Haunted Mouse is a pun-derful board game, but it struggles to stand out

Card-shedding board games face fierce competition these days. 2019’s Scout has long held its place on our best board games list, but enthralling newcomers like DNUP threaten to shake up the status quo. At the same time, party games like Things in Rings have shot to similar success.

With all this innovation, I fear Haunted Mouse might get lost in the noise. Haunted Mouse is adorable, consistent, and quietly delightful, but it doesn’t successfully push design boundaries. That means it’s in serious danger of being overlooked.

Published by Bezier Games, Haunted Mouse is designed by Jonathan Cox (Acorns, Mutation, Spring Cleaning). The pun-filled title should give you an idea of how much whimsy is packed in this little box. You’ll play as mice suffering from (presumably, cheese-induced) nightmares.

Bad dreams manifest as a hand of cards. Different predators represent the suits you’ll wrangle, and the goal is to be rid of them. Empty your hand first, and you’ll earn the biggest wedge of the cheese wheel in the morning. Haunted Mouse plays over several nights, ending when a mouse completes their cheese wheel.

It’s a twee concept that, thanks to Sai Beppu’s adorable artwork, gives me major cuteness aggression. Your player board depicts a unique mouse named after a kind of cheese. Those dairy slices you collect are 3D pieces that slot nicely into said board. Haunted Mouse is colorful and tactile in all the right ways.

Despite appearances, this isn’t a child-friendly title. The recommended age is 14 and up, because Haunted Mouse gets granular with its mechanics.

Like Scout, Haunted Mouse doesn’t allow you to rearrange the cards you’re dealt. You can place a card in your ‘Bait’ zone before a round begins, but otherwise, you get what you get.

To shed cards, you’ll need to play a meld. That’s either a set or a run. The first meld plays is the lead, and all following hands must beat it, either by playing more cards or ones with higher values. So far, so trick-taking-adjacent.

Haunted Mouse throws a few extra rules in. These help it differentiate itself from staples like Scout and DNUP. They also up the play time to, at most, 45 minutes – significantly longer than its most popular rivals. They also, unfortunately, make initial games a much clunkier teach.

Unique rule number one: if you want to change the type of meld you’re playing, it must contain one more card than the current lead. Three nines isn’t going to beat a 3-4-5 unless you have a fourth nine to sweeten the deal. This one takes a little getting used to, but every card shedder has details like these. You’ll be over the hill after a round or two.

Unique rule two: your meld can only ever have one more card than the previous meld. A set of four nines is useless to you if the current lead only has two cards. This stops anyone going out in a blaze of glory with an explosive hand. It’s more fair, but it’s less fun for its lack of drama. It also makes Haunted Mouse a significantly slower game than its competitors, with a runtime of up to 45 minutes.

The game attempts to inject more excitement with unique rule three: Setting Traps. These are powerful hands made of four identical cards of different suits or a four-card, ‘straight flush’ run in the same suit. You can play them regardless of how large the current meld is, and they get discarded immediately. You then get to take another turn, placing a new lead meld.

Traps take pretty careful planning to pull off, but you’re helped by unique rule four. Here’s where that Bait zone comes into play.

Everyone has one or more face-up Bait cards, and there’s a single Public Bait card available. As long as you use at least one card from your own hand or Bait, you can include as many of these other Bait cards in your meld. It’s flexibility at the cost of helping opponents shed cards – because you need an empty hand and Bait to wake your mouse.

Haunted Mouse’s unchanging hand of cards is already a challenge to explain to less experienced gamers (God knows I’ve faced that trial many times with Scout). All these additional rules make things slightly too complex for a game this strategically simple.

Thankfully, once everyone at the table has picked up what you’re putting down, games are smooth and speedy. There’s enough decisions to mull, but the lack of explosive turns make the race relaxing rather than cutthroat. 45 minutes never feels too long, even with the max player count of five.

It’s cute, smart, and plenty replayable. Haunted Mouse is a $30 game that’s well worth the price of entry. Sadly, I expect it’ll get massively overshadowed in the end-of-year ‘best of’ roundups. Games like DNUP are just as new and shiny, but they’re simpler, cleaner, and more elegant.

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A review copy of Haunted Mouse was provided by the publisher.

Source: Wargamer