Details: Written by Steven Wren; Category: Review; Published: 30 September 2024; Hits: 490

Tanto Cuore: Memento Mori

Designer: Ross Allison
Artists: Elaine Schimek

Publisher: Japanime Games
Year Published / Kickstarted: 2024
No. of Players: 2-4
Ages: 14+
Playing Time: 30-60 Minutes
Main mechanic / Theme: Deckbuilding, Anime

Employ maids, butlers, and séances to renovate rooms and restore the Twilight Manor. But beware… The dearly departed don’t take kindly to your meddling!

Disclaimer: Publisher provided a copy of the game for this review.

Overview:

Memento Mori - Twilight Monor is the sixth game in the Tanto Cuore series, a deckbuilding card game where you employ various Maids and Butlers into your Household. These character cards provide benefits such as more cards drawn, more Services for playing more cards, more Love to use to Employ more characters, and more opportunities to Employ said characters. Strengthen your deck and make use of your cards in tandem to acquire the most victory points!

Tanto 6 features several gameplay elements that build upon the previous titles. First is a deck of dilapidated Rooms that can be Renovated for victory points. Several of the characters are classified as Workers, and have skills needed for the Renovations. Second is the inclusion of Ghosts, characters with strong effects, but also Evil Effects that can turn them against you. Last of the major inclusions is the Tarot deck, which when accessed after playing a Séance card can have drastic effects on the game.

This review will be focused on Tanto 6 as a standalone experience, but it can be easily combined with previous (and future) installments for endless variety!

Gameplay and Mechanics:

At its core, Tanto Cuore will be very familiar to fans of the deckbuilding genre, and particularly fans of Dominion.

Each player starts with a standard deck of ten cards, seven “1 Love” cards and three “The Twilight Sisters” cards, and draws five cards. On each player’s turn, they can play any Love cards in their hand and up to one character card. Then, using the Love they generated, the player can Employ up to one card from the Town, a selection of fifteen different stacks of cards (The three different levels of Love cards, the two Event cards, the Two Chief cards, and eight of the sixteen possible characters).

All cards played, Employed, or left over in a player’s hand are then put in their discard pile, and they draw a new hand of five cards. If for whatever reason a player needs to draw a card but their deck is empty, they immediately shuffle their discard pile and it becomes their new deck.

Cards played, in addition to whatever unique effects they may have, provide one or more additional Servings (opportunities to play cards), additional Employs, additional cards drawn, and/or additional Love. Once players have improved their decks, it is not uncommon to draw, play, and/or Employ multiple cards per turn.

Character cards with high Employ costs, usually seven or higher, tend to provide victory points just for having them in your deck.

Additionally, by paying Servings some characters can be moved into your “Private Quarters,” a process called Chambermaiding. If a character is in your Private Quarters, they are not shuffled back into your deck and will provide victory points at the end of the game.

In Tanto 6, half of the Maids and Butlers are also Ghosts. They function like any other character, with two differences. First, all of them can be “Captured” by Chambermaiding them for one Serving, at which point they will provide one victory point. Secondly, each Ghost has a different Evil Effect. Certain cards can cause players to gain Evil Tokens. If a player has an Evil Token, at the beginning of their turn they must activate all the Evil Effects of Ghosts in their hand, often to devastating results.

One of the Event cards in Tanto 6 is the Poltergeist Activity card. When Employed it immediately goes to another player’s Private Quarters, where it gives a penalty to their victory points. Additionally, having three or more Poltergeist Activity cards gives an additional negative five victory points! On top of that, if a player has an Evil Token AND a Poltergeist Activity, they must activate the Evil Effects of the Ghost in their hand AND their Private Quarters.

Also in Tanto 6, there is a deck of Room cards, five of which are revealed at all times. Some of the living characters are Workers rather than Maids or Butlers. These function like any other character, but also have one of five Skills represented by a symbol. If the characters a player has played during their turn have the same set of symbols as on one of the Room cards, that player can Renovate that Room, putting it in their Private Quarters where it will provide victory points.

