Spooktacular Board Game

 

There are plenty of monster hunting games, but not so many where you get to play the monster! Spooktacular is a wonderfully playful take on the old cinematic monster movie genre in which you star as a screen monster, competing to amass the most victims. Level 99 Games, who say they make ‘tabletop games for a video game generation’ give the game the following introduction: ‘On Halloween night, 1986, the old, run-down Silver Cinema opened its doors one last time, inviting guests to participate in an all-night festival of film horror. No one really knows what happened that night, but they say that the monsters found their way out of the screen and into the theatre, bringing terror to life. In Spooktacular, players become one of twenty uniquely original movie monsters and escape the screen to terrorize the theatre. Earn points as you spook and devour guests, clash with other monsters, and bring your movie to life. When the final credits roll, only the most terrifying monster will emerge victorious!’

The game is for 1–5 players, and estimated to take 45 minutes.

Playing Spooktacular

 

In the game, you play as one of twenty different monsters, all with their own abilities and skills. For example, Dr Terror can lay traps for victims, and the Wolfpack can have up to four separate werewolves in play. Despite the asymmetry, game play is straightforward and clearly explained on the player boards—er, I mean, monster boards.

The ‘movie theatre’ (cinema for people on this side of the Atlantic wot speak English proper) consists of a number of interconnected rooms through which guests (i.e., would-be victims) and monsters roam.

On each move, you follow the sequence of steps described on your monster board, which could be moving into an adjacent room, spooking (frightening guests into leaving the room your monster is occupying), devouring (taking guests from the room you’re in into your ‘devour pile’), as well as the various unique abilities specific to your monster (such as using traps, if you’re playing as Dr Terror). Additionally, you have a hand of cards—some common to all monsters, and some specific ones—which can be played to trigger other actions.

You score points by spooking guests or by acquiring tickets (these can be worth a lot of points) by turning in devoured guests: a set of all five colours gains you a ticket.

The game ends as soon as anyone reaches fifty points or when there are no more tickets left.

One of the more interesting monsters is Killtron-3000, a robot which is normally played by ‘programming’ it with a sequence of cards (a little like the Eyrie Dynasties in Root). The thing that makes Killtron particularly interesting is that this behaviour can be automated, allowing solo play as well as just adding an extra monster to any game.

Impressions

This is a lovely looking game, with all the wooden meeples and the gorgeous ‘golden era’ style artwork.

Despite the theme of eating cinema goers, this is not a scary game by any means. It’s thoroughly charming and a lot of fun. I love all the old (and not quite so old) screen monsters, and working out which movies they have their roots in.

I mentioned Root earlier, another fine example of an asymmetric play game; Spooktacular is nowhere near as complex as Root, much easier to pick up and play.

Regarding replayability, with twenty distinct monsters, each with their own fun personality, there’s plenty of scope for mixing and matching. What’s more, each monster is labelled as easy (to play), intermediate or advanced, letting the game adapt to the confidence of individual player groups.

I will confess that I’m disappointed there’s no analogue to Pinhead (of Hellraiser fame) or a Xenomorph (Alien), but my fingers are crossed for future expansions in the same way as the Final Girl series keeps growing.

Finally, you can find out more on the project’s Kickstarter page, including a copy of the rule book. Check out the ‘Meet the Monsters’ section, a glorious list of links to articles about each individual monster, detailing its origin and design—well worth a read if the game interests you. Although the campaign ended earlier this year, more games are being printed, so there should soon be enough for all of us.

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About the Author:

When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). 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.

Setup

The ‘movie theater’ (cinema for people on this side of the Atlantic!) main board consists of a number of interconnected rooms through which guests (i.e., would-be victims) and monsters roam. You lay it out and block off some rooms in order to create more player interaction at lower counts, by placing ‘do not cross’ tokens in them: the relevant rooms have indicators in the top right showing which need to be blocked off. 3 rooms will be blocked off at 2 players, 2 at 3, 1 at 4, and none at 5.

Place all the guest meeples (bar the white ones, which are used by one of the monsters) in their draw bag, then randomly place a number in each unblocked room matching the room’s door count minus 1.

Place twice the number of players randomly selected ‘tickets’ face down near the board. These provide additional points at the end of the game.

Each player takes a monster board, and the corresponding meeple and cards, as well as additional components as directed. Some monsters have additional setup steps, a few of which I’ll describe in the Monsters section below, though one common to all is placing your monster meeple in a room of your choosing. In player order, each also takes a pair of score trackers, placing one at 10 on the board’s track and one in their play area as a reminder of which is theirs on the main board.

