Lucky you – You have just inherited the abandoned Twilight Manor… Unfortunately, the rooms are not only in shambles, but also being haunted by the resident ghosts. Now, it’s up to you to employ staff, restore the rooms, capture ghosts, and perhaps even hold a few seances, for good measure. The fate of the manor is in your hands!

What Is It?

Deck Building – Players start off with a small deck of “love” and maids. Throughout the game, players will buy more characters (living and ghost) with love cards to add to their decks to help them succeed. Some characters will have helpful symbols to restore rooms, some will let players draw, play, or buy more cards, and some will have various abilities when played as well.

Events – Players can buy seance and poltergeist activities to trigger events for all players, or certain opponents.

During the game players will also be “anteing” up character cards during seances and depending on the tarot card that comes out, the player with the highest or lowest value card will have to follow the instructions, for better or worse

Who Is It For?

  • 2 to 4 Players – Scales well, fine at any count. The game isn’t necessarily longer or shorter at any count, as it comes down to how people play (can end by restoring all rooms or depleting 2 character stacks)
  • Ages 14 & Up / Mid-Weight Gamers – Not super spooky, but might not be great for younger audiences. Probably good to have some experience with deck building, or at least gaming in general
  • Fans of deck building (with static markets), anime, and ghooooosts!
  • Players who don’t mind a bit of randomness with events, and the potential for a bit of take-that/negative effects

PROS

  • Aesthetics – I like the art and the overall vibe
  • Components – Good quality cards and a few cardboard tokens; the dividers are very nice to have to easily sort and find everything
  • Good variety in different character cards and you don’t use them all each game so you can change up combos
  • I thought the theme was fun and worked well with the living vs ghost characters – It was cool how you could get ghosts and use their abilities, but if you wanted points from them, or certain maids, you have to capture them and take them out of your deck. It made for a fun balancing act.
  • The seances were a unique way to do event cards

CONS

  • Unequal turns, but no adjustment for first player advantage
  • Runs a bit long
  • I found it easy to draw cards, but hard to play them all – balancing drawings and servings was tricky
  • Seances were neat, but they could be frustrating because of the randomness. Players contribute a character and then the player chosen by the tarot card must follow the text. Players don’t know what they card will be, so they don’t know if they want to play low or high. It just doesn’t feel very strategic, but feels like it should since you don’t play the character randomly

Final Thoughts

I really like the theme, and I thought the ghost cards, seances, and spirit tokens were cool elements in the game. I think I would have liked to see players get more evil tokens so the evil effects had bigger impacts, but maybe that just varies a lot depending on play style.

I also thought that, though unique, the seances and tarot cards became kind of overplayed throughout the game; I think I would have just preferred normal event instead of pretending my choice of character mattered, since I never knew what the tarot card would be.

It can be tricky to balance the servings with all the cards you want to play, but that tends to keep things interesting! I do wish it was a bit shorter, but overall, if you like deck building, and want a spooky theme, it’s worth checking out!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 7/10

Publisher – Japanime Games
MSRP – $59.95
Website

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

If you like what I do, consider Supporting Me.