Some effects, usually Tarot cards, can put Spirit Tokens on or remove them from Rooms. Some other effects can move or Exercise those tokens as well. A Room cannot be Renovated if it has a Spirit Token on it, and a Room can only have a maximum of two Spirit Tokens.

Speaking of the Tarot cards, the other Event card in Tanto 6 is a Special Event called Séance. Instead of being played immediately when Employed, it goes to the discard pile like a character. Having three or more Séance cards gives an additional five victory points! When played, it simply lets you draw a card. However, if a Séance card is the first card a player plays that turn, it also calls a Séance. Each player must take a Character card from their hand (if possible) and lay it face down. Once everyone has chosen, the characters are revealed and the player who called the Séance flips the top card of Tarot deck. They add or remove the indicated number of Spirit Tokens, then the effect is carried out. Typically, something happens to the player who had either the lowest or highest cost Character in the Séance. Then the players take back their Character cards and the turn continues.

Some characters, usually Ghosts, have effects that cause players to send characters to the Graveyard, a communal area where they are placed face-down and no longer go back into players’ decks, unless another card specifically pulls from it.

Once either all the Rooms have been Renovated OR any two character card decks in the Town (NOT the Love or Event decks) are empty, the game ends at the end of that turn. Each player counts up their victory points, and the winner is determined!

Theme, Artwork and Illustration, Graphic Design and Layout:

Tanto 6, as an anime-style game, has a very anime art style. While that style may not be everyone’s cup of tea, my friends and myself all enjoyed the art, and it was a point of discussion during playthroughs. It lent itself well to having bold and memorable character designs that reflected the cards’ functions, as well as eye-catching colors. Even the Ghost characters featured blue, pink, and purple tones prominently to tie themselves together thematically.

Additionally, thanks to there being thirteen different card illustrators, there was some variation in style throughout the cards as well. This prevented same-face syndrome for the various character cards, a common pitfall of anime art styles.

Though I unfortunately cannot say the same for the Tarot cards, I can say that the Tarot decks, in my opinion, have the most stunning art out of the whole game otherwise. By the end of my play sessions I garnered a reputation for constantly playing Séance cards. Partially because Séance is just a strong card, partially because I wanted to see as much as the Tarot deck as possible!

The other oversized cards, the Room cards, are also very well done, particularly in how they change when Renovated. On the front they are dreary and dilapidated, while on the back they are bright and picturesque. Getting to flip the cards and see how your Workers fixed things up provided a great deal of satisfaction. There was a bit of confusion with some players about whether the top card of the Room deck was in fact in play or not, however.

One thing Tanto 6 does that is unique to the other game in its series, and many other deckbuilding games, is have the board layout really reflect the theming. In other Tanto games, the Town, where you Employ cards from, is set up in a grid pattern, but in Tanto 6, the character cards are arranged in a circle around the Tarot deck, representing a Séance! While I was worried that it would be a hassle when first setting it up, and I can certainly see some people obsessing over getting the circle just right, it proved to be a non-issue for my playgroups and in fact helped in some regards by making sure each player had at least a few cards facing them right-side up. Plus, it’s quite a striking visual!

The box also included a pack of thick cardboard numbered prints of the card art as well as a set of the cards with differently colored backs, which I feel are ideal for both reference and collection.

Inclusivity and Accessibility:

As mentioned before, Tanto is very much an anime-style game, and with it comes a couple pitfalls.

Firstly, there is a clear bias towards female characters. While nine of the character cards appear to be male, half of the total characters, that holds true for only four of the twenty-two Tarot cards. Butlers were only introduced in Tanto 5, so if one were to decide to expand their collection, they may quickly find things becoming quite skewed.

Of course, inclusion of female characters is hardly a bad thing, and as mentioned before, the stylistic differences of the different artists make the characters feel unique. There is a lot of good expression work and characterization across the cards.

However, as is common in anime-style properties, they nearly all share the traits of being on the younger side with voluminous hair and bust sizes spanning from moderate to massive. And while not nearly as prominent in Tanto 6 as in other properties (and even other Tanto games), some of their outfits are on the risqué side. The character Dina is the only real exception, being an older woman, though the characters Emily and Leon could also reasonably be exceptions as well.

