Quiet House
- Board's Eye View
- May 7
- 2 min read
The premise for Emanuele Briano's Quiet House is that the players represent ghosts residing in their haunted mansion. They like a quiet and contented afterlife but they are fussy about the ornamentation of the house: they want the statues, mirror, candelabra et al all just so in relation to each other and to the four walls of the room in their mansion.
Problem is, each ghost can only see the target position for two pairs of objects. A card is flipped that indicates an object that cannot be moved but on your turn you get to move any other object according to its particular movement rules. You then signal to the other ghosts whether or not the requirements you can see have been met. It's a fully cooperative game for 2-4 players - best with four, with each player seated at a different corner of the board - where you'll need to use logical deduction from other players' limited silent communication to ensure all the objects are in the right places relative to each other before you run out of cards to flip.
Quiet House is an entertaining game that plays in a filler-length 15-20 minutes. It can be played as a light, family game and, because it's played in silence, it's a good way of winding down after the excitement of a longer more-intense game. With art from Marion Aupied, it's beautifully produced by Mandoo Games, played on a board mounted inside the box and using attractive screen-printed wooden artifacts. You might just find tho' that some players on their first play need to adjust their perception so that they see the two-dimensional relationship between objects on a board that is essentially a three-dimensional grid.
