Being a grave keeper has to be a hard job, especially when covering the burials of four different noble families. Over the course of six nights, you’ll bury the newly deceased, spruce up monuments, and keep away grave robbers. Grave Keeper is a print and play, roll and write game for one or more players.
Bring Out Your Dead
Each player is given a sheet that represents the four noble families that you provide services for. In each of the six rounds of Grave Keeper, four dice in the colors of red, green, yellow and blue are rolled. The dice are going to be used a few different ways in their current form.

Deaths: Players record which family member died in each family. This is based on the number on each colored die. When a die shows a six, you can chose any of the five family members in that color.
Actions: Players get to pair the four dice to take two different actions on their sheet. You’ll use the color from one die with the number from another die to determine which quadrant you’ll do the action in.
Bonus Action: Players get an additional bonus action based on a single die in the pool. You’ll use its color and number to do a final action in the round.
Grave Robbers: Re-roll a die and see which family will be visited by grave robbers. You can ward off these criminals by having an unused lantern in the quadrant. Players will also deal with rot and decay for any bodies that are unburied. The body will decay and be unable to be buried after two rounds.
The Daily Dig
Throughout the round, players are using the four dice to walk through the different phases of the round. You’ll only re-roll one of the dice when determining where the grave robbers are going to strike at the end of the round. Thankfully, the first night in the game, the robbers give you a break to prepare for day two.

Grave Keeper gives you a couple actions that you can take with the dice you have each round. The red die gives you the ability to bury your dead in a quadrant or an adjacent quadrant. The green die lets you make progress on the processional path on a quadrant. The blue die allows you to light the lanterns that keep the robbers from hitting your graves. Finally, the yellow die lets you decorate your monuments which are worth points at the end of the game if they have bodies in them.
Dying for a Good Time
Players will touch every action in Grave Keeper, but some will be more advantageous than others. Along the processional route in each quadrant, you’ll hit additional bonus actions that will make your turn go further. The other advantage of committing to the processional routes is that they award players ten points for each route they finish.

The quadrants are labeled two, three, four, and five. This means that rolling a one or six gives players some flexibility when pairing up dice. A one die gives players the option to pick any of the four family quadrants on the sheet. The six die allows players to take a “lesser” action in all four quadrants. This is a great way to catch up when you’re behind in burying bodies or lighting lanterns before the grave robbers arrive.
Grave Keeper does a good job of giving players plenty of areas to work on without becoming overwhelming. There’s a nice pace to the game that is kept on track by the phase tracker that is on each players sheet. While the color-coded dice and actions are clear and make sense, there is a learning curve here that needs to be pointed out.

Since each quadrant is color-coded AND also has a number assigned to it, it can be cumbersome when choosing your actions. The first time I played Grave Keeper, I played solo. I kept having to recite the “action” and the “quadrant” out loud so that I could make sure I was making the best choices. The four colors in the game are associated with the four actions, but also are visually represented on the player sheets in each quadrant.
I’m not sure there is a fix for this, it’s just going to be up to the player to train their brain as they play the game. It’s not difficult, just tricky.
Final Thoughts
The theming and structure of Grave Keeper reminds me a lot of The Bloody Inn, a game that is in my top 10 games of all time. The theme is morbid and the structure of the game works well. I really like the timing element of forcing players to address unburied bodies or face negative points because of rot and decay.

I requested a chance to review Grave Keeper because the theme fits into our love of spooky games that hit the table at the beginning of Fall. The game has a nice flow to it and I think it’s a solid design overall. The simple illustrations fit really nicely with the theme. This single page roll and write is one that will definitely be a staple of our Halloween game nights. With the flexibility to play any number of players, it will fill a gap in our spooky game collection.
Grave Keeper: A Victorian Roll & Write will launch on Kickstarter on October 31, 2024.
This game was provided to us by the publisher for review. Read more about our review policies at One Board Family.
Highs
- Excellent pacing and meaningful decisions
- Working against decay and grave robbers work really well
- Solo with support for any number of players
- Rounds broken into phases are easy to track
Lows
- Colors and numbers can get confusing the first couple games
- Macabre theme may not work for everyone
Complexity

Time Commitment

Replayability
