This was originally written as a fictional magazine piece — Gamers Monthly, Technical Appendix, Issue 104. Looking back at it now, a few days and one chaotic playtest later, it reads like a pre-game speech. Confident. Slightly naive. Worth keeping exactly as it was.
The Step Economy
In the digital realm, the computer tracks every calorie burned as you move through Mt. Holly. In this adaptation, the step economy is the player's primary lifeblood. Starting with a pool of 50 steps, the player must navigate a 45-room grid where every door opened is a calculated risk.
To prevent early-game stagnation, Slot 1 of the draft is always free. This ensures that even a player who has spent every gem can keep moving north, provided they are willing to take whatever room the house gives them.
The Progression Problem
How do you make a cloth bag feel like a rank-based progression? The answer lies in conditional drafting. By isolating Outer Rooms and Event Additions from the main pool, the house grows in complexity alongside the player.
Rooms like the Sauna and Locker Room sit on the sidelines until the Pool is drafted. The moment that tile hits the table, the logic triggers, and the new rooms are added to the active bag. It is a manual code-injection — the physical equivalent of a game state change.
The Lock Dice & Variance
As the player pushes toward the Antechamber at Rank 9, the probability of failure spikes. The board game translates this via a tactile lock dice system. At Ranks 1–4, locks are rare — one face out of six. By Ranks 8–9, the player is rolling against a 50% locked probability.
This creates a natural tension that mirrors the "one more door" desperation of the source material. When combined with Tomorrow Room cards, a failure at Rank 8 isn't a dead end — it's a data point. The player might fail today, but the star tally on their permanent Campaign Sheet means they'll start tomorrow a little stronger.
"The mansion is a giant puzzle box, and the rooms are the tools to solve it. My goal is to find the point where the math disappears and the mystery takes over."
That's where we were on April 4th. What happened next is in the following post.