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

Do you like ghosts?  Do you like pizza?  Do you like the thought of having psychic powers?  Do you have aspirations of building a ghost town, running for mayor (and winning), and then guiding pizza delivery people through the paranormal darkness of said town?  You might be thinking, these questions have absolutely nothing to do with each other!  And normally, you’d be correct but not today, good sir or madame!  Because today we are visiting the game Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town where all these crazy situations come colliding into each other at once.

As with many deduction type games, you will need at least three players to play.  Once assembled, one player is chosen to be the mayor while the rest of the players act as the pizza deliverers.  The mayor acts as the “game master” in that he or she will construct the ghost town (in hiding) so that the other players don’t know the layout of the town.  In the town, the mayor will position colored houses and matching pizzas in the grid but what’s a town without some ghosts haunting it?  The game throws in various tokens for the mayor to populate the town including the ghosts, as well as fences, and animal tokens.  We wouldn’t want our town to be too “boo”-ring would we?  As mayor, you can either construct this town from a pre-printed deck of cards or go at it straight from your imagination.

The other players (acting as the pizza deliverers) each take a player board they can write on.  On these players’ turn, they will use three different actions to try to deduce the layout of the town. 

1.  Move – the player announces which cardinal direction they would like to move their delivery person and the mayor lets everyone know if it the move was successful or there was an obstacle. 
2. Attack – the player announces which cardinal direction they would like to attack in.  The mayor then lets everyone know if the attack was successful in banishing a ghost.  If so, the player is given a Psychic Card. 
3. Play a Psychic Card – the player discards a card and applies the action

After each turn, the mayor relays a surrounding report (which is supposed to symbolize the psychic part of this game… I think…) that tells the players if there are fences adjacent to a character and lists how many ghosts, pizzas, and houses are in the eight spaces around the deliverer.

While the above is happening, each delivery player is attempting to coalesce all of this information into a drawing of the town on their player board.  This drawing will hopefully help them scout out a pizza and then deliver it to the matching house before their opponent does so.

This is a fun game especially with a full five players.  I really like that it gives kids a fresh way to put their deduction skills to use and wraps the whole thing in a funny and absurd context.  I also want to point out that there are multiple variants printed in the rulebook to keep the fun going if your kids tire of the standard version.