Is this not one of the most magnificent pieces of cover art you've ever laid eyes upon in all your life??? Party Joy was a Japanese company that evidently churned out dozens of elaborately illustrated board games throughout the 1980's, with themes ranging from fantasy adventure to slice-of-life comedy, and while more than one featured yokai, ghosts and monsters, "HAUNTED HOUSE" exceeds them all in pure style and imagination.

The folks who uploaded these scans have shared them all for free along with multiple translation documents and gameplay guides in a public google drive folder, so you could, hypothetically, print out your own bootlegged copy and play it yourself if you had that kind of time and energy on your hands, suffice to say the game features four irresponsible dudes nosing around the cursed palace of a demon king, arming themselves with a selection of artifacts as they fight randomized monsters.   -

  Every inch of the game and its components are as appealing as they possibly could have been, from the detailed game board to the positively awesome looking card backs, depicted in the sort of beautifully ghostly palettes you would expect from any proper 80's horror.

 

  And of course, the main attraction: a TRUCKLOAD of possible monster encounters! This is a selection of all the most "conventional" - zombies, werewolves, devils, Halloween animals - but even the most ordinary are dripping with personality. Literally, in the case of the miserable looking "Sludge!" I also love the oversized head of the crazed hellhound, the fact that the black cat is cleaning its paw, the goofy stare of the giant rat and the shiftiness of the grim reaper (shinigami). Every single one has an extremely satisfying color scheme, too, and how cool is that card border made of green snakes?! Green cyclops snakes! And they're so HAPPY about all this! Look at them! They love everything that's going on here!

  There are upgraded, miniboss-caliber monsters, too, with taller cards and higher stats. Here we have a purple, troll-looking Vampire with bat-wing ears and a cute little pet vampire bat, the "Shinigami King" who looks kind of like an icy goblin with lizard arms, the dripping green Zombie Dragon and the AWESOME looking Witch Medusa, not only snake-haired but snake-faced, and in a pretty pink princess dress because she deserves to look nice for guests, okay?!

  Then there are four BIG boss monsters. The disturbing Fire Devil just looks like a regular person burning to death, screaming skyward with flames shooting out of his eyes. Shogun Armor is a haunted samurai suit with a sword, obviously. "Ice Devil" is actually the humanoid form of our main villain, who you already saw on the cover: a shrieking blue vampire-looking figure with hair, eye makeup and a glittering black robe that evokes David Bowie, and probably on purpose, since he had just been in Labyrinth with a fairly similar look not long before this was published. Finally we have the Gold Dragon, which is stated to be the demon king's truest form!

  The game even includes a holographic sticker of the demon king in both of his forms, which you don't do anything with, but this type of square sticker was a whole thing in 80's Japan. There were all kinds of franchises that used them, they came in vending machines, they came packed with various toys, and you could of course buy special albums just for showing them all off.

All this, and we're still only half through the total monster selection included with this single game box, which is why I had to group so many of them together! Now comes the real fun (for me) of going over the rest individually.

SCRAMBLE BIRD

  A delightfully fuzzy, roundish bird a little reminiscent of a potoo or a frogmouth. Scramble Bird doesn't get a monster card that you can fight, but has its own special cards that cause various random events. The card backs show the bird breaking out of an egg, so it might be a whole "species" of tricky little goblin-birds who hatch from their eggs just to get in your way! Most of the effects are negative, according to my skim-read of the game instructions.

BIG HEAD

  This is treated as monster #1 in the whole bestiary, and features prominently around the box art! A good choice for a major "mascot" of the game and its "basic" enemy, it's indeed mostly a big head, a green cartoon zombie sort of head with a huge mouth, reminiscent of slimer, but with stubbier arms and a set of stubby legs. Plus, it's carrying a smaller head-monster, roughly similar in design except it has red skin and more hair. Just what kind of ghouls or goblins are these? Does the big one throw the little one around as a weapon? Can it make more of them?? Neat!

