Mattel - Strategy Games - Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters

Product Information

When you draw one of these cards you might find a set of keys that unlocks all of the doors, you may run away and get a free move, you can capture a ghost letting you remove one from anywhere on the board, or if you are unlucky you could instead end up releasing a ghost and adding one to a random room, or finally, you could end up finding a Jinxed Item. King of Tokyo wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if we weren’t monsters trying to destroy each other with super powers. Turns play out similar to the original game with players rolling the ghost/movement die, drawing a ghost card if indicated on the die (on the 1-5 faces), doing what the card says, then moving their kid. Admittedly, there are also more cards in the deck which do not place any ghosts (the plain shuffle card as well as the four door cards), however, the locked door cards will make it much more difficult to navigate the house, and this in turn makes it harder for you to fight off ghosts in a timely manner as you may not be able to take shortcuts through rooms like you can when the doors are open. The roll and move mechanism, combined with locking doors and the haunting mechanism can cause you to have some less than stellar turns, but the lightness and the length of the game make up for quite a few of its other sins.

Now that I finally own Creepy Cellar I can’t see playing Ghost Fighting Treasure Hunters without it. If a player wants to fight a ghost, they must enter a room where a ghost is and roll a fighting die in an attempt to rid the house of the ghost. The age recommendation is 8+ but younger players will be fine assuming there are older players to help suggest options – without being too bossy ideally. It’s like a super streamlined version of Flash Point: Fire Rescue will all of the fiddly crap removed and lots of FUN and excitement as been added! We used the theme to spark our imaginations - and on family walks I would pretend to be The Ogre and race everyone to the treasure waiting at our house.To fight a ghost, you roll a special battle die, if it lands on a ghost icon when you're in a room with a ghost you defeat the ghost and they leave the room. GFTH is a deceivingly simple cooperative game that has a fine balance between being easy to learn and play (as you would expect of a Kinderspiel winner) and being a challenging enough game to keep the interest of gamers of all ages. The game employs some low level assessment of probability and risk and develops some good strategic thinking and game play for more advance games as kids get older. Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters is a great example of a thematic cooperative game that isn’t just about placing and removing cubes on a map. In the end, thinking about how great this game looks brings us right back to why we love this game in the first place - and board games in general.

The Jinxed Items make it harder to collect the treasure tokens, but then also give you a way to unlock used Secret Passages. Likewise, i see this as an excellent game to get your kids interested in the hobby and sat round the table. Brian L: I had the opportunity to play this game once while it was in development and had a great deal of fun.

You also get twelve new Cursed Treasure tokens which replace the original eight Treasure Tokens from the base game. Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters was created by Brian Yu and published by Mattel in Germany as Geister, Geister, Schatzsuchmeister, and it won the very prestigious Kinderspiel des Jahres 2014, or Children’s Game of the Year.