it means a change of management and a huge loss of points.

The gameplay goes on a night-by-night basis for 7 days leading up to halloween, resetting and paying workers at the end of each night. As the game wraps up after all the guests leave on Halloween night, Euro-style rules kick in and players reveal secret values each of their successfully scared guests contribute to their total score.

Spook House is a complex game with multiple strategies to win, currently clocking in around 3 hours for a full playthrough with four players. But it's still very early in development.

—description from the designer