Deck of Haunts finally got me into roguelike deckbuilders

As a journalist, I’m always on the lookout for new games to cover that correspond directly to my beat. I’m a big fan of stealth games and RPGs, for example, so I tend to gravitate towards games like Dishonored, Hitman, or Baldur’s Gate.

But it doesn’t hurt to try and venture outside of your comfort zone from time-to-time. Sometimes, your next favourite game might be something that doesn’t look like your thing on paper, but when you actually check it out, it becomes something quite magical.

That was me with deckbuilder roguelikes, a genre I’ve tried to get into in the past but could never really hold my attention for long, for whatever reason.

Last month, a new game called Deck of Haunts released and it immediately caught my attention. I managed to play a little during the most recent Steam Next Fest, and I fell in love with the idea of terrorising humans as a sentient haunted house.

What really mattered to me with Deck of Haunts was its relatively simplistic idea: you play as a malevolent haunted house who needs to build up its strength by luring humans into its cursed halls and feeding off their essence, while also ensuring they don’t reach the beating heart of the house and destroy it.

A typical Deck of Haunts playthrough takes place over the course of 28 in-game days (a couple of hours in real-time), with gameplay switching up between day and night. You build up your house with new rooms and upgrades during the day, and then unleash your spooky powers upon the humans that come to explore it at night.

Each night, a group of humans will infiltrate the house and begin searching for the heart to destroy it. These humans have two stats, health and sanity, and reducing either to zero using the cards in your hand takes them out of play.

Obviously, as the nights go on, bigger challenges pose themselves. Humans get stronger, and more numerous. Special humans such as cops, priests, and stone masons, will eventually start turning up. They have special immunities and strengths that’ll make things harder, and you have to start thinking a lot more tactically about how to keep them away from the heart.

Mantis Games

The more I play Deck of Haunts, the more it begins to make sense to me. On the surface, it’s a simple game with a simple idea. I mean, all you have to do is play the cards in your hand to get a human’s sanity or health to zero. But the more I play, the more I’m discovering new strategies to achieve this.

Three games in, I realise I can deplete a human’s sanity, and then reduce their health to get basically double the points. Not long after, I discover an upgrade path that gives me essentially a massively overpowered deck.

And then after that, I unlock a new type of room that gives me a high risk, high reward situation, where I’m incentivised to let humans get a little further into the house than feels comfortable. Suddenly, my game becomes a lot more interesting. And I think that’s what made Deck of Haunts click for me.

See, most humans in Deck of Haunts will flee at the sight of a dead body. As soon as they enter a room with a corpse, that’s it—they’re outta there. If they successfully escape the house, you don’t get any essence points from them. So you’re discouraged from killing them too early in case it causes the others to flee the scene.

This means leaving humans until they get to the last few rooms before you start killing them. It creates a high risk, high reward situation where you can earn a load of essence points by reducing down their sanity or health to critical levels without actually killing them. And then once you’ve actually got a good hand to pick them off for good, you can execute a flawless strategy.

Mantis Games

I don’t profess to be an expert in these types of games, and I’m sure veterans of the deckbuilding genre are getting ready to tell me how wrong I am about this. But I’d recommend Deck of Haunts if you’re not a massive enjoyer of these games typically. I mean, I was also the same. I’ve tried games like Slay the Spire, Griftlands, and Wildfrost—and while I can respect what they do, none of those games ever really clicked for me.

But there’s something about Deck of Haunts that really grabbed me. It might be that it didn’t feel like I was being overwhelmed by all these various different systems and attributes. Or that playthroughs didn’t feel like they went on for too long. I was able to sit back and enjoy the game at a comfortable pace without being bombarded by new things to do.