Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good!

TWO-GUN PIXIE PRESENTS:

Legendary

Gaming

002 – Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Good!

What’s the word, Nerd Herd?

Welcome back to “Two-Gun Pixie Presents: Legendary Gaming”, home of the last surviving Gameporium Maximus in the Nerd Wasteland.

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Recently the Twenty-Sided Warriors took a poll on their group’s FB page and their Twitter feed asking which game the Wanders of the Nerd Wasteland wanted reviewed next. The top two games voted for are both officially licensed icons of pop culture awesomeness! Both re-defined their respective genres and embedded their stories deep with the collective human psyche.

This month the Great Grognard and the Twenty-Sided Warriors have been playing a game based on an 80’s pop-culture cinematic TITAN!

Strap on your proton packs, grab Tobin’s Spirit Guide, and fire up the Ecto-1!

Once again NYC (and the very fabric of the multiverse itself!) is in paranormal peril.

So…

Who Ya Gonna Call?

GHOSTBUSTERS: The Board Game

Designers: Matt Hyra, Adam Sblendorio, Mataio Wilson

Artists: Samuel H. Greenwell, Robb Mommaerts, Dan Schoening

Publisher: Cryptozoic Entertainment

Year Published: 2015

Suggested Player Age: 15+

Number of Players: 1-4 (Best with 2 or 4)

Average Play Time: 30-120 minutes

Game Mechanics: Co-operative Play, Dice Rolling, Grid / Tile Movement

MSRP: $85.00

SKU: CZE01968

ISBN: 9781617684616

UPC: 815442019684

Weight: 2.24 lbs.

Product Dimensions: 4 x 11.5 x 11.5 inches

Integrates With: Ghostbusters - The Board Game II

Cryptozoic Entertainment has a vast library of television and movie based officially licensed games; card games, dice games, and board games. Some of the product tie-in games based on franchises and properties include under their banner include; Rick & Morty, The Big Bang Theory, Supernatural, Adventure Time, DC Comics, Arrow, Portal, the NHL, Castle, The Walking Dead, Archer, Locke & Key, Street Fighter, and The Hobbit.

In 2015 they released a board game whose license they were more than happy to add to their catalog, Ghostbusters. This was a very successful Kickstarter product for them which allowed the backers access to a plethora of great extras.

For a final product Cryptozoic’s design team decided on a blend to try to make all the Ghostbusters fans happy across the board; the brought in elements not only from the original movie but also form the TV show and IDW comic book series.

Cryptozoic even brought in veteran IDW Ghostbusters comic book artist Dan Schoening to provide much of the art for the game.

So Nerd Herd, are those PKE meters in your pockets or are you just glad to read this review?

Let’s break the game down…

The Box

When we first opened the beautifully designed game box, after pulling out the annoyingly over-sized rule book and the all-to-common punch-out boards of game tiles and tokens, we were surprised to find another box, a plain brown cardboard box, arranged snuggly inside. Upon opening the second box it all made sense to us.

The display box is sturdy and, as mentioned, beautifully designed; artwork inspired directly from the IDW comic book series and a black and yellow design stripes reminiscent of the iconic ghost traps. The second box, the plain box, is likewise sturdy and inside is stored two clear plastic trays, one on top of the other. These trays hold the 48 miniatures in their own individual slots very nicely. In fact, they store all the game components almost perfectly. Being packed inside the second box allows the game to be moved around or displayed in any position without worrying about all the contents spilling around and mixing up, making your job that much tougher – and more time consuming – when setting up the game for play. At first it looked frustrating to have another box inside the main box, like a Russian Nesting Doll of exasperation but it not only works, it is a smart design to keep everything in place. It actually makes to one of the better thought out and designed game box insets.

However, this perfect fit design to the box and tray leaves no room for expansions or add-ons to be put into the main box. This means the more expansions bought for this game will take up that much more room on your game shelf, so this design is both a Nat 20 and a Nat 1 all at the same time. If you don’t plan on getting expansions for this game or don’t mind the extra room they’ll take up then it is perfect. Otherwise you may not be happy in the long run.

But then again, the box and the room it'll take up on your shelf, usually aren’t the deciding factors on whether or not you’ll buy a new game, are they?