Now, you’re ready to play.

Common Cards

A major component of gameplay is selecting a card from your hand and performing the action printed on it. Each monster has its own specific cards, but all players also have 5 common cards:

• Mash—move all monsters in the room occupied by one of your meeples (more on that plural in a tick) through a door into a connected unblocked room of your choosing. A couple of things to note are that this includes your monster, not just opponents’, and the action is mandatory; you can’t choose to leave a monster where it is. You gain 2 points on the score track for each player you move—that’s not each monster. Some players can have multiple monster meeples on the board, but even if several are in the same room, you only get 2 points for that player’s monsters no matter how many are moved. (For brevity, I’ll just say ‘your monster’ from now on, which can be taken to mean one of them where this is relevant, and ‘your room’ will mean a room occupied by one of your monsters, in some cases the single one selected for an action. Also, take any reference to rooms to mean only those that aren’t blocked.)
•  Jumpscare—move your monster into a connected room and then play another card; a good action to get into the right position in order to then perform something high-scoring.
• Search—add three guests to your room drawn randomly from the bag, then play another card; another good action to set things up for, say, one of the next two cards.
• Consume—devour a guest of each colour in your room. Devouring means taking a guest meeple out of your room and placing it on your player card; this can occur via other actions as well, but Consume lets you grab them in bulk. When you’ve collected one of each of the 5 colours, you immediately turn them in: place the 5 meeples back in the bag, take a ticket from beside the board and place it in your play area (keeping it face down—tickets aren’t revealed to anyone until the end of the game), then draw 3 guests at random and place them in the room with the fewest figures—figure is a term encompassing both monsters and guests. (If there’s a tie for least populated room, you get to pick.)
• Haunt—spook twice. Spooking means frightening guests out of your room; you send a single meeple through each unblocked door in your room, scoring a point for every one moved. You get to choose which guest colours and which doors, to act to your advantage and/or other player’s disadvantage. And then you get to do it again. Obviously, a card that scores well in a room with a lot of doors and a shedload of guests!

I’ll include descriptions of some monsters’ unique cards in next the next section.

The Monsters

In case it’s not clear yet, this is an asymmetric game… very asymmetric. Each monster has unique abilities and unique means of scoring points. I’ll describe just a few of them here, since covering all 20 would take too much space.

The monster cards are helpfully labelled ‘easy,’ ‘intermediate’ and ‘advanced,’ indicating how complicated they are to play. It’s probably worth sticking to the ‘easy’ ones for your first few games, though the more complex ones can be a lot more fun: I’ll focus mainly on a few ‘easy’ ones here.

As mentioned above, each monster has additional cards to add to the common ones. The monster’s player card also contains custom setup steps, a list of the turn steps specific to that monster, and may list additional components to be used for this monster.

What Lurks Below is possibly the absolute simplest of the monsters, and one I’d recommend for new players. Though probably for just one game, since it is rather dull!

This one has no additional setup, just the standard place the meeple in any room and draw 3 cards into your hand. The turn steps are quite simple, too: play a card, play another card, move into another room, and draw back up to 3 cards in preparation for the next turn. (Note that a single ‘play a card’ step there might involve playing multiple, if you played, say, Jumpscare described above.)

There are 5 new cards to add to the deck:

• Skittering—move and draw a card into your hand
• Nudge—move a figure (i.e., monster or guest) from your room into a connected one, then draw a card.
• Bump—move a figure from an adjacent room through a door into your room, then draw a card; this can be a useful card to play ahead of the next one…
• Listen—steal 3 points from a player with a monster in your room (i.e., move them 3 steps back along the score track, and your token 3 steps forward).
• Emergence—devour 3 times (unlike Consume, above, these don’t have to be different colours), then discard your entire hand, and draw one new card.

Since the turn instructions for this monster, unlike the majority of the rest, contains two play a card steps, the ones featuring draw actions can sometimes be useful as a first step, in the hope of gaining a card for your second which is more useful than the ones currently in your hand. Having a high card turnover and two separate card plays lets this monster react to the current situation fairly flexibly, though the rewards may not be as good as other monsters.

Killer Car is a tad more interesting, with a neat ‘pick up a passenger’ ability. There are no extra setup requirements, and the turn steps are: play a card, pick up a passenger, move, then draw back up to 3 cards.

The player board has a space—a seat, because after all, this is a car monster—for one guest of each colour, and picking up a passenger means taking a guest from your room and placing in into an empty seat, taking the corresponding action, e.g., picking up a blue passenger lets you take the spook action. Once you’ve collected a complete set of 5 passengers, you turn them all in to gain a ticket, exactly as with devouring; this empties the seats for subsequent refilling.

