Spooktacular is one of my favourite games, a madcap old-style movie monsters affair, where you get to play the monster, spooking (frightening) and devouring visitors to the cinema.
It’s an asymmetric game, with each of the 20 monsters you can play having different abilities and a different deck of action cards to draw from, ranging from simple to very complex; you can find much more information in my How to Play article.
If 20 monsters aren’t enough for you, publisher Level 99 Games has just launched a Gamefound campaign for their first expansions, Bride of Spooktacular and Double Feature, adding 10 additional monsters, along with some other stuff.
The New Content
A couple of these monsters bring along much more than another character to play as, but add entirely new modes of play, a feature which the designers are quite proud of: ‘One of the cool things about Spooktacular is that each monster is effectively a unique module in and of itself, creating new gameplay experiences for players as they try new monsters. In the base game, we introduced Killtron -3000- as a monster AND as the assigned solo mode. Now, we’re extending that concept by just integrating the new mode into the monster wholesale.’
The new monsters are:
Ailurophobia
Your black cat leaves shadows behind wherever she goes. Once per turn, she invokes ‘jump at shadows’ and every player in a room with a shadow token must reveal the token and reacting to its luck, usually to their detriment and the benefit of Ailurophobia, such as losing points while the Ailurophobia player gains cards. Incidentally, ailurophobia is fear of cats.
Dragonbeard
Dragonbeard seems to be a dragon who’s a pirate (with a bizarre looking hat), and whose turn structure doesn’t include the usual ‘play a card’ step—i.e., he can’t play cards in the same way as the majority of Spooktacular’s monsters. Instead, he places treasure throughout the cinema, and his game board includes action spaces costing varying numbers of treasure tokens. Each turn involves spending his accumulated treasure on whatever actions he wants (and can afford).
Gorgasnax 2
Gorgasnax is a mysterious elusive cryptid. The primary means of scoring in this game is to ‘spook’ guests or consume them, so it’s generally good to be in a space on the board with plenty of them. Gorgasnax adds a twist to this, in that it scores points when there’s no one else in its room. It comes with a bunch of ‘hunters,’ which behave somewhat like normal guests, but they can cause other players to discard cards (indicating hunters picking on the wrong prey, perhaps), but if Gorgasnax is in a room with just one, it zaps it and gains a massive 7 points.
Hellevator
Hellevator is a possessed elevator! Like the base game’s Mummygator, this monster comes with its own ‘room,’ and entering it can seal your doom. Hellevator’s special power is, once per turn, moving a figure (i.e., guest or player monster) from the room containing its meeple into the elevator room, and subsequently being nasty to them. It also features a nicely thematic track on the player board offering different per-turn actions based on the elevator’s floor.
It does look like a character guaranteed to raise the hackles of other players; in the description of the monster, the designers say it’s ‘one of the most aggressive monsters in the game!’
Dead Presidents VI
This is a multi-monster character, similar to, say, Regoo from the base game, with the twist that you gain benefits when your monsters are taken off the board. The premise is that your monsters are zombies (zombie presidents, in fact) and when they’re killed by being swamped by survivors—the other figures, both players and guests—you’re moved from the main board to your player board, unlocking an additional action. This means major parts of the strategy of playing this monster are to move to busy rooms or entice others into your room, specifically so they’ll bump off one of your zombies.
They Fly
Another multi-monster card with an interesting movement mechanism; one of They Fly’s actions is to spook only the scorpions (half a dozen associated tokens) in the same room as the monster meeple, and then swap positions with any scorpion on the board.
The Headhunter
There are yet more movement shenanigans here. The Headhunter behaves as a guest, in that it can be spooked and devoured; and if it’s devoured, the monster meeple is removed from the board, such that on the next turn, it can be placed into any room on the board containing a guest. Technically, it devours that guest, then takes its place, so this can be a good way to gain the final guest colour to be able to form a set.
