Spectral

Spectral is a genuinely curious experience and part-puzzle, part deduction, and part area-control. The setting is a spooky manor where once a year, vast treasures appear if you are tempted in to get them – but so, naturally, do a bunch of demons. Stray into the wrong room, and your treasure hunters end up with nothing.

The manor is represented by a series of cards that are laid out in a 4×4 grid, with each card representing a room. On your turn, you can place any number of your treasure hunters between two or more rooms, and peek at one of the adjacent cards. This is where Spectral gets challenging: the card doesn’t tell you what’s in the room it represents, but tells you what’s in one of the other rooms. You are told clearly where it is: it might be clockwise, diagonal, or on the other side of the mansion. But you’re not told if there’s a demon there as well, which is very possible. The goal of the game is to have your a treasure hunters next to rooms with treasure in when the game ends, but the catch is that any treasure hunters next to a demon are automatically eliminated.

It may sound like you just need to get lucky with your huntring, but there’s more to it than that. Each row of cards in the manor belongs to a set (A, B, C and D) and each set contains a card that triggers a demon somewhere. The sets don’t exist independent of each other, though: a card in set D may cause a card in set A to have a treasure or a demon. The demons not appear in C at all. Knowing where the demons are isn’t just about peeking at cards, but figuring out – using the game’s helpful pre-printed notepads – what’s what in the geography around it.

You’ll probably begin by placing one a treasure hunter at a time, but if you want to bump opponents out of an area, you need to place twice as many treasure hunters as they have there. As soon as someone places their last hunter, everyone gets one last turn before the cards are revealed, demons kill off any treasure hunters unfortunate enough to be standing next to them, and then treasures are split between all treasure hunters adjacent to them: a treasure is worth 12, so if you’re on two sides of the room and I’m on one, you’ll get 8 and I’ll pick up 4. The player with the most treasure wins!