Name: Ghost Blaster
Year of Release: 2014
Player Count: 1 – 4 Players
Playing Time: 15 minutes
Designer: Wolfgang Dirschel
Publisher: HABA
Primary Mechanisms: Cooperative Game, Modular Board, Memory
Weight (According to boardgamegeek.com): 1.25
In an effort to review games of all kinds and being fathers to children who love to board game, this review is a part of our series looking at games catering more towards children of all ages. These reviews will not follow our normal rating structure but instead will be shorter, more to the point, and will feature one rating from 1 to 5.
Review
Picture this: you are 1 of a team of 3 ghost hunters equipped with your trusty ghost blaster. The latest assignment is a ghost castle where you and your team have twelve hours to find 18 ghosts and blast them with goo missiles, your preferred method of dispatching these particular ghouls.
The castle is made up of 24 rooms created from a 4×6 grid of face down tiles with 3 different dungeons and the entrance located at the 4 corners of the grid. As your team enter the castle you see a dusty clock with the hands at 12:00 am. The rookie of the team decides to enter first and moves to the next room. He can only move one room as the player has rolled the die and it landed on the side with only one pip. The player flips over the tile and the ghost hunter discovers this room haunted by an elderly looking ghost. Since none of his teammates have found any ghosts, he decides to stay put and end his turn. The next player moves past the rookie to the next room, as she rolled a two, and finds a matching elderly ghost. She radios her findings to the rest of the team. The lead ghost hunter goes the opposite way, with a roll of a three and finds a third matching ghost. With three of the same ghosts trapped by the hunters, each unleashes a goo missile to destroy the ghosts. The players put down a green goo token on each tile signifying that they caught one of the six possible triplets. The next roll of the die shows a mysterious clock face and the hunters hear the ancient clock hands moving from 12:00 am to 1:00 am. The ghost hunters only have eleven more hours to find the remaining matching ghosts!
As the team continues on, they discover two magical properties of the castle. First, if a team member leaves a room before the matching ghosts have been discovered, the room magically hides itself again. The room tile is flipped back over, hiding the ghastly image that inhabited it. Secondly, the ghost hunters run into rooms housing no ghosts, but instead traps, symbolized by a magical keyhole. When the unsuspecting hunter finds themselves in this room, they are transported to one of the dungeons in the corners of the castle. To free the trapped hunter, one of the other team members must find the location of the dungeon and unlocked their trapped teammate.
If your team captures all 18 ghosts (six sets of three matching ghosts) before the clock strikes 12:00 am again you win! But if the clock strikes twelve before then or your entire team is stuck in the dungeons at the same time then the ghosts have outsmarted you and you have lost.
This game is fun cooperative twist on the classic memory game. The pieces are well-made, and the rules are simple enough to be any kids go to for board game night, at least for a few nights. But all-in-all it still is a game of memory so there is limited replayability.
Rating
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Amazon: Ghost Blaster Board Game