Spooktacular

• Designer: D. Brad Talton, Jr
• Publisher: Level 99
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 12+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4oyG99U 

 It’s Halloween night, 1986, and the all-night Spooktacular Film Festival is running in full swing in the midst of a wild thunderstorm. Suddenly, lightning strikes, overloading the theater’s power circuits and releasing a hundred years of cinematic monsters from the silver screen. As one of those monsters, YOU are now free to wreak havoc. Terrify and devour unsuspecting moviegoers in a race to become the most terrifying monster of all time!

In Spooktacular, play as one of twenty movie monsters, each with their own way of playing the game. Easy to understand rules are the base of the game, and everything else you need to know is right on your monster board. Tons of variability and devious monster abilities to discover will keep you coming back to the theater.

To start the game, each player chooses one of the twenty monsters in the box – takes the matching Monster Board as well as the Basic (and Unique) cards for their monster.  All the Monster’s cards are shuffled to form a single deck.  Determine a Start Player and give them the Player 1 Score Marker, and distribute the rest numerically around the table.  Each player puts their marker on the 10 space of the score track.  

Place the board on the table and put a random selection of Guest meeples in each room, the number equal to one less than the number of doors for that room.  Finally, each player now executes the unique setup rules for their monster – such as putting things on the board, drawing a starting hand of cards, etc..  A pile of two tickets per player is also made near the board.

The game is now played in rounds; on each player turn, the active player will enact the turn steps for their particular monster, and then play passes to the left.   There are a number of possible actions that could happen on your turn:

• Play a Card – follow the directions on the card
• Add a Guest – draw the specified number of guests from the bag and add them to the room where your Monster currently resides
• Move – Move your Monster (or possibly other targets such as guests) to another connected room through a door
• Spook – For each door in your room, move a guest out of that door and score a point for each such guest moved
• Devour – take a guest from your current room and put it next to your player board
• Gain a Ticket – turn in a set of 5 guests, one of each color, and gain a Ticket.  Keep the ticket facedown, NO ONE may look at it until the end of the game.  Then add 3 Guests to the room with the least figures in it
• Unique monster ability – these will all be listed on your player board.  The only thing to note is that there are two color coded types.  Purple abilities really only need to be known by you – you will know how and when to enact them and what happens.  Orange abilities could affect all players, and these types of abilities should be explained to all players at the start of the game.

In all cases, if you cannot follow the specified effects completely, simply apply as much of the instructions as you can and then ignore the parts which are impossible to complete.

Each of the twenty monsters plays differently – so simply refer to the turn flow on each associated Monster board to make sure that nothing is missed.

The game continues until the end of the round where a player has 50 points or more OR when all the tickets have been collected.  If all the tickets are gone and you can trade for one, you instead simply score 5 points.  Finally, players now flip over their points and learn how much each one is worth (values vary between 4 and 8 points).  These points are added to the final score, and the player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with more tickets.

My thoughts on the game

Though the geography of the Spooktacular map makes this the most interestingly designed theatre (architecturally speaking), the game presented here is straightforward and fun.  The game starts with the selection of characters, and with 20 different monsters in the box, it is going to be a very long time between repeat games for a player, not to mention there will likely be different combinations of Monsters in each game and thus different interactions between special abilities. 

While the basic goal of the Monsters are the same – trying to Spook guess for points or Devour them to later trade in for tickets – each Monster has its own unique powers and abilities that will require you to change your strategy a bit in each game.   Have all the players read out their special abilities as many of them can affect all players, and it’s still important to understand the ones which don’t just so that you don’t accidentally set up a Monster for a humongous turn.

Make sure that you look at the cards for your Monster so you know what to expect from them as you draw them in the game.  It is best to have any questions resolved before the game starts (and also so that you can plan ahead to try to set things up to maximize those cards). 

The cleverness behind each of the Monsters is evident, and this is one of the hallmarks of the designer.  It is very similar to the witty and often hilarious characters in his masterpiece, Millenium Blades – a lot of thought and energy has been put into the creation of the Spooktacular monsters. 

Once the game gets going, turns tend to move quickly.  Players will have a fair amount of time to look at their cards and work on some mental plans for their own turn, though of course, you have to wait and see what the guest situation is on the board looks like before finalizing any plans.  

Even if you’ve gone over the special abilities at the start of the game, it’ll probably take a few turns to figure out what opponents want to do – and then it’s simply a game of scoring the most points for yourself while trying to leave the board in a bad spot for the next player.  Spooking guarantees a point each, and on average, Devouring should lead to slightly more per guest (though you do have to work a bit more as you have to get one of each color to cash in on them).

For a theme night (you know, like Halloween…. Or a movie game night), this would be a great fit.  A spooktacular fit even. For regular game night, it could certainly be worthy of a matinee slot. 

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson: My three plays of Spooktacular have all been enjoyable – it’s light and doesn’t overstay its welcome on the table. Like Dale wrote above, there are some really clever mechanisms in each monster deck that play off each other in interesting ways.

I will note that my 20 year old son and his college friends are head over heels about this game – they would all rate it “I love it!” in a heartbeat.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Mark Jackson
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

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