Matthew BaileyLike a few other games in this year’s Halloween Spooktacular, this has been sat on my shelf for a few months now, being specially kept in reserve for Halloween, and actually, I should have gotten it out sooner because Ghostbumpers takes the simple idea of a fairly standard trick-taking card game that everyone, up to the grandparents in the family, will be familiar with, turns it on its head and actually makes something quite unique that is definitely worth playing. To the point where I genuinely think they should do a reskin that isn’t Halloween. I think it might actually get even more notice, and it deserves it.
Essentially, Ghostbumpers is, on the face of it, a fairly standard trick-taking card game where you are trying to score points without drawing your “Scared” card. In terms of other games you might know, it plays the most like old-school Windows favourite Hearts, as unlike most trick-taking games, you do not want to win every hand, as every time you win a hand, you have to draw a card from your “Scared” deck, which potentially gets you closer to winning the game.
At the start of each round, you are dealt nine Monster cards, numbered from 1 to 9, along with some special cards. You also have your own deck of seven Character cards, consisting of six Unfazed cards and one Scared card, and this is where the main and ultimately really interesting mechanic of the game comes in.
After looking at your hand, you secretly decide where to place your Scared card within your Character deck. This is where the main risk/reward element comes in. Placing your Scared card near the top makes things riskier but gives you the potential to score more points, while burying it further down makes you safer but limits how much you can score.
Once everyone has arranged their Character deck, you start playing tricks.
The starting player plays either a single Monster card or multiple cards of the same number. Going clockwise, everyone else does the same, with the highest result winning the trick. This is where the second very unusual mechanic comes in, and this is how the value of the cards works, as playing multiple cards works slightly differently to anything I have ever seen before. A single card is simply worth its printed value, but multiple identical cards create a decimal number. For example, playing three 8s gives you a value of 3.8, which would actually lose to someone playing a single 4. If there is a tie, whoever played last wins the trick.
Whenever you play multiple identical cards, you also draw replacement cards equal to one fewer than the number you played. This keeps everyone’s hand sizes equal but also means you can end up with unusual cards you weren’t expecting.
The winner of each trick must reveal the top card of their Character deck. If it is an “Unfazed” card, they are safe for now, but if they reveal their “Scared” card (which they placed in the deck where they wanted), the round immediately ends and they score nothing.
5s have a special ability, as for every 5 played during a trick, the winner must reveal an additional Character card. So, if two 5s were played, the winner would have to reveal three cards in total, potentially bringing them much closer to getting scared.
At the end of the round, everyone except the player who got scared scores points based on the position of their Scared card. You reveal cards from your remaining Character deck until you find it, scoring one point for every Unfazed card left underneath (so the closer you place it to the top, the more points you get).
This is a really cool mechanic and makes that decision about where your Scared card is gonna go really important. Generally, when you first start playing, you tend to play quite conservatively, and then, as you become a little bit more confident with how the game’s flowing, you then start to push your level of confidence that little bit more, and that’s where it becomes really interesting. And actually, this is probably my favourite trick-taking game I have played in years because it’s so unique in how it works, yet it’s really simple to explain.
There is also a special “0 or 10 Monster card”, which can be played as either a 0 or a 10. When it appears, the winner of that trick doesn’t reveal any Character cards. Instead, they move the bottom card of their Character deck to the top, potentially changing when they will get scared. Out of everything, this is the only bit that I wasn’t all that keen on, but it’s fine.
You can also attempt “Paranoia scoring”, which is essentially just like shooting the moon in Hearts, by deliberately placing your Scared card at the very bottom of your Character deck. If you manage to reveal it as the final card while winning a trick, you score 10 points and everyone else scores nothing. It’s a potentially rewarding gamble, but you won’t score anything from this approach if someone else ends the round first.
In practice, we found this is incredibly difficult to achieve, as it’s usually pretty obvious when you go for this, and unlike Hearts, where you can be pretty confident if you’ve got all of the face cards in your hand, because of the way the decimal system works, it’s pretty hard to stay consistently as the winner enough to definitely get your Character card out at the bottom of your pile before anyone else does. It is, however, a fun little extra if a game is going badly or potentially on the last round when you know it’s the only way you can win.
Once all the rounds are complete, the player with the most points wins.
Trick-taking card games are usually my absolute favourite, but Ghostbumpers is extremely good. It uses two very interesting mechanics that I haven’t ever really seen before, which are the predicting of where you’re going to get into your deck alongside the way the number system works if you play multiple cards, something that doesn’t really interact in other games.
It’s different enough to warrant having in your card game collection and simple enough that you can play this with relatively young kids who might not get the strategy but definitely can play along, as well as the grandparents who usually refuse to play anything that isn’t Gin Rummy.
I was gonna say that Ghostbumpers is the best trick-taking card game I have played in years, but it might actually be one of the best trick-taking card games there is. It’s funny how most of my favourite trick-taking card games are all Halloween-themed, as in my brain Halloween doesn’t necessarily lend itself that well to trick-taking card games, but whatever, it’s the way it is.
Component quality is good, cards are nice, everything comes in a nice box that’s not too big. It has that kind of UNO double-deck size to it, and I would really strongly recommend it. I really hope also, at some point, they make a non-Halloween-themed reskin purely so that more people might buy it outside of the Halloween season.
Definitely a game I would say you would get a lot of play with this, dare I say it, Christmas.