The male characters, on the flip side, have a wide variety of features. From young to old, bearded to bald, pretty to handsome, and cheerful to morose, there’s a larger swath of character archetypes. There is of course still some fanservice-The characters Jack, Jace, and Mark flaunt incredibly chiseled upper bodies, the latter being completely shirtless. In fact, the people I played with seemed to be drawn to the men more than the women!

One last pitfall of the style is that all of the characters appear caucasian in skin tone, and outside a couple exceptions are quite pale. Especially so for the Ghosts and Tarot cards, though as ethereal and/or supernatural beings it makes some sense.

On a more positive note, there appears to be a hint of LGBTQ+ representation. The Tarot card, The Lovers, depicts a same-sex couple, as a cupid-like figure looks over a pair of maids sharing an intimate moment. It was a pleasant surprise to see.

What worked:

Tanto 6 has a very solid foundation, and as a deckbuilding game the complexity of gameplay naturally ramps up as the game is played and players gain access to new cards and actions rather than starting players off with too much information. Even a friend of mine who, by their own admission, has trouble learning games and especially card games was able to pick things up quickly.

While turns get increasingly complex, they never take overly long. Each individual action is quick, so even multiple strung together will only take a few seconds once familiar with the game. It never got to the point where one player snowballed and played cards over and over ad infinitum. Even when players have strong hands, the use of Séance cards mean players get to engage even when it’s not their turn.

The process of Chambermaiding at the Evil Effects Ghosts add layers of complexity that really reward careful planning and balancing of your strategy. There were multiple synergies and lines of play that my playgroups employed, and even more that I thought of even while writing this review.

We played with both the recommended starting selection of characters as well as with the alternate recommended setup (when the character Jack is included), and even then since there are only ten General slots in a Town setup and sixteen non-chief characters, so there are many permutations we didn’t get to try that would keep the game fresh.

Final thoughts:

As mentioned briefly before, Tanto 6’s roots are very Dominion-like, so fans of that series or deckbuilding in general will certainly be able to enjoy the Tanto Cuore series.

The concept of the Graveyard as a sort of communal trash pile that can be taken from using certain cards is also very unique in the deckbuilding genre, and very interesting to me. It adds a layer of strategy where you can, in a way, steal cards from other players. Unfortunately, cards in the graveyard are placed face-down, making them hard to accurately interact with.

Generally, the fact that in Tanto 6 most characters require the use of Servings to use their abilities means that more often than not players would forgo those abilities in favor of simply playing another character for additional resources, so the abilities that actually put cards in the Graveyard or interact with them weren’t used very much.

This extended to Chambermaiding, particularly to The Twilight Sisters, who require two Servings to Chambermaid, and do nothing otherwise. It was difficult to remove them from your deck unless specifically building around characters that provide two servings, of which there were only two, or taking one of the Ghosts that could remove a Living character from your hand, which cost six and seven Love respectively. This was the biggest sticking point for my playgroups.

While all other cards either can be removed from your deck (or simply cycles itself in the case of the Séance card), there is no way to remove Love cards, so players are always stuck with their seven 1 Love cards.

None of the games I played ended by having all fifteen Rooms be Renovated, rather ending because players got a powerful draw or Love engine going that let them Employ all of the best characters. Renovating in general was a bit difficult if not all Worker cards were present.

Having games end on the turn the endgame is triggered, rather than at the end of the round, is a personal pet peeve of mine, though thankfully the hidden scoring aspect of cards in players’ decks helped discourage players from simply ending the game once they thought they were ahead in points.

Of course, these are all issues that can be resolved through experience, differing Town setups, and/or mixing and matching with other Tanto sets to find the perfect mix.

More importantly, each and every game of Tanto 6 I played ended with everyone in my playgroup expressing that they had fun. I can certainly see myself and many others amassing a collection of Tanto Cuore cards to pull out and play!