Deck of Haunts Lands on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One on October 8
The platform list has five entries, and the two Xbox generations are listed separately. DANGEN's press release, carried by Games Press, says the game "will launch for Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S on October 8, 2026." Turn Based Lovers and Nintendo Everything independently report the same date and platforms, and the developer's own Steam announcement repeats it.
The announcement does not say whether one Xbox purchase covers both Xbox One and Series X|S, and it gives no regional release times. Nobody has published Xbox pricing either. Nintendo Everything reports the title will be available for $19.99. That figure appears in Nintendo-focused coverage, and VGChartz's 2025 launch report put the PC Steam version at $19.99. If the Microsoft Store price matters to you, check the listing on launch day.
Xbox players can already see the game in Microsoft's store. The Xbox store carries a Deck of Haunts Demo listing with the same description as the main game. GameFAQs also tracks an Xbox Series X release entry. The announcement doesn't say whether that demo matches the October build.
A Console Port That Slipped From 2025 to October 2026
Console versions were promised from the start and have arrived much later than planned. VGChartz reported in April 2025 that the game would launch for PC via Steam on May 7 for $19.99, and for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch later in 2025. That window passed, and release-tracking site Releases.com later listed Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X release dates in the USA as Q1 2026. That date slipped too.
The platform list also grew. The 2025 plan named three consoles. The October 2026 launch adds Xbox One and Switch 2, so there are now five console SKUs and two separate Xbox builds.
The studio's own framing explains the gap. Philippe Mesotten of Mantis Games said in the release that "The Deck of Haunts launching on consoles is a very different game from the one we first released on PC last year," and added that the team is "thrilled console players get to start with all of this from day one!" The companies have not given an official reason for the delay. Still, the Steam patch notes show a studio that kept redesigning core systems through September 2026.
How the Haunted-House Loop Works in Deck of Haunts
The core idea is a reversal. In Deck of Haunts, you don't enter the haunted house. You are the haunted house. Play alternates between two phases. In daytime you build, arranging rooms into a maze that protects the Heart room, which the publisher calls the core of the house's power. At night you play cards against the people who walk in.
DANGEN's overview says you'll use a deck of terrifying cards to summon spirits, shift hallways, and unleash spine-chilling horrors. Examples include bone-chilling screams, phantoms, creaking floors, and shifting walls. Cards can scare visitors or kill them. You play haunts on individual humans and inside rooms to raise their tension until their sanity breaks, then harvest their essence to fund more rooms and powers. Better results attract tougher visitors, and the publisher names law enforcement and priests among them, along with a faction called the Stone Masons.
VGChartz's 2025 coverage adds the setting: America in the 1970s, where players embody a forsaken 1920s art deco mansion. On Steam the PC version is listed as single-player, in the Indie, Simulation and Strategy genres.
What Seventeen Months of Steam Patches Put in the Console Build
The console build is really a snapshot of where the PC game stands now. The developer's Steam announcement and the press release list what is included:
- There are dozens of new cards and rooms, plus new starter decks and a Creative Deck option. Turn Based Lovers confirms it lets players assemble a starting deck from unlocked cards.
- A mission and story system unlocks cards, rooms, upgrades, cosmetics and gameplay modifiers, and adds lore about the house.
- Nightmare Mode features 13 increasingly difficult Nightmares, each lasting 13 nights, with accumulating modifiers, and players can collect victims' souls to summon the Grim Reaper.
- Creature cards include the Imp, Gravetender, Webweaver, Drowner, Bloodletter and Krampus. Curated scenarios change the usual rules with pre-built haunted-house setups.
- Interface, building, sorting, navigation and control changes have been made based on player feedback.
The largest systemic change came in version 1.41 on September 1, 2026, and it changes how you design a house. The developer's patch notes say that before the update, humans crossed any room in one turn regardless of its size. Now every 8 tiles in a room add another turn: a human spends 1 turn in a 6-tile room, 2 in a 10-tile room and 3 in a 17-tile room. To offset this, building gets more expensive as rooms grow. The first 8 tiles cost 5 essence each, the next band 50 essence per tile, then 100, and the cost keeps rising by 50 per 8 tiles. Small rooms got drawbacks: each room holds at most one human per tile, extra humans "spill" into the next room, single-tile rooms are skipped entirely without triggering traps, and rooms under 4 tiles can no longer be targeted by room cards. Two optional totems, Floodgates and Claustrophobia, switch off the spill and single-tile-skip rules for players who find them too harsh.
