Tanto Cuore: Memento Mori – Twilight Manor Review

boardgamequest.com:

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?

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