Base price: $20.
3 – 4 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of Man-Eating House was provided by New Mill Industries.
Let’s dig into some spookier games in the next couple weeks! New Mill has a few trick-taking games currently up for pre-order, and they’ve got some themes that are perfect for spooky season. I’ve already reviewed an older version of Somnia, but Man-Eating House and Idle Hands are new to me and so, here we are. I’m going to be doing a bit of double-time for the next few weeks (both because I posted three reviews last week and because I’m doing a fair amount of travel between now and the end of the year), so look forward to your favorite two-a-week review cadence, but imagine me being a bit more stressed every Wednesday or Sunday when I actually get around to writing them up. Eventually I’ll figure out how to do a bit more development and photography editing on the go, but short of actually getting a Windows computer, it’s not looking especially likely. But I digress.
In Man-Eating House, it’s the summer of 198…X and some kids have wandered into an abandoned and appropriately-spooky house. It’s probably not a problem, they figured, but they were hopelessly wrong. Now, faced with monsters, demons, and dangerous locations, they’ll have to fight for their lives to make it out. Will they survive?
Contents
Setup
Not much setup! You just kind of shuffle the cards and deal them out (13 each at three players, 10 each at 4). The remaining cards are placed in a stack, face-down, called the Unopened Room. More on that later.
Shuffle the reference cards and deal them out.
The player who gets the unique one starts!
Gameplay
Man-Eating House is a pretty straightforward trick-taking game at its core with a few twists. Like most trick-taking games, you play a card from your hand and everyone plays a card of the same suit if possible. One major change is that the highest card played period wins (in the event of a tie, red beats yellow beats green). Even with that, there are a few changes to the core formula: Events and Special Cards.
There are two events:
- Escape: When multiple Children are played, an “Escape” event occurs. Before the trick is taken by the winning player, each player who played a Child scores their Child, adding them to their score pile. (The Children help each other escape.)
- Struggle: When Ghosts and Weapons of the same color are played in the same trick, the player who played the highest-value Weapon takes all the Ghosts of that color. Note that if two sets of Ghosts and Weapons of different colors are in a trick, the Struggles resolve independently.
Multiple events can occur in one trick, but the winner takes any cards left over once all events are resolved.
There are also Special Cards:
- Danger Location: Any Location marked with a red Danger symbol, when played, cancels all possible events. Instead, play normally (highest-value card wins all cards in the trick).
- Little Girl: When a Little Girl is played, set her aside, face-up, near the Unopened Room. Once all three have been played (one of each suit), Events can no longer occur for the rest of the game. If a Little Girl is played as the first card of a trick, the player who played her draws a card from the Unopened Room. Then, each player chooses a card of the matching color and plays it face-down. The player who played the Little Girl then chooses Left or Right, and the cards are passed in that direction and then added to players’ hands.
- Dog: The Dog is the lowest-value card in the game, but counts as a Child for Escape events and scoring.
- Old Man: The Old Man is the strongest of all Ghosts, and he wins every trick they’re played in with one exception: if the Dog is also played, the Dog steals the Old Man’s disguise and wins, instead. If the Old Man or the Old Man and the Dog are played, all Events are cancelled for that trick.
When a trick is won, the only Scoring Cards are Children and Ghosts. All other cards can be discarded.
Play continues until all cards have been played. The player who wins the final trick takes and scores all Scoring Cards in the Unopened Room. At four players, there are two teams of two (sitting across from each other), and the team with more Scoring Cards wins. With three players, it’s a bit more complicated. There are two teams, but those teams aren’t determined until the Old Man is played and resolved (since he can be stolen by the Dog). The Old Man is on a team against the other two players, and he only wins if:
- He captures a 1 Child / 2 Child / 3 Child (one of each, regardless of suit).
- He gains at least 11 Scoring Cards.
Otherwise, the other team wins!
Player Count Differences
This one’s pretty different, as outlined earlier. At four, you’re playing on two teams of two, so your goal is just to get as many Scoring Cards as possible. You don’t even really care which ones, so just do the usual trick-taking noise where you don’t trump your partner and you watch out for certain card combinations. At three, it’s an entirely different game since you don’t know which other player (if either) will be on your team. It mostly resolves down to also “get as many Scoring Cards as you can”, but you’ll find some resistance since players really don’t want to give out a set of three Children or the Old Man card if they can avoid it. It creates an interesting and tense dynamic, much different than the four-player game. The four-player game is simpler in that it’s more classic trick-taking, but without that potential element of “who is on my team”. If that appeals to you, go three. Otherwise, four is perfectly fun.
