Spooks consists of 56 laminated cards (featuring a total of 11 excellent Alex Fernandez paintings), and a double-sided 8.5"x14" rules sheet (of which 1/4 is variants and the credits), in a flimsy double-wide tuck box; while it would have left a little bit less room for graphics, a regular-width tuck box would have been sturdier, and I ended up transferring the cards into an empty CCG box I had lying around, cutting the old box up and glueing the title etc. onto the new one just because I’m the kind of guy who does that sort of thing. The rules are clear (although not simple), with a sentence or two of flavour text playing up the haunted house theme at the start of each section, and there’s a helpful summary chart at the bottom of one page.
The cards come in five suits and three colours (Spiders and Spooks are blue, Bones and Bats are red, Goblins are green)(notice the care taken to pair the groupings up alphabetically, two Ss, two Bs, and two Gs? It’s an unimportant little touch, but someone at SJGames went to the trouble to think it up so I thought I’d recognize it here)(although if they’d matched Bones and Bats with blue, Goblins with green, and Spiders and Spooks with scarlet I could’ve talked about even more matching; but I digress), each numbered 1 to 10, plus a Master of each suit (a painting of an advanced version of the beastie shown on the lesser cards: e.g., skulls and some candles on the regular cards and a full skeleton with flames wreathing its head and shoulders for the Master of Bones; long-fanged bats and then a nosferatu on the Bats cards). In addition, there is one black Cat card.
The deck is shuffled and then the cards are divided equally (give or take) among all the players. Whoever has the 1 of Spiders (a blue card) plays it face up and then the player to his left must play a card with the next number higher in sequence (although not necessarily of the same suit) or pass, and so on around the table. So long as blue cards (Spiders and Spooks) are played, the ascending sequence continues. If a Master is played as part of an ascending blue sequence, the player who did so gets to play again, starting the new stack with any card from his hand.
If a green (Goblin) card is played at any point, all the players simultaneously play a single card: the highest Goblin wins the trick, allowing that player to restart the stack with any card from his hand. (Players can choose to slough a card of another suit during a Goblin trick round if they have no Goblin cards or if they want to save them for later.)
If a red card (Bones and Bats) is played during an ascending sequence, then play changes: players must match the suit or number of the last card played, until a blue card is played (which returns play to ascending sequences). If a player is unable to match the suit or number of a Bone card, the player who played the Bone is then allowed to discard a numerical sequence of any suit or combination of suits, and of any length, from his hand, with the highest card in the straight determining the mode of play afterwards. If a player is unable to match the suit or number of a Bat cards, each of the other players gives the stopped player one card from their own hands, and then play continues as normal.
The single black Cat is a wild card. If played on a blue or red card, the next player clockwise gets to restart play with any card from his hand. If it’s used to win a Goblin trick, the player of the Cat gets to restart play with any card from his hand.
If at any time (including during a Goblin trick, laying down a straight when someone’s stumped by a Bone, or giving cards to a played stopped by a Bat) any player gets rid of his last card, he wins (and there can be ties under some circumstances). This would be the “outrunning your friends” part.
The rules variants provided run the gamut from the banal “Play more than one hand, totalling the amount of points left in each player’s hand when someone else goes out; the first player to hit 200 points over multiple hands loses, while whoever has the lowest total at that point is the overall winner,” to the commercial “Buy another deck and shuffle the cards into a single big deck,” to the complicated, a variant where each Master has a separate special effect (the Master of Spiders becomes a wild card within its own suit only, the Master of Spooks requires everyone to pass one card to the player to their right, the Master of Bones causes left/right, clockwise/counterclockwise in any rules to be switched, the Master of Bats causes ascending to become descending, and low to beat high in a Goblin trick, and the Master of Goblins allows that player to give one card to the player with the fewest cards remaining in his hand), and finally to one that wouldn’t have made much difference to the way we played, but which might have had an effect on expert players who’ve figured out the hidden strategies of this game: when the cards are dealt to the players, an extra dummy hand is dealt, and those cards aren’t used at all, making it harder for experienced players to work strategies or figure out which cards their opponents may still be holding (assuming that experienced players can actually do either of those things).
Play of Spooks is quick, although it stops and starts frequently during early games because of the many special rules (i.e., you can pass when unable to play on a blue card, but there are two very different effects that come into play when you can’t play on a red card).
One problem that bothered me but didn’t seem to bother the others around the table was that fact that the game didn’t evoke a horror feeling in me. Sure, there are ghosts and spiders on the cards, and receiving extra cards from other players as a result of not being able to play on a Bat card is called being “Bitten By Bats,” but once each player had admired the art on the cards in his hand, play became very much a matter of ascending sequences, matching numbers, and winning tricks, with no reference to the theme of the game. It does mean, though, that I don’t necessarily have to worry about the game frightening a younger player; although there’s no specific age suggestion on Spooks, the box does say it’s “for adults and kids alike.”
The biggest drawback, though, is that even after a few games (with and without variant rules), none of us seemed to be able to come up with any strategies for play; everything we did was purely reactive, based on whatever the previous card played was, and we couldn’t see a way to come up with long-term plans that wouldn’t fall apart before play came around the table back to our hands (especially when playing the basic game). A couple of the less interesting game variants could have been left off the rules sheet to make room for a couple simple strategy hints (if there are any).
Despite its shortcomings, Spooks achieved what it set out to do: it’s a fun party/family game that doesn’t quickly become boring. And who knows? If you play it enough times you may discover that there really are strategic depths to the game that aren’t obvious to the beginning player.