ONE EYED DEMON

  You have to have a cyclops guy somewhere or other in this kind of world. One Eyed Demon is a dumpy purple humanoid who wears scraps of armor, with a single horn growing from each shoulder. Its ENTIRE head is just a big eye, though. I mean, there's surrounding eyelid flesh, so you could say it has a head with one eye, but there does not appear to be much room for much of a brain or skull or anything else, and there's no obvious mouth or anything. Maybe all that stuff is somewhere else, like in its chest or stomach under the armor.

TWO HEADED DEVIL

  Two headed devil is so silly! Its heads look like a couple of sagging lemons or kiwis with big goofy muppet frowns, tiny red eyes sharp horns for noses, narwhal-style, but they've also got curving bull-type horns on their heads, and the inner horns are hooked into one another. It's also dressed in poofy, pinkish purple royal looking garb, like a princely outfit, complete with fancy gold necklaces. Was this thing royalty??

SNAKE WOMAN

  This is mostly your typical "snake with a woman's head" type monster, but I really like the face design a lot. It's like exactly between a human face and a snake face, but not in the fanged, scaly, threatening way of other reptiloid monster designs. It just has a very slight muzzle, nostrils, and a wide mouth with that cute little middle opening that a snake has, where its tongue flicks out. Really charming.

SHINIGAMI HORSE

  You already saw the Shinigami, a typical "cloaked skeleton" reaper design, but here's what is either a horse that he rides, or a whole separate death spirit that is also a horse. Its body is totally engulfed in fire, except for just the skull and some exposed ribs.

BRONZE DEVIL

  Strange! This figure has a sot of "space alien" look with a very tall face, kind of moai-like, and skinny arms with elongated fingers, entirely colored the blue-green of oxidized bronze. I'm really not sure what being a "Bronze Devil" means exactly. Just a creature literally made of bronze or with bronze skin I guess, but why? From where?

LIZARD MAN

  How can you not instantly adore the design of this lizard man??? He's a dumpy, frumpy pale blue reptile, with patches of pebbly magenta scales and some yellowish spikes down his back, and just the cutest silliest sleepy lizard face with little squinty eyes and a big frowny muzzle. He almost has the visual personality of a grouchy pelican. Not the proportions or shape of a pelican or anything, but just, that kind of vibe. Doesn't he?

DOLL

  Just an evil doll, straight to the point, with its eyeballs rolled back, blood smeared on its face and horrible broken looking teeth. It also has curly blonde hair and a hilarious fancy pink victorian era outfit with a HUGE hat!

LIQUID DEVIL

  This is just your standard amorphous green slime monster, just a puddle of green gunk, with sad looking orange eyes. I guess I could have included this one and the doll up there with the rundown of more generic monsters, but I didn't want to, so there! I like that the art portrays it upside-down, like it's creeping on the ceiling.

GAS DEVIL

  By now, you might be as annoyed as I am that the stat numbers are so unnecessarily huge on these cards. Their stat are literally just three or four digits, why are those framed in plain squares SO much larger than the numbers themselves that they cover up half of each design?! Each monster's complete illustration can be found in a separate insert, but with a more limited color palette, which means we may never get to see the original images in their entirety, ever. JEEZ!!!

Anyway, this is Gas Devil, a mass of gas with devil horns and reptilian eyes. At least the stats aren't covering up anything but more gas, I guess! But now you know!

MERMAN

  I'm forever grateful for the existence of the Creature From the Black Lagoon, because its success is almost definitely the only reason we get to enjoy so, so many humanoid fish as "spooky" type monsters. This is an especially lovable one, because it's just a big roundish piranha-like fish with little arms and legs!

HYDRA

  This is an exceptionally cool hydra! It has no visible tail or central body (not even in the insert art, I checked) so it's JUST a writhing blob of purple snake-like heads, but only snake-LIKE. They're scaleless and eyeless, so more like monstrous worm things than snakes, and their only visible teeth are rodent-like incisors. That's actually quite a bit scarier than fangs. This is a big mass of worm things that will collectively gnaw you to death.

MUSHROOM

  Too cute! A pink and yellow polka-dotted mushroom running around on hilarious little footies with a round, screaming mouth in its stem. It also appears to have eyes on its cap, though they are either clenched shut or they're naturally just a couple of dark creases.

