The Last Lighthouse: Keeping Madness at Bay
- Solitary Quest Blog
- Oct 30
- 7 min read
In Scott Almes’ The Last Lighthouse, an 18-card solo game from Button Shy, players defend a lonely beacon against encroaching nightmares. This review explores how a minimalist design captures the tension, isolation, and fragile sanity of lighthouse keeping.
Lighthouses, in the popular imagination, are settings prime for psychological thrills. The keepers of these mighty beacons—stationed in the most remote locations on barren rock—tend to face all the perils of loneliness: boredom, misgiving, and psychosis that plays subtle tricks on the mind to blur the line between reality and the supernatural. And amid the unrelenting pursuit to keep the light burning at all costs, madness and paranoia inevitably take hold. Was it really a cadaverous coincidence of the wind playing vile tricks that made Thomas Howell see the lifeless hand of his fellow attendant wave to entice him out of the safety of the shelter during a storm? Or perhaps it was some other, superior force acting to affect the freshly soloed tender of the Smalls Lighthouse in 1801?
And the mind that keeps this solemn vigil? Robert Eggers’ 2019 film The Lighthouse shows us two men obliged to a forsaken rock while drink, deceit, and the monotony of their duty accelerate a cascading mania. Hammered by a storm that unendingly darkens the sky, all sense of time disappears and even the portentant gulls appear to mock Ephraim Winslow, portrayed soberingly by Robert Pattinson. The rapid untethering of what is real and imagined by Mr. Winslow seems to confirm that no sane man should exist in such a place. Maybe no sane man does? Aptly filmed in black-and-white, the droning soundscape of relentless waves, ravaging storms, and clockwork-like bellowing of the deep foghorn orchestrate a maddening cacophony.
Fiction also portrays Lighthouses as places of tragedy, where the customs of civilization are dashed against rocks, just like the passing ships would be were a lighthouse’s lantern to darken. Jules Verne wrote for us a dark, and violent story of survival in The Lighthouse at the End of the World. Set in the mid-19th century in Tierra Del Fuego (the Southern tip of South America) against a backdrop of immutable remoteness that lends the story an undertone of hopeless horror, the cruel pirate Kongre is the epitome of real, not imagined, terror. Verne’s novel served as the inspiration for the highly enjoyable 2021 solo roleplaying game The Lighthouse At The Edge Of The Universe, in which the spirits of those lost at sea haunt the tower and its dwindling light.
Whether they are plagued by insanity, pirates, or spirits, Lighthouses and their keepers make for excellent settings and characters for nightmarish tales. And it is against an onslaught of those nightmares that the player must defend a solitary lighthouse in Scott Almes' entry into the seemingly burgeoning haunted lighthouse genre. The Last Lighthouse is an 18-card tower defense-like card game where the player, as a lone lighthouse keeper, tactically deploys trap cards from their hand to stave off nightmares until dawn arrives (aka: until the tiny deck runs out) or the nightmares deal enough damage to the lighthouse.
With a queue of nightmare and trap cards—called the sea—extending single-file from the lighthouse card, each round begins with the player deploying traps and using them to attack nearby nightmares. Then the nightmares swell their ranks, adding one new threat to the end of the sea, and attack—either striking the lighthouse if it’s in range or attempting to disable a trap. Combat, if you can call it that, is straightforward: traps and nightmares both have health (the number of hits they can withstand in a single action) and range values on their left and right sides that determine which cards they can target in the line. Each trap or nightmare within range deals one hit, and the target’s health must be overcome in a single attack—damage doesn’t carry over. Nightmares will always prioritize hitting the lighthouse whenever it’s in range.
Traps and nightmares each have abilities that trigger either when they’re played or when they’re defeated. On-play abilities make for instant boons from traps and hazards from nightmares, while on-defeat abilities are more of a gamble: knocking out the wrong nightmare at the wrong time may have worse consequences than just targeting another one or being patient and not attacking at all; yet, a trap with an on-defeat ability may be cycled out of the queue or discarded from the game without its ability triggering.
