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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | Whats Your Game? | Ghost For Sale

Ghost For Sale

Price: £15.99

Card Game; 3-5 Players by What\'s Your Game? Buying castles in Scotland can turn out to be excellent business. Even more so when, at the same time, you can provide tourists with these lands attractions: natural beauties? Oh no, no, rather offering them scary ghost infestations!!! Some eccentric characters fight in an auction to be assigned castles and manors. This, in the hope that presences will not be too numerous! Even if a castle without ghosts may be found useless, on the contrary one which is too \'populated\' will end up terrorizing tourists and being valueless... Every player, after having seen the various castles, can declare what was seen, by showing his signs \'picture\' or \'ghost\'. Were there gloomy presences or only old and powdery family portraits? But beware, not all declarations are reliable: many players could lie... or perhaps all of them? In the first phase players must decide whether in that very turn they will lie or tell always the truth. Mrs Truelight could help everyone to find out actual results of such decisions, but she is greedy and therefore she will reveal precious indications only to best bidders. Caution is vital: the ones who pay more money too early will turn out having less funds to offer in the second phase auction for castles. Shall we have enough money to steal best ones to our competitors? Every castle has a score according to the number of ghosts by whom it is haunted. The player who succeeds in guessing where ghosts are and their exact number will achieve optimum business, becoming able to buy what he/she wants in a fairly relaxed mode and allowing himself/herself even the luxury to mislead adversaries with fake offers. Ghost for sale is a clever deductive game, with a subtle bluffing component, for 3 to 5 players, suitable for all the families, but with a strategy component that will not leave indifferent even most experienced gamers. In the box there are 8 special cards to be used for \'special auctions\', which constitute a set for playing advanced rules games and which, randomly combined to the various castles and manors, guarantee rounds which are always exciting and different. ++++++++++++++++++++ Counter magazine review. ++++++++++++++++++++ 3-5 players, 45 minutes designed by Acchittocca reviewed by Ben Baldanza The last few years at Essen have seen an increase in Italian participation, and Ghost for Sale is a new game following last year\'s Leonardo da Vinci from the Italian gaming designers group called Acchittocca. Ghost for Sale is much lighter than Leonardo and sits in a gray area between guessing and deduction. Players go through two rounds of bidding to buy hopefully haunted Scottish manors and castles, and after these two rounds the player with the most points from ghosts wins. The two rounds are structured the same, and in each case six buildings will be auctioned. Each player has a set of 10 bidding cards and these are used to both bid for the buildings and to bid for information about the buildings. Information is needed to know which of the buildings are haunted. When the round begins, players first declare which buildings (manors in the first round, castles in the second round) they will bid for by placing a chit, blind to others, that states whether they will be telling the truth or lying in this round. This chit is placed along with a chit showing a ghost or a painting. As players declare, it is unclear which buildings are haunted because though you may see many ghost chits, the players placing them may be lying. If your declaration card says you\'re telling the truth, then the chit you play (ghosts or painting) is true. But if your declaration is to lie, then your painting really is a ghost and your ghost is really a painting. Interpreting the information shared in the declaration is the key to making intelligent bids for the buildings. The buildings score based on the number of ghosts, and that is determined by the amount of bidding at the building. For example, Manor Fyvie is worth nothing with just one ghost, but worth seven if four people place ghosts there. Castle Borley is worth five with two ghosts, but worth nothing with four ghosts. You get this information in a bidding round in one of two ways: you can bid to see another player\'s declaration, or bid to see the stack of declarations not made (when I choose to lie, my ``truth\'\' card gets put in a stack). You use your bidding cards and place them, up to two at a time, either near the stack of discarded declarations or near the Mrs. Truelight card. When all cards are played, the results are revealed and the player who bid the most at the stack can look at the stack. This is helpful but not specific. If playing with five players, for example, I may see that three truths and two lies were discarded. I thus know that three of the actual declarations are lies and two are truths, but do not have information by player. This is where Mrs. Truelight comes in. The bids for her information are revealed, and the players are sorted by their bid amount. Player one gets to look at the declaration of player two, player two looks at player three, etc., and the last place bidder gets no information but gets their card back. After the information gathering, the formal auction for the buildings takes place and players bid by placing bidding cards next to the buildings. After all bids are placed, the declarations are revealed and it is then seen how many ghosts actually inhabit each building. Players take the buildings they won and will score the value shown on the ``ghost meter\'\', depending of course on how many ghosts they captured. The second round works the same as the first except that players are more limited in the number of bidding cards they have. This is because initially players put four of their 10 cards aside for this round, and then only get back the cards from the first round that were unsuccessful. Players who track this information will have a better idea of the bids in the second round of course, but this gets to the fundamental problem of this game - it seems like you should be able to know more than you do, but in practice you end up guessing quite a bit, especially with more players. This is not really a deduction game, it is more a bluffing game, because the information about the ghost declarations must be gleaned from limited data (what you really learn from the information auctions) and interpreting how others bid to help see if they reveal their intents before you place all of your bids. The result is a game that is fun to play but quite light, and if taken too seriously it is not fun. This is the intent of the designers it seems, so this is not so much a criticism as a warning for players expecting the next Black Vienna. For those who want to add to the mix, there are a set of optional cards that can be placed above the buildings each round. These either modify the declarations (``place bidding cards face up instead of face down at this building\'\') or allow a special action (remove a ghost, get to earn points by guessing the exact number of ghosts, etc.). These cards are overkill for the most part as the game generally works better without them. Ghost for Sale is creative and not derivative, but the blind bids and the need to continually guess place it solidly in the family game category.

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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | Whats Your Game? | Ghost For Sale

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