Lockwood’s Asylum: Changing The Deckbuilding Genre

You are locked in a horrible insane asylum filled with grotesque monsters and nightmarish horrors. Can you fend off the creatures and survive the night?

Lockwood’s Asylum is a competitive deck builder game set in a horrific insane asylum. Lakeshore Asylum is filled with violent patients and horrible monsters. Players will have to survive the night by recruiting doctors, nurses and nonviolent patients. However, Lockwood’s Asylum brings an interesting twist on the standard deck builder format. While each player is filling their own deck with helpful allies, the other players will be making the deck worse by filling it with monsters.  Each time a player draws a monster card, they are forced to play the monster card into their play area. If the player can defeat the monster on their turn, the monster is slain often with some additional effect. Otherwise, the monster strikes back and deals damage to the player. If a player is reduced to 0 health, they’re consumed by the monsters and out of the game. The last player standing survives the night and wins the game.

I really enjoy deckbuilders and Lockwood’s Asylum brings a rarely seen new angle on the genre. Most deckbuilders rely on victory points or accumulated wealth of cards to determine victory. I’m not sure I’ve seen a deck builder with a Last One Standing victory condition. One of my biggest issues with most competitive deck builders is the lack of player interaction. Too often, it’s not really a direct competition. It’s usually more like parallel play, with you and your opponents each playing separately and seeing who did the best at the end. Lockwood’s Asylum adds the Take That mechanic, allowing players to attempt to slow down whoever is winning or pick off the weaker players. I think this will really add a new level of strategy that is lacking in many current deckbuilders.

via Blackout Games

Lockwood’s Asylum – $35 – Kickstarter ends Nov 27th

There have always been rumors surrounding the Lakeshore Asylum. The strange fire back in the days of the Great Depression, the scandal involving the administrator and the flayed bodies in the ’40s, the missing patients that briefly led to the asylum’s closing in the ’70s… they were stories told around campfires by those who had not seen the horror first hand.

When Dr. Lockwood took over the administration of the asylum, nobody had any reason to be concerned. The doctor was analytical, precise, driven: the perfect person for the job.

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Then Lockwood found the tome, and the rituals and experiments began…

• 2 – 5 Players

The card art alone is enough to make me shutter.

Author: Matt Sall

Matt has loved games of all kinds his whole life: board, video, war, roleplaying. He's worked as a writer for BoLS since 2017. He's worked as freelance editor for board game rulebooks and has designed many of his own games as well.