So let’s look at everything else…

Components

- 1 Ghostbusters Operations & Field Manual (rule book)

- 4 Ghostbusters 28mm minis (Peter Venkmen, Ray Stance, Egon Spengler, Winston Zeddmore)

- 2 Ghost Bosses 28mm minis (Slimer and Idulnas)

- 1 Ghost Boss 100mm mini (the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man)

- 20 Galloping Ghost 28mm minis

- 12 Gruesome Twosome ghosts 28mm minis

- 8 Boogaloo Manifestation ghosts 28mm minis

- 1 Ecto-1 miniature

- 1 Ecto-1 tile

- 10 double-sided game board tiles

- 1 Spirt World tile

- 5 stream tokens per Ghostbuster (with about 20 extra stream tokens)

- Gate Tokens

- Slime Tokens

- PKE Meter tile

- 4 Ghostbuster Player cards to track character abilities

- 5 XP Trackers

- 15 Scenario cards

- 3 Ghost cards

- 3 Ghost Boss cards

- 4 six sided dice

- 1 six sided event die

- 1 eight sided die

The rule book, as previously mentioned, is big. Too big. There seems to be a trend with companies printing up the rule books on these enormous scales, like vinyl record big. I can’t explain enough to you how much I find this annoying. They are awkward to hold and too big to feel comfortable in your hands. Sometimes, with new games, I like to take the rule book with me to read if I go on a train ride downtown or on a trip. Rule books this size makes it difficult to travel with while keeping them relatively safe from getting bent or damaged before their time. You may not mind large-size rule books, then this will not be a problem for you. Me? I’m not a fan.

With that said the rule book has a brilliant comic book inspired story to read that kicks-off the entire plot of the campaign. It is written and drawn by IDW Ghostbuster veterans Erik Burnham and Dan Schoening who bring the game story to life beautifully. The rules are set up easy enough to follow and the book is edited together better than most seem to be these days. You should be able to follow the rule book with little problem during your first game as long as at least one player has read it first.

The game board tiles, tokens, and cards are all good, solid stock and should hold up well even after running many games.

The dice are well balanced and easy to read.

Now, one of the real pulls for the game is the miniatures supplied. These are all sculpted beautifully; the Ghostbusters all retain their unique look and feel and are easily discernible from each other across the game board. They are not, however, painted nor do the molds seem particularly friendly for painting as many aspects meld together as opposed to showing strong delineation between different details of the minis. Each Ghostbuster is a solid color which matches their cards and the streams they use.

The Ghost minis, except Stay Puft – we’ll get to him in a moment – are all clear, blue-tinted plastic. This creates an almost eerie look to them and the idea is great. The problem is that they are all the same blue color and the designs can kinda look a little similar as you are staring down the game table at the board.

Slimer is, naturally, clear green and this makes him stand out wherever he is on the board. Idulnas, another boss figure, is the same blue color as all the other ghosts on the board. He isn’t even bigger than them. This makes him almost blend into the board creating a whole “tree in the forest” situation making him easy to lose track of on the board. This was a major design fail. As a boss figure he should have been a different color from the common ghost “pawns” littering the game board. When you also take into consideration the third boss, Stay Puft, Idulnas is a complete design fail. Stay Puft is the largest mini in the game, a whopping 100mm as opposed to the more common 28mm figures that come in the game.

As he should be, Stay Puft is also all white… fitting. From a distance he looks good, great really. However, when you look at him more closely his features seem a bit blurred, or smudged. He seems rushed. The all white mini of the Ecto-1 also suffers the same design problems as Stay Puft.

You see, I want to say that I like the minis because one-on-one I honestly do like most of them and they are quite sturdy. The problem is that on the whole, when you’re looking down the gaming table at the horde of clear blue minis choking the board, most of which are similar sized, everything becomes more visually confusing than it really should be.

Honestly, considering the fact that this game was funded on Kickstarter and raised a whopping 1.5 million dollars the miniatures are a crit fail. Hopefully Cryptozoic will step up the miniature designs for the sequel.

Game Play

The first thing the Twenty-Sided Warriors noticed about the game play was that it felt like a streamed-down version of Arkham Horror. They felt this way mainly because of the game’s mechanic of shutting down “Gates” to prevent otherworld, supernatural creatures from entering our plane of existence. That’s where the comparison ends though. Character movement across the tile board is typical in the sense that the player decides to move one or two grid spaces as an action on their turn. Using the Ecto-1 lets the players move much farther with an action – up to 6 spaces. The Ecto-1 miniature is moved along the game board while the Ecto-1 tile is kept off the board. This tile is used only to place your Ghostbuster minis on when they enter the Ectomobile mini.

The combat system is not revolutionary but then again, let’s be honest, there is little reason for it to be. Examples, the line of sight rules are standard as are rules concerning difficult terrain.

