Haunted Mine: game rules
Haunted Mine
⛏️ Goal: As a prospector, collect every piece of ore in a mine, then it's on to the next. Three mine layouts rotate, and each one gets tighter: the ghosts get faster up to the fourth, their patrols get shorter up to the fifth, and the time they flee after the dynamite shrinks to one second by the sixth. Once only a fifth of the ore is left, Grimm picks up speed. Points count: ore 10, dynamite 50, one silver bar per mine 500 to 2,000.
🎮 How it works: Steer with the arrow keys or WASD, swipe on a phone or use the d-pad. Feel free to pick a direction early – you turn at the next junction, turning back works at once. The side tunnel leads to the other side. Solo, pause with the space bar or P.
👻 Mine ghosts: Four ghosts hunt you, each in its own way: Grimm head-on, Lauer aims four cells ahead of you, Zwicker comes mirrored across Grimm, Funzel only hunts from afar. They take turns patrolling to their corners for 7 seconds and hunting for 20. If one catches you, you lose a life – you have three, and one more at 10,000 points.
🧨 Dynamite: Every mine has four sticks of dynamite. After one, the ghosts flee for a few seconds and you can catch them: 200, 400, 800 and 1,600 points for the first to the fourth. Shortly before the effect wears off, they flicker. A caught ghost flies back to the ghost house, rests there for six seconds and then comes out again.
🏁 Race: Up to eight players go down at once, each in their own mine, all in the same order. Whoever has used up all lives watches the others. The race ends after 15 minutes at the latest.
🏆 Winner: The most points win, on a tie the deeper mine. Solo, you chase your personal best.
Settings & scoring
💡 Good to know: After the third mine it starts over. A small arrow on the prospector shows the preselected direction, the phase bar next to the mine whether the ghosts are roaming or hunting; once per mine a silver bar lies at the entrance. Ghosts only score in the flight phase. Solo you can also pause with ❚❚, and play only starts once you choose a direction. In a race you see each opponent's mine, ore and lives – in the pills on the phone, otherwise in the standings, at most five seconds old; reloading, leaving the race or being offline for more than 15 seconds ends your run with the points reached.
🕹 The lobby is an old arcade cabinet: the seats on the screen, the host's START button on the console; when someone joins, a coin drops audibly. Next to it, once the leaderboard is switched on, hangs a high-score board with the best single run per account – guests are not on it. Solo, “Again” starts without the intro, and “New best” only appears when the old value is beaten.