Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters

Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters (republished as Ghostbusters: Protect the Barrier Game) is exactly the game you might expect from the title. We are a ghoul-punching, gemstone-snatching team, and our collective goal is to get all eight treasures out of the house before six of the rooms become… haunted.

Everyone gets a player piece in their colour and puts them at the front door of the house, which has eight rooms containing treasure, four of them shared with a ghost. Each turn begins with the active player rolling a movement die – on values 1-5, a Ghost Card will be flipped, and (usually) another ghost added to the house somewhere, as dictated by the card. Then the player can – optionally – spend as much of their movement as they like.

The principle goal is to collect treasures, and everyone can slip one (-maximum one!) into their backpack if they end their turn in a room that has a treasure in it. If there’s also a ghost or two there, you fight them by rolling another die, hoping the ‘ghost’ side is rolled: if so, remove a ghost from the board (if there are two or more treasure hunters there, you get to roll two dice instead).

Then your goal is to get back to the front door, drop your harvested treasure outside, before returning to the fray for more fightin’ and huntin’.

But.

If a room ever gains a third ghost, you remove all three and replace them with a red Haunting piece. These are harder to remove: you can only attempt it if there are two or more treasure hunters in the room, and you need one of the dice to roll the haunting side in order to succeed. If the sixth and final haunting piece is ever placed on the board, the players instantly lose!

It’s a game of some strategising and risk-taking over when to stick together, when to move apart, and when to flip from fightin’ to hunting and back again. You also need a fair degree of luck: rolling sixes is always good, and drawing the reshuffle card from the deck is also a blessing, as it means there’ll be no additional ghost this turn.

Sam says

Whilst I can’t help feeling to win, you basically need an awful lot of luck – a movement roll of 1 or 2 does the same damage as a movement of 4 or 5 whilst being significantly less helpful – Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters is so easy to learn, fast to play, and with an inbuilt escalation of tension, I can’t help but enjoy it anyway, though I think it’s ripe for house-rules if that kind of thing doesn’t horrify you. We play a movement 1 roll does not flip a ghost card and moves all players (optionally) one space. I have read other options online, where up to two ghosts are added per round but there are several movement dice rolled for everyone and players take turns selecting one. All worth considering. I think there are more elegant co-op games (the Pandemic series of games being a great example) but this is so easy to pick up, it’s a good one for families, as long as you can duck the potential for one player telling everyone else what to do. And it’s tough!

Take That!

None from each other. All the brutality comes from those pesky ghosts.
Fidget Factor!

As it’s a co-operative game (and a very fast-moving one at that) you’re engaged even when it’s not your turn.
Brain Burn!

Wonderfully simple rules, but space enough to give players choices.
Again Again!

The basic game is hard enough to crack, but if you feel it’s not tricky enough for you there are a couple of variants you can mix into the challenge.