Apologies if this is tl;dr.
My friend and I initially started working on this idea years ago (and it was closer to Arkham Horror/Betrayal than it is now), so now I'm worried genre fatigue might turn people off off this idea, but here it is anyway.
The game's premise is that you're a character in a story (you get a character card with stats and abilities) working your way through a haunted hotel (location cards randomly make up the hotel) trying to complete your story (you have facedown mission cards that you're trying to accomplish).
During your turn, you try to walk from location to location, completing tasks and searching for items to accomplish your goals, while the other players interrupt your story by playing complications for you to overcome (like monsters and traps).
Tasks are completed by assigning symbols to them. For example, one task might be "Looking for a Book" which requires two Search symbols to complete. Complications add more symbols to the task; another player shouts, "when suddenly...!" and plays a monster card that adds one Fight symbol, so you now need two Search symbols and one Fight symbol to successfully find this book. The system is a little more involved than this (symbols come in different colors) and how you combine and convert these symbols is the biggest part of the game.
Your missions range from item finding (place the Metal Gears inside the Solid Snake Statue), to accomplishing something (defeat ten monsters), to interacting with another player (exit the foyer with another player/kill another player over the altar).
You should have action cards in your hand and item cards in front of you to complete your tasks. How you use these symbols is up to how you tell your story. You can't use symbols of different colors normally, but you can exchange/combine symbols to form a matching set. Using the book example, say it needs two Red Search symbols. If I had four Red Fight symbols, I could convert those into two Red Search symbols and as I tell the story, I could say that while searching for the book, I started knocking along a wall and hit a hollow patch, so I punched the wall until this little hole gave way and I found the book inside. If your story sounds a little reaching (you're using symbols that don't make thematic sense), the other players can call shenanigans and you'd have to pay some penalty.
The idea is to be a tongue in cheek homage to survival horror games - so there's no centralized type of horror - and there's a kitchen sink approach to building the game, the idea being you can add/remove card types as you like. For example, you don't like magic in your game, so you take out the magic deck before play. I don't have specific cards fleshed out yet because I'm still tweaking the mechanics, but this is mostly what I've written down so far. Things marked with an asterisk are ideas I'm reserving for expansions once I have the main game fleshed out enough.
Play:
Framing a scene - try to tell a story
Play a location
Match tokens to move out to new location
Play a challenge
Match tokens on the card
Convert - Swap two matching tokens of the same color (2 blue Fire for one blue Search)
Combine - Swap two matching tokens of the same symbol (1 green fire and 1 blue fire for 1 red fire)
Freeform - discard 2+ cards to gain Wildcard tokens equal to total discard -1
If successful, continue your turn with another challenge or pass
Pass - Draw two cards from location deck, action deck, or either's discard pile
Missions:
Three facedown Challenges. Accomplish all three to win.
Decks:
Location - Locations and Quests
Action - Challenges, Complications, Conditions, Setbacks, Tactics
Scene Cards:
Locations (where) - Rooms, Hallways, etc.
Challenges (what you're doing) - Search for item, etc.
Complications ("when suddenly...") - Monsters, Darkness, Loud noises, etc.
Conditions (modifies other cards) - intelligent monster, extra pages, horde, secret room, etc.
Setbacks ("oh no!") - played after successful checks. Discards cards/tokens
Tactics (actions) - run, hide, fight, etc. Provide alternate checks, or tokens
Quests - mini quests, Discard [Item] while at [Location] to gain something
*Events - Global complications in the Location deck; darkness/power outage, creature buffs, etc.
Challenges:
Tokens needed will mostly only need color, so you can work it into your story. You just have to create a flush
Ex - card needs [Red Punch] + 2[Red] to overcome
Complication will add specific tokens a Challenge
Item Cards:
Gear (provide tokens) - Matches, guns, bullets, flashlights, batteries, ...
Spells (drawback: sanity, target number) - element tokens, healing, card drawing, ...
*Psionics (drawback: headaches, harder to to do tasks and slowly go away) - mental tokens, deck manipulation, hand reveal, ...
*Gadgets (drawback: paradox, something bad and then wipe) - do overs, token manipulation, ...
Sanity/Headaches/Paradox:
Tokens will build up. Tokens cannot be used to swap. Each respective deck will have trap cards that activate based on these tokens
Tokens:
Travel
Search
Fire
Punch/Hit
Spotlight/Wildcard
Insanity
*Paradox
Salt
Silver
Water (Holy Water = Green Water)
*Headache
Shield
Lightning
Colors:
Brown (move)
Blue (mental)
Red (physical)
Green (magic)
Gray (wildcard)
Yellow (energy)
Orange (location)
Right now, I'm just putting this out there to see if something like this is already being done. My friend dropped out an iteration ago.
Once I have the rules in place, I wants to make a short version of the game (three characters, truncated decks) to see how it plays and about how long a game lasts.
Right now, the time period is present day. I want to add time travel at some point, but that idea is on the back burner.
Uhh, the purpose is to have fun, I hope?
There are characters for the players to play. Back when this was a board game there was going to be an accompanying webcomic, so I got a good starting point for characters.