Besides “Moving and Shooting” the game does incorporate franchise-specific ideas and concepts to the rules which work together greatly to give the game a wonderfully thematic feel. Characters can (and will!) get slimed which will affect the in-game performance of the characters but they can also use an action to remove slime from themselves or an adjacent Ghostbuster. Of course no job can be complete until the traps are deposited in the containment system; in this case, in the portable containment system located in Ecto-1! This adds another element to the Ecto-1 other than just moving around the game board since the players need to use an action to deposit their traps at Ecto-1. This also adds another level of strategy to the game as you plan out your actions/maneuvers. This mechanic turns the Ecto-1 mini into a sort of “Floating Goal Point” in the game whose movement is controlled by the players – when they remember to or have time to move it.

The mechanic of depositing traps ads yet another very thematic feel to the game. This is because of the balance the players have to maintain with a game aspect known as “The Spirit World”. One game tile represents the Spirit World and is kept separate from the other tiles that comprise the specific game campaign you are playing. On this tile you place all the ghosts the scenario information card instructs you to place there. Whenever a gate (or other game effect as described on the individual scenario cards) spews out new ghosts onto the game board you take them off the Spirit World tile. If the Spirit World tile is ever depleted of its supply of ghosts the game is over and the players have lost. The only way to replenish the Spirit World is to deposit your traps after you capture a ghost. And you can only do that at Ecto-1.

A nice aesthetic touch to the game play is the design of the stream tokens; they are round and hollow, like little doughnuts. This is great thinking and works perfectly. Because they have a hole in them they can be placed on/over the ghost minis to show how many streams you have on each of them and who’s stream it is.

During combat each different ghost type has its own ghost card which lists various information about that particular type of ghost. Included in this is how they move and how they react to both being hit by a containment stream and being missed by a containment stream. At first the randomness and chaotic feel of this mechanic felt like a cop-out to use. The lack of thought in this system seemed like lazy game design to us. Our opinion of that rule changed after we played the game. The ghost’s chaotic randomness actually accentuated the already very thematic feel of the game. The randomness is determined by rolling the supplied eight-sided die and consulting the PKE tile. This shows (or tracks to put in a more thematic sense) the movement of the ghosts. Simply by rolling an eight sided die you consult the PKE Meter tile and move the ghost in the direction indicated. This invoked a feeling of the original movie and for that reason that mechanic completely works for this game and makes sense.

As mentioned earlier in this review our initial thoughts on this matter brought us all to thinking of Arkham Horror immediately. Both games use the mechanic of antagonists using gates to cross over into this world where they can wreak havoc and hatch horrible schemes. The reason both games use this idea is because the source materials do. Honestly, for a board game translation of both these properties there really is nothing to do to differentiate the concept. Gates can release adversaries and you have to plan actions out in order to close them. In this case shooting them with your proton packs as the original team did on top of Dana Barrett’s apartment building in the 1984 movie before the new form of Gozer was chosen (spoiler – it was the form of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Ray use to roast Stay Puft marshmallows by the fire at Camp Wauconda).

I think the last point of interest concerning the rules and game play is the campaign aspect of the game. As is popular in many board games these days Ghostbusters: The Board Game tries to simulate a feeling of a role-playing game. As you defeat ghosts and use you character abilities you gain experience points (XP) and advance in levels. Each advancement grants you access to another ability, most of which are fairly unique to the feel of the character. The player character cards have a great XP tracker on them and each ability is explained on the card itself so no one has to waste time looking through the rule book to see what they can do every time the level up. Although the leveling system works and I have no real problem with it as a game mechanic something feels off. It leaves me thinking that it was just tacked on for no reason other than they thought the game needed a leveling system.

Final Thoughts

Overall the game works; the rules are easy to learn and make sense, the game play is fun, and it captures the feel of the source material almost perfectly. In fact those reasons alone are strong enough for us to say this may be the best board game translation of the Ghostbusters intellectual property yet published. This is a game that any fan of either playing board games or of Ghostbusters will enjoy playing.

However, this game will only work for a few people when it comes to actually buying it. Yes, the reason I say that is because of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $85 is a bit steep. Even with the problems that the miniatures suffer from, the other components, play mechanics and game design are worth it to add this game to your collection. That’s the age-old board gamer’s dilemma; Price vs. Game. If you are still interested in buying this game but are a bit worried about the price look for deals and sales, especially on-line because it is worth it if you can find a price you can afford.

Because of the easy rules and familiar pop-culture property it does make a great gateway (pun intended) game for new tabletop gamers as well as a nice gift for both anyone who enjoys board games and the Ghostbuster fans alike.