Anyone who played the Steam version at launch in May 2025 will notice a real change. The layouts that worked then are built on different rules from the ones console players will start with.
Controller Work Shows the Xbox Build Shaping the Windows Version
Development between the two versions has run both ways. Controller work for consoles has been fed back into the PC game. Version 1.42, released on Steam on September 10, 2026, was titled a "Controller and Steam Deck Quality of Life Update". The developer explained that it was still working on the console release and could reuse the same controller improvements in the PC and Steam Deck build.
That patch added camera rotation on the controller (left stick horizontal while holding R3). It also added multi-tile building by holding the select button while moving the build preview, and a hold-to-confirm requirement for skipping card rewards. Card tooltips became reachable by controller in the deck, draw, discard, unlock and exhaust screens. Version 1.42b on September 17 added controller support for search and undo when assembling a Creative Deck. Version 1.41c changed pause behavior to apply only when focus is lost on consoles, which is a small sign of console-specific tuning in the shared codebase.
These notes describe the PC build, and certified console behavior can differ. They do show that controller input got dedicated work in the weeks before launch rather than being a crude mapping of mouse controls.
Windows and Steam Players Keep Features the Consoles May Not Get
The PC version is the reference point, and some of its features depend on Steam. Steam lists Deck of Haunts with Steam Achievements, Steam Workshop, Steam Cloud, a built-in level editor and Family Sharing. The console announcement doesn't mention Workshop content, the level editor or any cross-save between Steam and Xbox. Console buyers should assume none of those are included until the store listings say otherwise.
The PC requirements are modest. Steam's minimums are Windows 10, a 2.3 GHz processor, 8 GB of RAM, a GPU with 3 GB of VRAM and 2 GB of storage. PC owners also got a cloud option this summer: a Steam announcement on August 6 said Steam owners of the game can now play it on GeForce NOW.
Localization matches across the marketing. Steam lists 11 interface languages: English, Japanese, French, German, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Spanish (Spain), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Traditional Chinese and Korean. The console press release lists the same eleven languages. Store pages will confirm which languages each console SKU ships with.
PC development is also continuing into the launch window. On September 21 Mantis Games opened a community contest for a Halloween update. Ideas are submitted on the game's Discord from September 21 to 29, 2026, a community vote runs October 1 to 5, and the winning creature, card or room will be built into the game. Three finalists each get a Steam key. The studio hasn't said when that update reaches consoles. With the vote closing three days before the console launch, the winning content will probably ship on PC first.
What this means for you
If you play on Xbox and like strategy deckbuilders, October 8 is a reasonable time to buy. The version you get is the mature one, not the May 2025 launch build.
- Deck of Haunts is scheduled for October 8, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, Switch 2 and Switch. Regional release times haven't been announced.
- The console version includes the post-launch content, including Nightmare Mode, the six creatures, the mission system and the room-size navigation rework from version 1.41.
- A demo listing already exists on the Xbox store, so you can try the core loop before launch, though its build version isn't stated.
- The $19.99 price comes from Nintendo-focused reporting and matches the PC price. Xbox pricing and any Xbox One–to–Series upgrade policy haven't been published.
- Steam Workshop, the level editor and Steam Cloud are features of the Steam version. Nothing announced suggests they carry over to consoles or that saves transfer between Steam and Xbox.
- If you already own the game on Steam, you can play the same updated build on Windows 10 or later now, or stream it through GeForce NOW, without buying it again.
The console launch finishes the plan DANGEN announced in 2025, about a year late and on two more platforms than first promised. With a Halloween community update already scheduled and patches still arriving every week, both the Xbox and Windows versions will keep changing after October 8. How closely the console builds follow the Steam patch schedule will become clear once the first post-launch update arrives.