Almes is a virtuoso of making the most out of every component in a game, which is a crucial talent when Button Shy holds you to just 18 cards. In The Last Lighthouse, traps and nightmares share card space, with a nightmare on the top and a trap on the bottom when rotated 180 degrees. After a player defeats a nightmare in the lineup, they rotate it to its trap side and take it into their hand to deploy on a future turn (defeated traps are removed from the game). And the nightmares and their inverse traps often have reciprocal abilities and features. For example, one nightmare card has an on-defeat effect that returns a trap card in the sea to the player’s hand, while the corresponding trap card lets the player discard a card from hand to automatically defeat a nightmare. In this case, both abilities move cards between the player’s hand and the sea. And generally, I have noticed that the stronger (i.e. more health) a nightmare has, the better the reciprocal trap’s ability is. This is a subtle, but appreciable, intentionality in the game’s design.
After the player and the nightmares make their moves, the “tide changes.” This is basically a recycling mechanism to prevent a stagnant board, affecting the card closest to the lighthouse. If that card is a nightmare, move it to the back of the queue, furthest from the lighthouse. Shunting nightmares to the end of the line wards off a conglomerate of nightmares from amassing within range of the lighthouse and draining it in just a few turns. Without the tide, this would be a particularly stubborn board state to overcome, especially since the game setup places a number of nightmares at the front of the sea according to the difficulty setting. If the closest card is a trap, discard it from the game. This prevents the player from fortifying the lighthouse with a succession of high-range traps that can systematically drub whatever nightmare is pulled from the deck each turn. I really like this cycling effect as it keeps the game moving forward and adds more of a sense of urgency to each round.
The Last Lighthouse is a game of push and pull. The player needs to knock out nightmares to get more traps to play to knockout more nightmares to get more traps to … you get the picture. And with the ability to place a trap in any position in the sea, the player has a slight tactical advantage over the nightmares who are always added to the end of the queue each round. In this way, the game in front of the player is one of manipulating the sea—considering the ranges of the cards in play—to steadily move through the deck while keeping nightmares at a distance where they can’t levy too many hits. Add in the abilities that manipulate spatial movement, access to additional cards in the deck, action economy, as well as other boons and busts and the Almes has delivered another tight little solo puzzle.
The artwork from Anastasia Khmelevska is also stellar and a perfect match for the game. Given only 18 cards to work with, Khmelevska paints us a broad picture of … well, nightmare fuel. Each grayscale portrait is like a snapshot of a bad dream at the moment just before you wake up: porcelain silhouettes held captive by distorted animalistic and grim humanoid figures. She also plays with depth of field to offer chilling scenes, like the wispy grim holding his scythe at the center of a megalithic bear trap. My favorite shows an insectoid creature playing puppeteer to a pale, mouthless doll with hollow black eyes. The aesthetics tease us with anguish; and is these are the monsters banging on the doors of my lighthouse, you bet I’m going to be laying my best traps to stop them.
Variability of play from game-to-game is fairly steady despite so few cards. A great trap ability or a devastating nightmare draw could have a big impact on the game without making it feel too swingy. That also makes each decision critical, especially on harder difficulties. Although I am able to win fairly handedly almost every time on the easier difficulty setups, the more challenging games usually come right down to the last few plays. The deck seems to run out of cards (triggering a win) just in time; another round and the nightmares would have taken the lighthouse.
Admittedly the game has felt somewhat stale at times if I play it a lot in succession. As alluded to above, difficulty can be added by changing the starting setup of the sea. One nightmare to three traps on easy, two nightmares to two traps on normal and so on. By the “nightmare” level of challenge, I find it’s pretty tough to clear those starting four nightmares, especially beginning without any traps in the sea. This means it's less of an increase in the overall challenge of the game, but more of a more challenging circumstance. But it’s tough to complain about that for how much enjoyment I’ve found in this little nugget while on the go. For a while now it’s been sitting in a pocket in my backpack at-the-ready while traveling. And if it were not for my general indifference towards wallet game expansions, I’d readily go in on the expansion bundle that adds four new ways to plays. Undoubtedly, these can scratch the itch of beefing up this game if that’s what you’re looking for.
Designer: Scott Almes
Artist: Anastasia Khmelevska
Publisher: Button Shy
Player Count: Solitaire
Play Time: 5-15 minutes
👍 great presentation and art design; clever mechanics
👎 not too much replayable depth
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