Killer Car has 3 custom cards:

• Get In—pick up a passenger (meaning you would be able to pick up 2 passengers on the turn this is played in).
• Overdrive—move into a connected room, then play another card, essentially a second copy of Jumpscare above.
• Mow Down—move all figures (including yourself, remember) through a single door into another room, gaining a point for each figure moved.

Pick up a passenger is kind of a combination playing an extra card action, with a little more choice in the action to take, and devouring a guest (though the passengers are treated as a separate collection of meeples from anything devoured—you can’t combine passengers and devoured guests to make a set of 5 different colours). To avoid wasting scoring potential, it is important to make sure you’re in a room with appropriately coloured guests at the pick up stage, so this monster does require a bit more thought than What Lurks Below.

Getting slightly more complicated again, Remover includes a rather simple mini-game, the Weight Loss Plan, on its (her?) player board, which is activated by two of the steps in the turn instructions. Remover uses a ‘dumbbell’ token, placed at the start of the Weight Loss Plan as an additional setup step.

The Weight Loss Plan is a 14-space path to follow, where you perform the action on the step containing the dumbbell as part of your turn, such as spooking, devouring, stealing points, and a rather interesting draw all of your cards.

The turn steps are: play a card, do ‘fearsonal fitness’ (i.e., play the action from the Weight Loss Plan), advance the dumbbell 1 or 2 steps along the Plan (thus setting up what will happen on your next turn), move, and finally, draw back up to 3 cards.

As an aside, since other players can see the Weight Loss Plan, they know what action you’ll be taking on it on your next turn, so can plan accordingly (e.g., make sure they’re far away, to avoid having points stolen). In general, players can see each other’s boards, which provides an additional layer of strategy in stymying their plans as well as enhancing your own.

Remover has only 2 extra cards:

• Flex—do fearsonal fitness again (or, rather, a first time, since the card is played before that step in the turn instructions).
• Coaching—move a guest from each connected room into yours, gaining a point for each.

For this monster, you need to balance the cards in your hand with where you are on the Weight Loss Plan, to maximise the benefits of both on a turn. You do have the disadvantage of other players knowing what’s coming for one of those, though.

Killtron -3000- is an intermediate-level monster, which requires quite a different way of thinking than the monsters described so far. As I mentioned in my review of the game, this plays a little like the Eyrie Dynasties in Root, in that you ‘program’ your actions and later on, ‘execute’ them.

Killtron has a 3-card program, which is activated (executed!) in left-to-right order as part of your turn, exactly as if you played those 3 cards in order as part of your turn, except that all players can see what actions you’re going to take 1–3 turns ahead and do their best to mess you up. One important thing to bear in mind when executing the program is that you ignore all instructions to play a card (e.g., with Jumpscare, you move, but don’t play another card).

The additional setup instructions are to initialise your program with Guidance System, Rollout and Grapple cards (which I’ll cover in a moment). The turn steps are simple: first execute the program, then update it by discarding the card on the right, sliding the other 2 across, and placing one from your hand in the leftmost slot, and then drawing a new card into your hand.

Killtron has 5 additional cards:

• Exterminate—spook.
• Rollout—move.
• Grapple—move a figure from a connected room into yours.
• Arc Lightning—steal a point for each player in your and connected rooms.
• Guidance System—discard this card from the program, then place a new card from your hand here and perform its action.

These cards tend towards the simple, so that they can be combined in a sequence. Your actions are telegraphed to other players, who can see the program you’ve set up at the end of one turn before you execute it in the next, with the wildcard behaviour of Guidance System adding a little disruption. Note also that each card can be played up to 3 times, once in each position, so you need to make sure the cards mesh nicely with the others ahead and behind in the sequence. A bit of a head scratcher, but a lot of fun to play.

The final monster I’ll cover is Regoo, one of the advanced ones, and a rather different beast to those covered earlier. Or perhaps, rather different beasts, plural, because the person playing Regoo can have up to 10 ‘blob’ monsters in play.

Regoo has no special setup instructions, save to note that you start with a single blob on the board, but the turn steps are a bit longer than before: consume (not to be confused with the Consume card), choose one blob as the one to be used when any action refers to ‘your monster’ and play a card, grow, draw back to 3 cards, and finally, if you turned in a set of devoured guest, place a blob in any room (moving one from another if all are already in play). Those 2 new actions are:

• consume—for each player sharing a room with one or more of your blobs, steal a point per blob.
• grow—place a blob in your active blob’s room or a connected one.

