Tanto Cuore: Memento Mori – Twilight Manor Review

As you take your first step into the crumbling manor, the wind wails through the moldering walls. Nobody in your family wanted this house, but you know an opportunity when you see one. You hear a whispering voice calling your name from the direction of the overgrown conservatory and remember the family legend that this place is cursed.

But you came prepared. A Tarot deck in hand, you are ready to perform seances when the ghosts show themselves and hire whatever help is necessary to repair the dilapidated rooms. Who would turn their nose up at an estate like Twilight Manor in this economy, ghosts or no? You’re ready to roll up your sleeves, get to work, and hire some maids.

Tanto Cuore: Memento Mori – Twilight Manor, for 2-4 players, is a new take on the Japanese deck building franchise. Players are still hiring maids and butlers to help out at their manor house, but Memento Mori adds in new play modules with haunted room restoration, seance events, and ghosts to be exorcised. Will these changes herald a new era for the Tanto Cuore universe, or create unnecessary clutter for an otherwise streamlined game system?

Gameplay Overview:

In the Tanto Cuore games, players use love cards to recruit staff from a central market to help them in their manor. The more beloved you are, the more specialized staff are willing to come work for you, and better staff cards come with victory point bonuses. Some staff with the chambermaid ability gain extra VP bonuses if you take them out of your deck and add them to your ‘private quarters’.

In Memento Mori, repairing rooms in the house and capturing ghosts also awards victory points. At the end of the game, which is triggered when either two piles of cards in the market are depleted or all of the rooms are repaired, whichever player has the most victory points wins.

Memento Mori adds several new elements to the Tanto Cuore format. The first is two new character types. Ghosts behave like regular characters for the most part, but have evil effects that can be called into play during various events throughout the game. While the ghost cards have helpful abilities under normal circumstances, your primary Maid Chief, The Twilight Sisters, will give you victory point bonuses for ‘capturing’ them and adding them to your private chambers. Players have to balance how many ghosts to take from the marketplace, and whether their helpful abilities are worth the risk of evil effects triggering.

The other new character type is workers. Worker characters are recruited from the marketplace like usual, but have additional skill symbols on them, like a hammer or wrench. When a worker is played from your hand, its skill symbol becomes available for use in repairing a room.

The room restoration process is also new to Memento Mori. Above the marketplace there are five room cards available gray side up, four plus one on top of the 15-card deck. Each room has a gray dilapidated side with several worker icons, and a repaired side showing the earned victory points. By playing enough worker characters in one turn to resolve all of the repair icons in a room, players get to take that card into their victory point pile. Rooms can also be haunted with spirit tokens by the effects of events, and haunted rooms cannot be repaired until the tokens are exorcised by specific maid cards.

Finally, Memento Mori has two new event cards unique to the game. The first is Seance. A seance card can be purchased from the marketplace, and if you draw one in your hand at the beginning of your turn, the event triggers. All players must participate if they can, selecting a character from their hand to place in the center of the market. The top card of the special Tarot deck is revealed. Each Tarot card has two parts, a Haunting score and a Reading. The Haunting score instructs how many spirit tokens the player who called the seance is now required to place on one of the room cards, making it harder to repair.

Each Tarot card’s Reading has a unique consequence for the players, based on the circumstances or cards they selected. Some may give players a bonus, but some may require a player to take an evil effect token, or take one of the other new event cards, a Poltergeist Activity card. These events are worth negative victory points, and cause evil effects to trigger when they’re drawn into your hand.

Game Experience:

This is easily the highest production quality Tanto Cuore game yet, with the amount of new content being a huge step up for the game. The full color rule book is a big improvement over the previous smaller black and white ones, and the two piece box is much sturdier and roomier than the flimsier hinged ones from earlier in the series. The art on every single piece, but most especially on the tarot cards, is beautifully detailed and well done. I loved the ghostly details, like having Burke & Hare character cards that move characters back and forth from the graveyard. If you’ve been turned off by the scantily clad art style in some of the previous versions of Tanto Cuore, this edition is a little tamer, and continues the trend that started in the last expansion of offering both male and female characters in the marketplace.

The new rule sets theoretically operate as modules that can be mixed and matched with previous games. The back of the rulebook gives suggestions for how you can get your Octoberfest maids to perform seances, or have your beach vacation maids working on home repair projects. If you’re going to play with the haunted rooms, though, you’ll have to have each type of worker character in your marketplace, and seances require at least a few ghost cards in the game. This limits how well they can be truly mixed and matched between editions, although it is possible.

While these rule additions are thematically interesting, in practice, we didn’t engage with them as much as we wanted. Repairing rooms mostly waited for the last couple turns of the game, when we had enough worker cards in our deck to consistently draw them out concurrently. Only a few of the Tarot cards trigger evil effects or poltergeist activity, so the ghosts didn’t do a whole lot of haunting in our games.

We found that there was overall less opportunity for the cards to synergize with one another for victory point bonuses than in previous Tanto Cuore games, making scoring feel a little clunkier. While there are 16 different character cards provided to add changeability to the marketplace, so many characters are required to play the new rules that there are only actually a few spots you can mix and match. Despite this, having so many things going on at one time—repairing rooms, calling seances, capturing ghosts, and exorcising spirit tokens—did add a lot of variety to the gameplay, though, creating enough different paths to victory to keep things competitive and interesting.

Final Thoughts:

The haunted mansion theme elevates the traditional deck building mechanics of Tanto Cuore: Memento Mori – Twilight Manor, making for a fresh and fun reinterpretation of the base game. The theming is spot on, with lots of spooky art and haunted details to deliver on the creepy premise. While there are a lot of bells and whistles tagged onto the game, some of which add a lot to gameplay and some of which add little, Memento Mori is a solidly entertaining choice for a Halloween Season game night.

Final Score: 3 Stars – A spooky good time that won’t disappoint fans of the franchise, and will entertain those who enjoy deck builders.

Hits:
• Excellent production with high quality art and details
• A delightfully spooky twist adds something fresh to the game series
• Base mechanics are well designed for competitive play

Misses:
• The new rule modules don’t have as much of a table presence as expected
• Characters don’t synergize as well as in previous editions
• So many characters are necessary for the new rooms and events that the market stays mostly the same from game to game.