Ghostel (2017)

Ghostel is a semi-cooperative family game for 2-4 players that plays in 60 minutes.

Prey on the phobias of guests by turning into their worst nightmares. Work with other ghosts to combine forces, and scare away the hardiest of hotel patrons to earn upgrades and get even scarier!

The randomised guest and dice roll mechanic means each round is different from the next, but there’s more than luck to winning the game.

Creepstone Manor has been closed for nearly a hundred years, standing dark and silent above the town of Creepstone, and that’s just the way resident ghost Spookie likes it! But now, the manor has been reopened and turned into a hotel for the living. You play the part of one of Spookie’s ghostly minions, charged with ridding the house of these warm-bodied usurpers. Use your skills of terror to send them fleeing into the night and win Spookie’s patronage. Who will be top ghost?

The game of Ghostel is made of rounds, and each round is split into a Day Phase and a Night Phase.

During the day, new people will enter the hotel whilst those who already spent the night and survived will calm down from their twilight visitations. Meanwhile, the ghosts are hiding in the attic, preparing for the next night by buying more Terror Dice, Scare Tactics to improve their scaring and Spookie favours to give those extra little bonuses.

During the night, the ghosts walk the rooms, using all their creepy tactics to frighten the humans away and show off for Spookie himself. At the start of the night Phase, each player rolls their Terror dice to determine how scary they are for that night. Players can move one room per turn, leaving behind a Terror die as they move. If the total of all dice in a room exceeds the courage of the human in residence of that room, they're scared out of the hotel! Players then score based on who placed the highest scoring dice; however, scoring is graduated so even a single pip die will still score the canny player some victory points.