SPIDER MAN

  Not THAT spider man! THIS spider man is a purple-skinned yokai-like demihuman ghoul who has eight limbs sprouting off a fat blueish abdomen. Very pleasing color scheme completed by the round, yellow-orange eyes. His limbs are humanlike, but they all end in talons more like a bird's than either a human or an arachnid.

SALAMANDER BROTHERS

  I got you the alt art of this one too, so you could see their full glory. The "salamander brothers" are like a couple of bug-eyed crocodiles, one riding atop the other, with feathered forelimbs like an archaeopteryx and serrated beaklike jaws instead of actual teeth. Really cool looking creatures! By "salamander" I'm guessing we mean the "fire loving" kind of mythological salamander, since these don't look particularly amphibious.

GIANT MANTIS

  A wonderful, wonderful thing to include in a haunted house! Yes!!! And what a fantastically designed mantodean yokai! It's not accurate to the real insect, but it's clearly not meant to be, having an emaciated little humanoid torso, a really long segmented neck, an almost hammer-headed cranium with spherical eyeballs and a fat beak with small fangs. Everything in this game has "chibi" proportions with a large head and limbs in proportion to the body, but I like to think this is a case where the monster literally looks like awkward.

FLY MAN

  YES!!! Now we're especially talking!! My favorite animal and by extension favorite monster archetype of all perhaps! Not nearly as common as fish people, but once again we can thank a single horror movie for the fact that they DO crop up again and again in extensive enough horror monster gangs. As such a stickler for diptera, I can be picky about their designs, and this is a GOOD fly man monster. I like the squat, fat, toadlike proportions of the fleshy humanoid body, very appropriate for the bumbly shape of a typical fly. It has the correct number of wings, which are a nice pinkish hue, and the head has a great design for something that is neither fly nor man; wide and flattened with properly immense fly eyes, a small nose-like cluster of yellow feelers in the appropriate place, and a wide, also kind of froggish mouth that looks acceptably similar to where a real fly's head flares open and houses the proboscis. I don't mind fly creatures with inaccurate mouths so long as they avoid having mandibles or otherwise looking like the mouth of the wrong sort of insect. And if you look closer at the cover art, at the top of the page, it looks like the Fly Man DOES have a hidden proboscis!

IRON BUTTERFLY

  ...And yet, as much as I love the fly man and the mantis, and as much as I had to say about them, the inclusion of an evil butterfly in a Haunted House is both rarer and cooler. Especially an evil butterfly made of metal for some reason. The full art reveals that it has a single pair of adorable little lizard-like legs, interestingly its only limbs other than its very sharp looking wings. It has no antennae, either, but it has menacing red insect eyes in an almost owl-like head design, with a coiled proboscis that appears to emerge from a tube rubbing all the way under the thorax.

It looks constructed, for sure, but was it forged with the INTENT it would come to life, perhaps by dark sorcery, or was it just a sculpture that came to be occupied by a supernatural entity? It could even be haunted by the grudge of its own creator! There's so much possible story here! Where's our Iron Butterfly horror movie?!

AXOLOTL

  Our last nameable monster in the whole game, and a monstrous "axolotl" is such a fun addition! It's clearly not quite as simple as just a big larval salamander, though. It's a uniformly banana-yellow, worm-shaped amphibian, with gooey looking arms that grow from right behind its relatively nubby gills, a simple crescent smile full of sharp teeth and only a single round, white yokai-type eyeball. I love everything about it, and the creators were clearly quite fond of it as well, as it even has its own dedicated room on the game board! It's shown emerging from a tiled pool, and extending a humanlike tongue:

A MYSTERY

  So there's technically one last monster worth mentioning, but as near as I can tell, it appears exclusively o the box cover, right next to the demon king himsself. It looks like a snake, but with an insectoid or helmet-like head sporting dragonfly-like blue eyes, and its mouth is just a bunch of pink tentacles dangling from a tube!! What?! What is this?!?? Was there some kind of alien space worm that got cut at the last minute, before it could get its own monster card?? Did I simply miss some other place where it appears? Was it skipped over by the folks who scanned everything in? Hello?! WHO ARE YOU little fella!!!!!!!