The Four Doors

• Designer: Matt Leacock, Matthew Riddle, Ben Pinchback
• Publisher: Happy Camper
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Beneath a mystical light tower, an ancient Hollow has re-opened, releasing a horde of evil spirits known as the Shadow Veil, who threaten to cover the land in everlasting darkness.  Your challenge in The Four Doors is to collect the relic from behind each door, then gather everyone at the beacon in order to light it.

Join a band of daring adventurers on a quest to retrieve the four sacred relics hidden beyond the doors of a mystical light tower.  Work together to unite the relics and ignite the beacon – before the sinister Shadow Veil engulfs the tower and the doors are sealed forever!

To set up, place the four door cards in a column; reveal nine cards from the deck, placing them to the left or right of the matching colored door based on the card’s design (though never more than 3 on the side of any particular card); deal each player a hand of 2-4 cards and a random adventurer, placing the matching token at the depicted door; and set the shadow level – generally determined by player count though you can alter it to change the difficulty of the game.  As the game is cooperative, all players keep their hand cards face up on the table in front of them.

On a turn, a player takes up to three actions: drawing a card, moving to an adjacent door, giving a card (or relic) to someone at your door, illuminating a shadow card from your door by discarding a card that bears a lantern of the same color, or finding a relic by discarding four cards of the color matching your door. Each adventurer has a special power that modifies an action or offers a new action.

Each door has a relic behind it, and once you find a relic, the holder can use its power by discarding a card bearing the relic’s symbol, sometimes as an action on its own, sometimes not.

To end a player’s turn, they draw two cards – if you ever have more than 5 cards, you must immediately discard down to 5.  Then place “shadows” from the deck equal to the shadow level. If a fourth card would be placed on either side of a door, flip the card to its partially closed side; if the door would flip a second time, remove it from play. If the players don’t already have this relic, they lose.

Each time players need to shuffle the deck, the shadow level increases — and this level will increase more quickly as the game progresses since some cards, such as spells that provide a one-time effect, are removed from play instead of being discarded. If you have no cards to shuffle or the shadow level tops out, the players lose.

The players win if they can collect all four relics, have all the player pawns standing on the Beacon card, and one player has a Luminous Flux spell to play to activate the relics and light the beacon, thus banishing the Shadow Veil!

My thoughts on the game

So, as it turns out, I’ve actually played this game a few times before – I had seen a prototype of this with Matt Leacock a few years ago.  I remember having a great tense cooperative experience then, and thus far my experiences with the published version are the same.  We’ve yet to move past the base difficulty level, and our games feel like they are coming down the last or penultimate play each time.

For better or worse, this is a fully cooperative, fully quarterbackable game.  I mention that not in a pejorative sense but more as an explanation.  The Four Doors is a group puzzle, with all of the pieces known to the group – all the hand cards are open knowledge, all the shadow cards in the tableau are known, the discard pile and the trash pile can be searched.   Our group likes this sort of cooperative game, and each member of the team is able to contribute their solution(s) to the particular problems.  You’ll probably already know whether your particular group likes this sort of co-op game or not.

The pressure in the game starts out light, but definitely ramps up with each pass through the deck.  At the start, it is possible for a door to already be in danger – you can have up to three cards on any side of any door at most.   The game will place two Shadow cards each turn, and players generally only have 3 actions, so it could take as much as two-thirds of your actions just to maintain the status quo.

Of course, the spells can remove multiple cards (without costing an action), so they should be used wisely and timely.  For the most part, the spells are one-use only as they go to the trash pile after use, so you’ll not want to waste their use.  There are plenty of times where you’ll want to have those cards in your hand so that you have access to them at the right time, but you only have capacity to hold 5 cards, so they can take up valuable hand real estate.

It may be helpful to try to collect a relic early on – because once you have a relic, you can actually consider ignoring that particular door going forward.  I mean, you’d still rather keep the door in the game as you can continue to recycle the cards of that color into your discard pile/deck, but you won’t lose the game if you’re forced to forsake it.  Additionally, the relics allow you to use the cards of that particular color to discard Shadows.

As the game moves on, the speed of the game really increases – oftentimes the deck gets so small that it only lasts for a single player turn (or less!).  

The game comes in a delightfully small box, and the art on the cards is appealing.  I’ll admit that I really dislike the irridescent foil finish on the relic cards – they are SO HARD to read.  While they look cool, they sit very low on the usability scale.   My pictures can’t quite reflect just how hard they are to read IRL.  I would have liked the player aids to have had a little color bar or pawn on the aid side.  The cards are double sided with the player color/special ability on one side and then the round summary on the other.  We had a lot of issues not being able to figure out which player was which color as players more often had the round summary side up.  A simple color indicator on the backside of each card would have solved this.  I’m likely attacking my cards with colored Sharpies to fix this issue.

The Four Doors is a great cooperative game in a small package.  As I mentioned earlier, we’ve had super-tight games at even the basic difficulty level thus far, so I fully expect that we’ll continue to be challenged by this game for awhile even as we improve at playing the game.  I would expect no less from a cooperative game that has Matt Leacock as one of the designers, as I’ve found that he is a master at the genre.  (And that’s not to take anything away from the other two designers, I just don’t have as much experience with their cooperative game desiging skills).

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.  John P
• Not for me…