Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Haunted Mouse is a hard game to write about, because it falls perfectly into the gap between the good, about which there is much to say, and the bad, about which there is often even more to say. Jonathan Cox’s shedding game, a reimplementation of his own Spring Cleaning, is a perfectly alright time at the table. People talk about their days, the weather, the latest gossip. The game goes on quietly around this, undemanding and unobtrusive.
The goal of the game is to empty your hand by playing sets of increasing size and strength. Every trick-taking and shedding game has its gimmick(s), and Haunted Mouse is no exception. It joins the rapidly expanding field of shedding games in which you cannot rearrange the cards in your hand, and are forced to make sets out of adjacent cards. This has been used to marvelous effect in Scout, Jungo, and dnup, and works just fine in Haunted Mouse.
A common mechanic between these games, though it works differently in each, is the ability to add cards to your hand, putting them anywhere you want. In Haunted Mouse, this idea is combined with allowing players to shed troublesome singletons from their hands to make Bait. Bait is tremendously promising as an idea, and works like so: If you cannot play a set, you must draw a card. When you draw a card, you may then put any one card from your hand down on the table in front of you. This is Bait. Your own Bait is available for you to play as part of a set at any time, but it is also there to tempt other players. If they take your Bait, you’re one card closer to the goal of an empty hand.
I wanted to love the Bait mechanic. I really did. The fact that your Bait can be used as part of a set from anywhere in even your own hand should make every Bait a threat. Do I leave your 2 there, or do I assume you’re about to use it to play something too large for anyone to beat? These sorts of questions are the lifeblood of shedding games. In reality, though, most of the time, Bait is just junk.
Play continues until any one player has filled their wheel of cheese. The cheese tokens are charming, though the scold in me cannot help but feel that they could have been cardboard. My copy of Haunted Mouse does not need to outlive me by thousands of years.
It’s not that Haunted Mouse is bad. That would be going too far. It is perfectly functional. But the changes to the formula don’t do much. The gimmicks fall flat. My colleague Justin agrees. Spoiled as we are at the moment with shedding and trick-taking options, I’m not taking this bait.
Haunted Mouse details
- Designer: Jonathan Cox
- Artists: 別府さい (Sai Beppu)
- Publishers: Bezier Games
- Release Date: 2026
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 15+
- Time range : 20 - 45 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Hand Management, Ladder Climbing
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.11928 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
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