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Ghostel!

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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.

Are you the scariest ghost of the night?

 

components

Cultist Expansion (included in base game)

Game designer: Bevan Clatworthy
Ghostel BGG Link: boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169475/ghostel

Ghost story

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?

Accessible: Ghostel has been designed to be inclusive from the ground up. The approachable theme (who doesn’t love a haunted house!?), coupled with a straightforward ruleset mean players with a range of ages and abilities will enjoy an evening of spooky play.

Depth of Strategy: Ghostel’s ease of learning and lighter mechanics disguise a game with many player choices and interactions. Planning ahead and adapting your strategy to your opponent’s decisions are vital to scoring big in the ghost house.

Intuitive: We’ve worked hard to reduce text to a minimum on the cards in play, using instinctual iconography to keep the game clear yet beautiful.

Playtesting: We’ve taken Ghostel to many, many playtests over the two years it’s been in development and logged literally hundreds of games at events such as the UK Games Expo, Playtest UK, Chaos Unpub and DragonDaze. The result is a game that feels mechanically tight with dollops of fun included.

Educational: For younger players, Ghostel represents a fantastic way to strengthen numeracy skills through addition, subtraction and multiplication tasks throughout gameplay, as well as tactical reasoning and forward planning.

Two Player: The rules for a 2-player variant of the game have been carefully crafted and playtested to make sure Ghostel is just as fun for two players as it is for higher number, see a review about it here.

How to play

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 night-time visitations. Meanwhile, the ghosts are hiding in the attic, preparing for the next Night by buying Terror bonuses, Scare tactics to improve their frightfulness and Spookie favours to give that extra little edge.

During the Night, the ghosts walk the rooms, using all their cards and dice 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 round, leaving behind a Terror die as they move. If the total on all dice in a room exceeds the courage score of the human in residence of that room, they’re scared out of the house! 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.

For a full version of the rulebook as a pdf, please follow this link.

How To Play Video

Reviewers

To read a collection of reviews from BGG and Kickstarter visit our reviews page

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Example Artwork

These are examples of the art style being used in the final game.

An example of the Ghostel art style using the Tinkerbots (Bevan, Tony and Gino) as examples
An example of artwork.

 

17 Responses

  1. Did you pick a winner to be on the cards from those who entered at the games expo? I’m super excited! I hope it’s me!

    1. Hey Fiona, we’ve done the draw and contacted the 8 winners. If you haven’t heard from us yet then unfortunately you didn’t get drawn.
      We haven’t released the names of the winners yet because we’re waiting to confirm that all 8 winners are happy to take the prize and proceed. If anyone declines or fails to respond to our messages then we’ll re-draw the unclaimed prizes. Once we have 8 confirmed winners we’ll announce all the names in an additional update.
      Cheers!

  2. For those of us with the Connie room card – are we now allowed to know what her ability is so we can use her in the base game?

    1. Hi John, the rules for the cultists are on a card in the deck that comes with the game. Let us know if yours is missing from your game.

  3. We love love this game!!!! Even our 82 year old Nana likes this game! however i need an extra ghost? Anywhere we could purchase one please? many thanks. Charlene

    1. Hi Charlene! Thanks for letting us know you like the game, especially your nana!
      When you say you need an extra ghost, do you mean a 5th player or a replacement for one of the original ghosts?

  4. I played Ghostel at my friend’s house and lived It! Where can I buy it? She got here’s as a Christmas present and doesn’t know.

  5. Hi Gino, i saw with the prototype game the ghosts were 3-D printed. A friend of mine wants to create a green one

    1. *helps if I finish the message! Is the STL available for things like this at all?