Strategy
- You can try to force out the Old Man if you have enough red cards. I mean, it kind of sucks if you’ve only got the Old Man as your sole red, but that can happen. If you want to draw him out, keep playing red cards! It’ll happen eventually.
- Watch out for a player stealing the Old Man with the Dog if they have enough Children. If you see any player with a 1 / 2 / 3 Child set, keep an eye on them. Even if you have the Old Man, they might try to swipe them with the Dog and take an easy win. You really can only be Absolutely Safe if you have both.
- Look out for Event effects! You can score more cards pretty easily. Getting more Ghosts is always good, but you might be able to help your teammate out if you both play Children. Just be careful of your opponents piggybacking off of that for their own scoring (or worse yet, playing a Danger Location to swipe all your cards).
- If you’re worried about keeping some of your high-value cards, play Danger Locations or wait until all three 4s are out. Those cancel Events, which can keep your high-value Ghosts safe from their corresponding weapons.
- You might think other players are helping you by playing Children to help you escape, but they might be goofing you. They might be using you to get Children into their own score pile so that they can play the Old Man and win, which is not ideal.
- Once the Old Man is out, you can use the Dog as a bonus Child, which can help. If you’re trying to get more kids out for Escape Events, the Dog always helps. What a good boy.
- At three players, you should be pretty suspicious of everyone until you know how the teams are set. The one thing you have to watch out for most is the (hilarious) end outcome where nobody had the Old Man, but the player who won the last trick pulled it from the Unopened Room and ended up taking the card. If you’re not careful, they might just win outright. That said, it’s also totally possible for them to take the card and immediately lose. That’s more funny, I think.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Very portable! We love the small-box trick-taking games, and with a lot of these, they’re small enough that you could pretty easily fit two or three in one box without much trouble.
- I enjoy the Event-level interactions between various card types. It makes the tricks more interesting, I feel; even if you don’t “win”, you might be able to score more than other players.
- The in-game effect of the Dog stealing the Old Man’s Disguise and winning is pretty funny.
- There’s some good strategizing you need to employ to win here! You have to figure out how to get the Scoring Cards beyond just winning tricks. If you only focus on winning tricks, players are going to use Events to sneak cards out before you can get your hands on them.
- The tiebreaker rules are nice and simple, too. I appreciate that just going off of suit color is the move; it’s easy to remember (and matters sometimes, which is always fun).
- The three-player rules are fun; I like not knowing what team I’m going to end up on. It’s not social deduction, either, which I appreciate (or not really); it’s more strategizing around which team you want to try to be on based on your hand. Even if you have the Old Man, you might try to bait another player into taking it because you won’t win if you play it, for instance.
- Nice and quick. I appreciate that it’s one hand and done, rather than playing X or Y rounds to pad out the game length. You can always just play again!
Mehs
- It would be nice if it were a bit clearer how the 4s worked. I think the major point of clarity is around when they’re played during a trick. I assumed that they’re set aside as normal, but that’s not explicitly clear in the rules (or, at least, we weren’t sure).
Cons
- The theme and art are a bit … off-putting. I played this with at least one person who was very uncomfortable with some of the monster art, which can be pretty intense. Also, thematically, there’s kind of a whole vibe of “the Old Man looking to capture children”, which can throw some people from even a horror standpoint. It’s definitely not my favorite choice, though the dog is cute.
Overall: 6.5 / 10
Overall, I think Man-Eating House is fine. I think the theme is just an overall pretty solid miss, for me, and for the groups I normally play with, so it’s hard to get them to dig more into the actual game itself. Is it Halloween-appropriate? Yes. Is the art and the general ludonarrative tough for a lot of players? Also yes. It’s not Kingdom Death Monster or whatever, don’t get me wrong, but I got more than one unfavorable reaction trying to get this played for review. Which is a shame, because the actual trick-taking game underneath of that is pretty solidly fun, especially with three players. I always like the high-tension play of not knowing what team you’re going to end up on, and even the player who plays the Old Man card might not end up being on their own team. With four, things are a bit more straightforward (two teams of two trying to score the most cards), which lends itself a bit better to more formal trick-taking play. I like the interaction of different events causing different cards to get grabbed from the center and leaving strange outcomes; it keeps things fairly dynamic and leads away from simply just playing a high card. It’s a high-chaos trick-taking game, and I’m always down for those. I just kind of wish the theme were a bit more to my taste. If that’s not an issue for you or you really enjoy high-chaos trick-taking, Man-Eating House will probably be a blast for you!
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