You are the children that the evil Daemon has captured in its’ nightmare castle. It is trying to chain you down and keep your souls for all eternity. If you stick together while investigating the castle, and use your unique abilities wisely, you’ll surely be able to escape the vicious nightmares. Good luck!

What Is It?

Cooperative – Players work together as a team to escape the castle

Exploration / Tile Placement / Modular Board – As players aim to work their way through the castle, they’ll lay out room tiles. They must connect doorways, but otherwise can explore the different directions in any order, meaning a unique lay out every play

Variable Player Powers – Each character has their own unique ability. There are 6 characters to choose from, and 3-4 will be used each game, depending on player count

Dice Rolling – In many rooms, there are “tests” players can perform to gain items or remove chains from players. Players will add their roll results to their character’s stats

Who Is It For?

  • 1 to 4 Players – I thought it worked okay at any count, but thought it was best at 1 or 3 because you play with 3 characters, and you get a little boost during set-up because you put out 3 tiles that you don’t have to draw events for, so it just felt more managable
  • Ages 12 & Up / Light to Mid-Weight Gamers – Pretty approachable, especially since it’s cooperative, so you can help each other. Some strategy involved, but not too heavy by any means
  • Fans of cooperative games, exploring tiles, and dice rolling
  • Fans of a spooky theme

PROS

  • Theme – Love the spooky theme; works well with the game
  • Aesthetics – Great art/graphic design
  • Components – Nice quality tiles/cards/cardboard
  • Rules – Clear/well-written
  • Good reference cards
  • I like the solo and 3-player starting with a few tiles out already, really helps the game feel more manageable
  • Various character abilities are neat

CONS

  • Luck/Randomness – Bad dice rolls or a string of bad event draws can really hurt your team, and there’s often not much you can do to combat that
    • Because of this, you can sometimes just know you lost the game, because of where you are in the tile vs event deck, so playing it out feels futile
  • Insert doesn’t have a good spot for the dice
  • Not a big fan of wooden dice

Final Thoughts

I thought this was a pretty neat game. I was definitely interested based on the theme, and I thought it did a good job of portraying the story in the game elements.

I thought it had pretty straightforward rules, and streamlined gameplay, so it was easy to get right into and play. Though pretty simple, I thought there was good room for strategizing, and using character abilities efficiently in order to succeed.

Like many cooperative games, it does have a large luck element between the event deck and the dice rolls, so some plays can definitely be disappointing if you end up just not standing a chance. But on the bright side, this doesn’t have a huge set-up/clean-up, so you can reset if you really want a chance to beat it!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 7/10

Designers -青山奨 (Shou Aoyama), 下見幸穂 (Yukio Shimami),
田谷由壮 (Yuso Taya)
Publisher – Japanime Games
MSRP – $39.95
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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