Review: Haunted Heist

What is it?

Haunted Heist is a game by Daniel Carter-Hope and Paul Williams of Red Mug Games, the games arm of the UK-based Evil Hypnotist Productions indie film studio. I was given a digital review copy of the game by Red Mug Games but have received no other compensation as part of the request to review it.

The pitch: players take on the role of deceased criminals under the guidance of a Game Medium (GM) to embark upon a heist that would otherwise be impossible by living human standards. The overall tone is comedy/horror.

The art communicates this endearing sort of horror atmosphere, akin to Disney's Haunted Mansion or The Nightmare Before Christmas, quite well, but unfortunately, as my players pointed out after we finished playing, the tones of the game clash discordantly at times. Some of the potential outcomes of actions (mostly the horrific and instantaneous death of unfortunate bystanders) really don't feel like they fit with what the game bills itself as. For example, one of the stronger abilities of the Possessor includes this detail: "Strong possibility the target will suffer a fatal stroke/heart attack/aneurysm when the possession ends." This is an awfully specific manner of death, one that has the potential to really upset some players given the relative prevalence of these health conditions in real life, and it's just not that funny either when it comes right down to it. Head exploding: high funny potential. Fatal aneurysm: less so. If you bring this game to the table, take the temperature of your players to understand what kind of bloody slapstick they have an appetite for.

How does it work?

Players have a resource called Spirit Level (SL) that they can spend on various spectral powers based on the type of ghost they are (Haunter, Poltergeist, Possessor). If they run out of SL, they vanish until the GM can reconnect with them. Action success is determined by rolling 2d6 and checking the table for the outcome (5-9 is a partial success, to give an idea of what to expect).

The GM's actions mainly involve predicting the result of dice rolls. When any player rolls for an Action, the GM predicts the outcome, and if they're correct they get a sizable benefit. Similarly, when it comes time to resummon ghosts, the ghost's player rolls a d6 and the GM predicts the result. If they're correct, the ghost returns with full SL, and if they're wrong they can try again next Turn with the ghost predicting their own number.

The game also operates on a ticking clock, with the GM keeping track of Turns in each Round with a 6-sided die. Every ghost gets one action per Turn, the Round advances after 6 Turns. The more time you take, the more likely the heist is to end in failure with the ghosts abandoning their jobs to take care of Unfinished Business or the GM's Debt causing their grisly demise.

How did it go?

I played this game with a group of three players about a week ago using the "End of the Pier" adventure summary from the book itself: "Magic isn't real... or is it? Down-on-his-luck hypnotist Derek Beige has the whole town under his thrall, but for what nefarious purpose?" With this summary, I spun up the Great Bosinski Game Medium, another 'psychic' conman who had been operating just fine in Mortecambe Bay until Derek Beige showed up. Using the spirits of Gem "Knock" _____, Spinnin' Sid, and Frozen Freddie, we were all set up to steal Derek Beige's platinum pocketwatch and break his terrible power.

It was right here, shortly after character creation, that everything started to go off the rails. And not in the fun heist way.

What happened?

Let me be clear: much of this was my fault. In my revision of the rules before starting, I missed the instructions to organize the game in three phases: Character Manifestation, Planning, and Heist. As a result, I skipped the Planning Phase and had the players jump into exploring the town as they tried to figure out how to take down Derek Beige. As a result, scenes were not so much pulse-pounding heist action as they were pulse-neutral information gathering, it was unclear when abilities could be used effectively, and everyone (including myself) left the game feeling a little frustrated.

A compounding factor on top of the initial error had to do with pacing. The game operates on a ticking clock in theory, but in practice we didn't even get all the way through a single Round. My players took about 2 hours to do character creation and play 5 Turns (15 actions), at the end of which we felt like we had just about resolved the problem of Derek Beige. This meant that we took an average of about 24 minutes per Turn and 8 minutes per action, which feels pretty fast for many storygames. But even so the game didn't feel particularly urgent or that we were on a time limit. This probably would have been mitigated with an actual Planning Phase as the players would have known more or less where they were heading.

Stuff I liked

Before going to the larger lessons learned here, I wanted to share bits and bobs that I particularly liked from the game:

• I like the positioning of the GM as a player in the world and the explicit ticking clock that triggers certain events, and I really loved the thematic resonance of trying to psychically predict dice outcomes
• The sample characters and their accompanying art give a good sense of the tone the game wants to live in: comedically gruesome and pretty absurd
• The Grave Consequences table, while not always giving the most actionable or impactful results, has a clear voice with a dry sense of humor that is pretty fun and funny to read
• Heist locations are all evocative and feel quite different from each other, but I would appreciate a better sense for how some of them would actually be used in a heist

So what do you do when you play a game wrong?

I'm not really sure, honestly. I only found my mistake in the rules upon rereading the text in preparation for writing this review. If I had just brought this game to the table because I thought it was fun, I probably would have just written it off after it didn't really work in play and never given it another thought. This speaks to a challenge that game designers face when working on their art: how do you ensure that something important doesn't get missed when people are learning how to play?

Ignoring the reality that you can never be 100% sure of this, one solution is to integrate the most important components throughout the rules. It's easy to miss a single reference to something important (as I did with the Planning Phase), it's harder to miss multiple references to a specific component that all feed into each other. These could be in the text of other rules, play examples, flowcharts, you name it; the important thing is that anything that is crucial to understanding how to play the game should be as inescapable as possible.

That is ultimately my biggest criticism of this game: its component parts don't quite gel together into the most harmonious whole. My experience playing it was frustrating, but that was partially due to one specific mistake I made before the game even started. I had an okay time playing, but neither I nor my players ever really found a groove where the game just worked for us.

Will I play this game again? Probably not. Will I be thinking about my favorite parts of the game (GM as diegetic character, ticking clock, psychically predicting dice)? Absolutely.