Personal Demons Preview – Devilishly good tableau-building

A prototype copy of Personal Demons was kindly provided by Tettix Games. All art, components and rules are subject to change. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

The somewhat unique mind of Judson Cowan has come up with some odd stuff. I covered Hideous Abomination a few years back, and more recently, Deep Regrets. He’s back, with his signature art style and creative use of themes and mechanisms, foisting Personal Demons upon us. It’s a clever mix of drafting and tableau-building, and it’s really rather good.

It’s clear from the opening paragraph of the rulebook that Personal Demons is a very personal project for Judson. He talks openly about his mental health issues, which led to the creation of the game. As someone who has had (and still has) his own personal demons to deal with from time to time, it’s refreshing for me to see such a frank opening to a game and the acknowledgement of the problems. This stuff is important.

Let the sin begin

Personal Demons has a bunch of cards. There are Fears, which, much like in life, get in your way until you’re ready to confront them and do something about them. Each of the game’s three rounds has its own deck of demon cards. There are royal cards, fragments, and knights.

During the game, you draft demon cards by taking one and passing your remaining hand to the person beside you. You play them onto your summoning circle board into one of the sixteen spots, with the goal of getting the sigil emblems in the corners to match the colours of their neighbours. Let’s say you manage to get four red corners together (or even some purples, which are wild). You get to place a red seal disc on the point where those cards meet, and at the end of every round, every new seal scores the points printed on all of the cards they touch.

It gets tricky really quickly. More often than not, you find yourself making the least-worst choice. Some of those corners aren’t going to match, so you need to decide which ones you want. Every card you play also increases one or more of the sin gauges printed around the side of your summoning circle. You can spend those sins to draw little fragment cards, which take up half of a card space, or spend more to draw Royal cards, which often offer up wild seals to help make those necessary connections.

Where Personal Demons gets clever is at the end of each round. When your seals are scored, they get flipped to their cracked side. Cracked seals act as valid prerequisites for some cards to be played, but they don’t score again. They gum up the works. The only way to refresh them is to play another card over the top of previously-played cards to make the seals anew. It tends to be the case that the cards that are the easiest to place are the ones with the fewest points. Almost like it’s been designed that way…

Ooh, you devil!

The fragments aren’t the only differently sized cards in the game. At the start of the game, you get to choose two bigger demon cards to keep to one side. The beautifully-named Hefty demons take up the space of two normal demons, and Colossal demons, which fill up the space of four demons. These cards need certain seals to be present in your circle, and need a huge amount of collected sin to be spent. They take up lots of space, but offer lots of ways to make seals more easily, and potentially score a lot of points.

What I love about the hefty and colossal demons is that they offer a route for long-term planning. Most games of this sort, these middle-weight, approachable, hour-long games, tend to rinse and repeat from start to end. Personal Demons lets you decide before the game even begins what you want to try to get done.

Another thing I really like about the game is how, even though it’s a very difficult theme to convey and abstract into the form of a game, it has a darn good stab at it. You confront your demons and seal them away. You have a fear, and until you overcome it, it prevents you from confronting more demons. You get courage cards. Small cards which give you bonuses during the game. Courage makes you stronger.

So while this isn’t a game that’s taking a head-on approach to dealing with mental health, it takes a jaunty sideways glance at it. Heck, even if you completely miss the point of the game and don’t read the rulebook, the game is still awesome. The demon artwork is superb. The game is fun. It’s a good game with cool demon art in it. A hormone-riddled teenager who likes nothing more than demons and cool artwork will have an amazing time with it.

Final thoughts

Personal Demons is a superb game. I get a lot of preview games across my table throughout the year, and it’s fairly common for them to get sent along to the next reviewer in the chain. It’s the first game in a long time that I’ve been genuinely sad to box up and move on. I want to keep it and play it more. My precious.

It’s a really easy game to teach with a few thoughtful examples of play, and from then on, the game just rattles along at a good pace. There’s strategy, on-the-fly tactics, and lots of pivoting involved. If you’ve enjoyed any pattern- or edge-matching games like Honshu, Codex Naturalis, Ecologies, or Butterfly Garden, you’ll have a great time with Personal Demons.

I love the theming. I love Judson’s artwork. I honestly think the only people who would find something to dislike would be people who find the artwork a bit off-putting. Not grotesque, for want of a better word, just a little weird. But hey, they’re demons. Not fluffy animals or cutesy fairies. Demons. If anything, their appearance helps cement the theme. It makes you want to do away with them and to get something cuter in your life.

Personal Demons is great. I love it.

Personal Demons will launch on Kickstarter towards the end of the summer/start of autumn. Make sure to follow the Kickstarter page to know when it launches.

Pros & Cons