There’s a lot of things I want to like about Haunted Lands. I like the premise, where you’re adventurers/exorcists trying to help your little city expand out into the countryside by sending ghosts to the great beyond. There’s some mechanical flourishes that are genuinely interesting. Unfortunately, the game itself does not really rise above a rote resource-collection exercise.
It’s important to gather wood when exorcising
Haunted Lands is an action point game, where instead of getting a pool of action points, you have discs that correspond to different actions that you use to do various things in a sequence of your choosing. For example, you move, then gather, then build a building, move again, and finally, help a ghost.
You’re doing all this because helping the ghosts (which requires the right number of action tokens depending on how far the game has advanced), harvesting, and building buildings all give you resources, which you use to build more buildings, or sell said resources to buy upgrades. Building buildings and paying for upgrades gets you points, and in the late stages of the game, helping ghosts gives you points too.
The game forms a fairly simplistic loop. You move, making sure you have enough movement points to cross terrain, get resources, then go back to the center and spend those resources to get upgrades and money. You can unlock a few abilities, but they’re mostly just enhancements to existing actions.
Spirited meh-way
The spirits cause problems where they sit on the map, variable from game to game, though I found the game too easy with only one of the rule cards for them, opting to instead play with 2-3 of them per game (a variant in the rulebook). Each round, the player in last place gets to decide where the new spirits show up, gumming up the works. Additionally, after three rounds, the players who are not in first get to add endgame scoring cards for themselves, which serves as one of the more creative catch-up mechanisms I’ve seen, where you form alternative victory conditions as you’re behind on points.
The aesthetics of the game are very pleasing. I really like the art style Ludus Magnus uses for many of their games, which tilts a little into the weird.
Ultimately, the game has too light of a touch. Everything is very straightforward, and with my table, everyone was doing almost everything available in the game each game. There’s not much nuance or excitement buried within the design to fill me with the excitement of discovery. You find your loop, and once you get far enough into the game, it starts playing itself a little bit. Sometimes, you find a game with compelling ideas that needed more development to make a cohesive experience. In this case, we have a game that requires more stuff or needs to be marketed to a younger audience rather than a hobbyist one. Sadly, not much more to say about this one—I guess I’m haunted by the specter of more grandiose designs.