Shiny Toys
Here, you—the Child—give your ‘toys’ to other players, then have to catch up to those players to reclaim the toy and take its corresponding action. The toys are modelled on some of the other monsters, but sadly are just cardboard tokens and not mini-meeples. I imagine this monster is tricky to play, unless some other players are willing to cooperate, which is also the case when the Kaiju Fight Club is in play…
Kaiju Fight Club
This is the first of the mode-changing monsters, adding a team play mechanism, and then partly hiding it! At the start of the game, the Kaiju Fight Club player gives each other player a random ‘team card,’ which they can look at but not share, and takes two of their own, such that everyone knows what team they’re in, but not who their team members are. One of the Fight Club’s actions is to cause the other players to place a guest on a ‘fan club’ board, which can provide evidence of what teams people belong to, and the number of guests associated with each team contributes to the final score.
Scream Mart
This is the other mode-changing monster in the pack, introducing bidding to the main game. The first thing Scream Mart does in their turn is reveal the top card of their deck, then start bidding among all players, using ‘vouchers’ handed out at the beginning of the game. If Scream Mart wins the auction, they play the card; if someone else wins, they get the card. I’ll repeat that: the other player gains a card into their hand from Scream Mart! There’s an intriguing tension here between spending your vouchers too quickly vs letting other players—most especially Scream Mart—make use of powerful cards.
New Board
As if that wasn’t enough, Level 99 Games are throwing in a replacement board, the Drive-In. The notion of rooms here is a bit of a stretch, with ‘walls’ formed from rows of parked cars, but no matter. The first significant change from the base game map is a different layout, with more possibilities for gameplay around the outside, unlike the focus on the centre in the original map. Additionally, some rooms having multiple connections between them, which might change how you think about spooking (expelling guests through doors).
At this point you might be asking if this is a standalone game or an expansion: it’s got the monsters and their tokens, and a map… However, it’s lacking the player tokens, guest meeples, tickets and the standard action cards. If you take a look as the crowdfunding campaign rewards, you might notice that the price for the base game (with twice the number of monsters) is exactly the same as that of the expansion, so I guess those missing bits can’t be all that expensive! Shame the creators didn’t go that little bit further and include the rest, or at least provide them as a cheap add-on.
The new monsters and alternate map are available in preview form on Level 99 Games’ Tabletop Simulator mod. There are also several playthrough videos of the new monsters on Level 99’s YouTube channel.
Double Feature
An additional smaller expansion is also available, providing alternate playmats for the monsters in the base game. For those familiar with Ark Nova, this is akin to the new(ish) ‘BGA’ maps for that game—variations on the base game, but not necessarily better (or worse), just different.
As the playmats define how monsters work, some of the changes adjust the actions players can take or affect the order of operations. These playmats are also present in the Tabletop Simulator mod mentioned earlier.
Campaign
For those who pay attention to such things, the Bride of Spooktacular campaign reached its funding goal in under 40 minutes, and currently stands at more than 3 times over-funded less than a day after launch, thanks to close to 2,000 backers—while the funding numbers are seldom a meaningful indication of success, the project’s clearly popular.
The campaign page provides only a brief summary of gameplay, but then this is an expansion after all, and fans will already be familiar with the game. Will this attract new players—maybe, maybe not, though if people’s interest is piqued, there’s plenty of information available about the base game elsewhere.
Rewards seem reasonable in general (though beware VAT and shipping), but the expansions are certain to hit retail later on, so I’d be inclined to wait for that. Spooktacular is so much fun, though, that I won’t hold it against anyone if they’re too impatient to wait!
There are a few oddities within the add-ons, though: Spooktacular-themed cards for a different Level 99 game, 99 Heroes, along with a gaming mat and deck of cards, which again have nothing to do with Spooktacular other than the artwork.
As with the previous campaign for Spooktacular, there are spotlight articles for the individual monsters—the background, how they play, design thinking, and some lovely pictures. Not all are available yet, but you can find: Ailurophobia, Dragonbeard, Gorgasnax 2, Hellevator, Dead Presidents, Shiny Toys and Scream Mart so far.
Finally, if you are interested in Spooktacular, or any other Level 99 material, the team has issued a warning that someone’s been impersonating Level 99 Games on social media and elsewhere, so take care to validate links before you click them.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Dune: Imperium - Uprising and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
