Haunted houses aren’t my thing. But games by design collective Jasper Beatrix are very much my thing. When it comes to Scream Park, a drafting game about assembling a seasonal haunted house, I’m glad I took the risk. Not only are there no jump scares for those of us operating above the table, but like the rest of JB’s oeuvre — Typeset, Signal, and Here Lies — Scream Park pulls more weight than first meets the eye.

Building the Sanguine Cathedral.

To be clear, that first glance isn’t all glued-on warts and costumes that have clearly seen too many Halloween seasons, although that’s the basic conceit for the entire game. Those haunted houses that pop up every October are, unsurprisingly, operated on razor-thin margins, forcing designers and crews to reduce, reuse, and recycle every scrap of last year’s attractions, from props and costumes to frayed lighting.

Scream Park, then, is a drafting game. Each round, everybody draws eight cards, picks two to use, and passes the rest around the table. Cards can be used in a few ways, including being sold off to pay some extra theater kids to don rubber masks, but their main function is being incorporated directly into your haunted house. For that purpose, each card has two segments. The top portion represents a scene — incomplete for the moment — while the bottom offers an actor in a costume, special effects, haunted noises, and so forth. Basically, the stuff you actually put into a scene to make it pop.

Even at its most basal, Scream Park is wholly competent, even natty with its grungy illustrations and sense of place. Putting together a functional haunted house feels good, with obvious tradeoffs between hiring extra actors or stringing a room together with a few mirrors. Assembling the right icons to complete your scenes is the immediate challenge, forcing players to look ahead with each draft.

Choosing which rooms, props, and actors to include.

But because this is a Jasper Beatrix game, Scream Park offers more than the obvious. Scratch the surface and one uncovers an entire layer beneath the rind. Multiple layers.

The first of these extra layers is a surprisingly expansive decision space. This is no mere icon hunt. Okay, yes, it’s an icon hunt, but there are more icons, with broader applications, than you might initially anticipate. There are the main icons, the dabs of gore, creepy dolls, lore-books, and so forth that complete scenes and keep guests happy. But there are also special effects, themselves tied to special abilities, which serve to emphasize your attraction’s strengths. Or distract from its deficiencies. Can’t find the right props to round out your torture chamber? Make something explode. A burst of flame will dazzle customers and prevent their recovering eyes from noticing the bare walls.

A third layer of icons can be found underneath those first two. These are thematic enhancements, stuff like spooky lighting, music, and narration. While not as immediate as your other effects, these serve to add points at the end of the game. It’s the stuff that theaters sometimes promise, a “4D experience!” that slams guests with sights, sounds, and the occasional tickle on their ankles, and while these aren’t usually your first consideration, they offer just enough of a nudge to your score that it’s wise to keep them in mind.

The best thing Scream Park does, though, is yet to come. After each round, your haunted house is visited by a guest. A very important guest.

Everybody fears Fire Marshals.

VIPs are the stage blood that sells Scream Park as an authentic work of art. When they appear, VIPs walk through your haunted house, moving from left to right across your tableau. The wrinkle is that each VIP has their own finicky criterion that will usher them into each room. The more they visit, the more you score. Conceptually, it’s simple. The ramifications for your haunted house are anything but, especially since you’re simultaneously building your space to appease all three of your planned visitors.

I have a soft spot for tableau-building games that not only let us create a space, but explore it too. My usual example is Santa Monica, Josh Wood’s surf-wax masterpiece, which sees you filling your beaches and roadside businesses with both townies and tourists. That game also featured VIPs, special guests with desires that stepped outside the game’s normal boundaries.

The VIPs in Scream Park are more idiosyncratic, and by extension more interesting to engage with. Rather than being average visitors with quirks, they’re borderline threats, effectively the haunts to your haunted house. The fire marshal, for example, only visits scenes that are incomplete, ostensibly rewarding those spaces that aren’t so tangled with wires that fleeing guests could easily find the exit. A children’s birthday party, meanwhile, wants to be bopped over the head with effects, and everybody know that review bloggers are insufferable snobs who will only rate completed scenes. (Hey now!)

By casting these guests as more than mere visitors, but as antagonists whose needs must be appeased, Scream Park does something special. It takes us behind the plywood and cast doors to demonstrate the particulars, abstracted though they may be, that go into crafting a specific tone. Many games let us create. Not so many are investigations of the act of creation itself. Scream Park shows how thematic spaces — in the theme-park sense of the word for once — are built and decorated and staffed, but also how they might fail to cater to everybody. The last time we revealed that the fire marshal would be making an appearance, and more than that, appearing in the final round when we would normally want our attractions to be as crowded as possible, one of our players loudly declared “I hate that bastard.” If that isn’t how you make a setting more than window dressing, I don’t know what we’re doing here.

THE TWISTED WASTELAND.

Once again, Jasper Beatrix has crafted something special. Scream Park is quick but meaty, understands how to transform drafting into more than the sum of its parts, and utterly nails the horror aesthetic.

It also cannot be overstated that it has a wonderful sense of place. My particular affection for the game skyrocketed when my eleven-year-old insisted that we not only build and score our haunted houses, but narrate them as well. Such an exercise is special not only for its many correspondences — the werewolf ironically lurking the trophy room, an irradiated mutant showing up in a post-apocalyptic marauder fort — but also for the spots where the fibers show through the rubber. We laughed ourselves silly when a Loch Ness-style lake monster somehow crammed itself into a creepy kitchen, and speculated about how a collection of dolls wound up on the flight deck of a UFO. Such clashes are goofy and misplaced, but that’s also what makes them resemble the few haunted houses I’ve actually suffered through.

Will I be visiting more this coming Halloween season? Haha, no, obviously not. But in this format, I find the whole concept appealing enough to visit over and over again. Bring on the guts. I’ll walk that children’s birthday party right down the middle of the serial killer’s walk-in freezer.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read my quarterly report on all things board games!)

A complimentary copy of Scream Park was provided by the publisher.