Haunting the Game Store

After a fine dinner and book buying evening with my daughter, I finally made it out to Little Shoppe of Games for our weekly game night. I got there just in time, right after Chad and Lizzi arrived, to join in a game of The Haunting House. Lane and Jess already had it laid out on one of the tables, so it was just a matter of grabbing a token, some cards, and joining in. The Haunting House is a tile based game, where the tiles are arranged to form the floor plan of a large house. Each tile is a corridor, with one to four exits, leaving the house a maze. Players start at the center of the house and have to work their way out to the exit. You've probably guessed it isn't as easy as all that. First off, Lane had a couple of expansions to the game included, which gave us a second story and an attic. Several of the tiles have arrows on them indicating that they rotate 90 or 180 degrees when you enter them. Others have the word flip on them, meaning that when someone leaves the tile, it flips over and becomes unavailable for the duration of the round. To make matters even more chaotic, each round is split into two parts. For the first part, the player to your left chooses at random the four action cards that determine your next four moves. For the second half, of the round, you choose four for yourself. The cards themselves can let you move one, two, or three spaces, rotate tiles, swap places with an adjacent player, etc. One kills you, if you are standing on a square with ghosts on it. You become a ghost, and suddenly the whole game is different, because the ghosts' goal is to get to the far corner of the attic rather than the first floor attic. And ghosts can't travel along hallways, they can only go between walls. The Haunting House turned out to be all kinds of insane fun. The random part of each round played havoc with any kind of strategy, and you had to keep an eye on everyone else's movement as much as you own. Backstabbing ran rampant, but in the end one of the ghosts (I think Chad, but it might have been Lizzi) managed to get to the attic corner and win. I had a great time with it, and want to give it another shot sometime soon. The high point of the evening, though, was the buckwheat cookies Lizzi brought us all.  Mmmmmmm, cookies.