The 3 extra cards are:

• Schlorp—perform the grow action
• Blurp—for each blob, devour a guest in its room.
• Squelch—move each blob.

Regoo is rather aggressive against other players, having the opportunity to steal points every turn, and with the huge number of blobs in play—close to the number of rooms in the theater, same in a 2-player game, in fact—it’ll be difficult for people to avoid being attacked. A small disadvantage of playing Regoo is that it’s fairly weak at the beginning of the game, when there are few blobs on the board.

If you’d like to find out about the rest of the monsters, including strategy tips and pros and cons, check out the ‘Meet the Monsters’ section on the game’s old crowdfunding page.

Playing a Turn and Ending the Game

The overall rule for playing a turn is to perform the turn steps on your monster card. That’s it.

You’ll start off with 3 cards in your hand out of a character-dependent deck comprising the 5 standard cards and the monster-specific additions. At least one of the turn steps will involve playing a card from your hand: reveal it, perform the action, then place the card on a per-player discard pile. (Killtron -3000- is a bit different, as described above.)

The final, or close to final, step of the turn will be to draw back to 3 cards; if you happen to have 3 or more already, don’t draw any new ones, but you are allowed to hold more than 3 in your hand into the next turn. If your draw pile is empty at any time you need to draw a card, shuffle the discard pile and turn it face down to form a new draw pile.

On your turn, you can score points (e.g., by spooking or by stealing them from other players), moving your score tracker appropriately. You can also acquire tickets by turning in sets of devoured guests. In some end-game circumstances, you may find there are no tickets to claim when you turn in a devoured set, in which case, add 5 points to your score (which is higher than the minimum ticket bonus, but lower than the maximum).

Unless they say otherwise, all actions are mandatory: you cannot choose to avoid moving when instructed to, for example. However, the rulebook does note that some actions may not be possible: for example, if told to devour 3 guests but there are fewer in your room, you devour as many as you can (which might even be zero—a bit of a waste of an action). Sometimes you do find yourself with a hand of cards which give you nothing useful to play, and all you can do is effectively just discard one, in the hope of drawing something better for your next turn.

The game end is triggered when someone reaches 50 points on the score track or when the last tickets has been acquired. The current player finishes their turn, and any remaining players in the round take their turns.

At this point, players reveal their tickets and add the appropriate number of points to their score. The winner is the person with most points, and ties are broken based on number of tickets a player has, and if that doesn’t resolve things, it’s just a tie.

Solo Play

Killtron -3000- can be adapted as an automa for solo play. To be more precise, it can be used as an automa at 1–3 players, which can be beneficial as player interaction is somewhat on the low side with fewer players.

Board setup treats Auto-Killtron as an actual player (i.e., 2 human players and the bot means the only rooms blocked off are the pair labelled for 3-player games).

When used as a bot, Killtron’s cards are dealt into 3 separate small draw decks, as indicated on the back page of the rulebook. Auto-Killtron starts in the room with most doors, and begins the game with 5–20 points depending on how hard you want to make the game.

On its turn, Auto-Killtron reveals a card from each deck and plays them in order, as if executing the program described earlier, ignoring all draw actions as well as play a card ones.

Rules have been provided for where Killtron’s cards offer a choice: e.g., when spooking, Auto-Killtron will move red guests first, the purple, and so on, and will use the top left door of the room first, then the next clockwise, proceeding until all doors or guests are used up.

When the small decks have been used up (after 3 turns), they’re separately shuffled into new draw decks and play continues.

If a single bot isn’t enough, or you fancy something different, an enthusiastic BoardGameGeek member has created the SpookyBOT Factory, featuring a modified Auto-Killtron called the KilltronBOT, as well as a CharlesBOT and a SlayerrBOT, riffing off the game’s Chortlin’ Charles and Nightslayerr monsters, which can be dropped into any game, just like Auto-Killtron.

Final Words

Despite the length of this article, Spooktacular is not a complex game; the rulebook is a mere 6 pages, with another half covering the solo mode. It’s true that some of the rules are hidden away on the player cards; when playing, it does help if you’ve got at least a passing familiarity with those of all the other players in the game.

There’s a nice range of monsters, with varying levels of difficulty and appeal, but you can just dive in and have fun spooking and devouring.

If you need some ambient sound when playing, Level 99 has created a soundtrack for the game! You can find it on Spotify or Youtube.

Finally, if 20 monsters isn’t enough, Bride of Spooktacular is the subject of an upcoming crowdfunding project and scheduled for release next year.

About the author

Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Terraforming Mars 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.