The Four Doors – What’s Behind Door Number Two?

It’s usually evil. Right? When there’s an ominous door at the end of a hallway, or worse yet, four doors stacked on top of each other on a tower? The mood feels tense. It feels dreadful. One might say it feels… Forbidden.

This is the mood evoked in The Four Doors, a new card-based cooperative game from industry veterans Matt Leacock, Matthew Riddle, and Ben Pinchback and published by Happy Camper Games. There’s some new and some old in this gorgeous set collection game for 1-5 players. A game takes about a half hour, and players as young as 8 can play. There’s a little bit of reading.

Setup

The Four Doors is a game made up entirely of cards. Place the four colored door cards in any order in a line stack on the table with the Beacon card at the top. Make sure the doors show their fully open side. Place the Shadow level card at the bottom, leaving space below that for The Hollow (insert crashing lightning here).

Randomly deal an Adventurer card to each player. Take note of your special power! You’ll need it. Each player puts their pawn on the colored door that corresponds with their Adventurer card.

Then, shuffle the rest of the cards and deal nine cards to the tower. The bottom of the card is the “Shadow area” and either the background or the shade matches the four door colors. Place them so their bottom edges match up with the patters on the left and right edges of the matching doors, overlapping as needed.

Deal cards to each player from the deck, the count depends on player count. Set the shadow level with an unused pawn.

Let’s get some relics and close some doors, shall we?

Gameplay

In The Four Doors your goal is to gather the four relics stowed behind these doors, move to the Beacon, and escape. You’ll accomplish this by gathering relic cards while fending off the advancing shadows.

Like most cooperative games, each player has a number of actions (three, here), and then “bad stuff” happens. The basic actions are:

• Illuminate – Discard a card from your hand with a lantern icon that matches the door you’re on to remove a shadow card from one side of the door and put it in the discard
• Move – Move up or down the tower one space
• Search – Draw a card
• Give Card – Give a player on the same door a card
• Find Relic – Discard four cards with the relic image that matches the door you’re on. Take the matching Relic card. You now have this power for the rest of the game!

Every player’s character power modifies these basic actions in some way, so make sure to share your powers with everyone else. Speaking of sharing, The Four Doors is a game where it’s perfectly acceptable to play open-handed.

After taking three actions (you can use the same action multiple times), draw two cards.

Then, the bad stuff.

The Bad Stuff

Depending on the current Shadow level, flip a number of cards face up from the draw deck. Place these cards next to a door the same way you did during setup.

If the card would be the fourth shadow on one side of a door, place that card in the Hollow instead, and flip the door card over: the door is beginning to close. The second time this happens, the door fully closes. Place it in the Hollow, along with all shadow cards that were next to it.

If you need another card and the draw deck is out, shuffle the discard pile (not the Hollow!) and advance the token on the Shadow level card. If it moves to the skull, you lose. Similarly, if the draw pile runs out and there is no discard because too many cards are in the Hollow, you lose.

Spells

Mixed into the deck are spell cards that provide special effects that don’t count as actions. Whenever a player uses a spell card for its spell, throw it in the Hollow.

You’ll need one of these spells, Luminous Flux, to win the game. Once players have all collected all four relics, move everyone to the Beacon and cast Luminous Flux to win!

Impressions

A Forbidden Comparison

It’s impossible to not consider The Four Doors a spiritual successor to Gamewright’s Forbidden series, also developed by Matt Leacock. The Four Doors feels like a return to this form. But each successive entry in the Forbidden series lost some luster with the weight of additional rules or components.

The Four Doors casts these chains off, getting rid of all the extras, and shrinking the box down to support 65 cards and a bare handful of other components.

That doesn’t mean the game loses any of its power as a collaborative excursion, though. Every game we played, we either won or lost by the skin of our teeth. We needed to talk over every turn, figuring how to squeeze value out of every step we took. We really had to collaborate – the asymmetric player powers proved incredibly useful and I simply couldn’t do what other players could. It was tense in the best possible way.

The graphic design is precisely what I’d expect from a star-studded game production crew. Not only does the solid game design still rest on Leacock’s shoulders, but Happy Camper was started by same industry veteran that oversaw Forbidden’s rise at Gamewright. Zachary Hoel and Asher Israel’s art is no slouch, either.

The Four Doors feels a little darker than the Forbiddens but no less approachable.

A Welcome Return

As for me and my house, we’ll be hanging on to The Four Doors for a long time. We’ve long since moved on from the other titles referenced in this review, but The Four Doors represents a return to a formula that just works well, expertly executed by accomplished designers.

We’re also always trying to shrink the size of our game collection even if we can’t manage to cut the game count down by quite the same measure. So the fact that we get the same impact at a smaller scale is great. If we want to travel, we can literally pack the entire game in a double deck box.

It even sports a solo mode if you find yourself without any friends to help you save the world. Sometimes there’s only one true hero, right?

You can get your own copy of this cooperative adventure for under $20 directly from Happy Camper, on Amazon, or at your friendly local game store.

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Happy Camper Games provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of The Four Doors for this review.

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