Print and Play

It's officially done. The print and play version of my game is now available for download. Go have fun with it!

Download here:

Ghost Investigators

Playtest Results

After getting everything in my game in a semi-working order, it was time for playtesting. Of course, within five minutes, it was already broken. Between bad grammar, confusing rules, and some weird mechanics that I have a lot to do. Here is a list of things that I need to fix and some suggestions/ideas on how:

• Going into rooms that don't affect a player need to be more interesting. I need to add something to them such as affect cards. I have figured that there should be about twenty cards (subject to change) and that they all shouldn't be bad. I plan on making ten semi-okay cards, five good cards, and five bad cards. 
• I got several suggestions that people wanted to be able to screw people over in the game. This lead to the idea of a malicious ghost idea. Basically, this ghost is controlled by everyone playing the game. For every turn that you make, the person to your right takes the same turn. If the malicious ghost lands on or goes past your character, you will either lose a turn or start back at the entrance. 
• The original character cards had the full description of the characters story. The beginning, middle, and end. I was suggested that this wasn't random enough and could make the game boring. So what I came up with is a way to make the stories and the rooms different each game. First I decided to make an easy, medium, and hard card. You have the basic character card that tells you which ghost you are looking for and the clue to their first room/easy card. Each time you find the right room, you then pull the next level of card until you figure out the hard card. This makes the game much more interesting. This also lead me to a problem that people could get the same room twice in a row. To make sure this doesn't happen, I made each difficulty card have different rooms from the one before them. 
• Rule wise, I need to make sure I discuss the player movement piece, how to pick the player movement piece, and where to place them at the beginning of the game. 
• I need to make it clear that the player to left has your ghost card. 
•  Last but not least, all the grammar. 

I learned a lot from playtesting and hopefully will be able to do more of it to make my game even better. 

Prototype Rulebook

Ghost Hunters

So good that even the ghouls like it

A game by Allie Thomas

20, 2-4

Collect more evidence than your opponents

Blackburn Home for the Criminally Insane use to be the forerunner in treating its patients. That is until someone found out about the way they treated their wards. Now one hundred years later, Blackburn stands abandoned. Yet some say you can still see and hear some of the patients that weren’t lucky enough to make it out with their lives.

Race around the board trying to collect all your ghost cards before your opponents.

Players swap turns moving around the board and investigating rooms. If a room is entered, the player then gets to investigate that room. After the investigation is over, whether successful or not, the players turn is over.

Game Components

The board.

Affect cards. Sixteen ghost cards.

Player pieces. Die. Ghost coin.  

Board has four separate pieces. Print each one out on a separate piece of 8.5 x 11 paper. Tape board together based on color-coded lines. Print out all cards and character pieces. Cut cards out. You will need a die and a coin.

Setting up the game

Shuffle the affect and evidence card separately. Place the affect cards on the affect card square face down. Place one evidence card in each room face down. Each play picks their player piece and puts it on the start square. Each player takes their player card.

Roll the die to see who goes first. The player with the highest number wins.

Turn Order

Roll die           

Move player piece

If possible, investigate. If not, end turn.

If investigating, flip ghost coin. Heads up means look at card. Tails means don’t look at card.

End of turn

First Phase

Roll the die to see if how many spaces you move.

Second Phase

Whatever number on the die you rolled, move that many spaces.

Player can move forward or backward, no diagonals.

Roll a four on a six-sided die, move four spaces toward the room of your choice.

Third Phase

If possible, enter a room and start investigation. Pick what item you are going to investigate with and then flip the ghost coin.

When you enter a room, this is where you will investigate to see if there is a ghost in the room.

You roll a four, you move your piece two spaces and into a room. You decide that you want to investigate with your camera, so you tell the other players that. Next flip the coin to see if the investigation is a success or not.

Check for Victory

If you get heads up, your investigation is successful and you can look at the ghost card in the room. If it applies to you, you can take the card. If it does not apply to you, put the card back face down. To trick the other players, you can put the card back down even if it applies to you.

How the card applies to you is based on what item you investigated with. On your character card, when you picked camera (or whatever item you chose) there is a number next to the item. If the camera has a five next to it and the ghost card has a camera and a five next to it, which means it does apply to you. If the number and item don’t match, the card doesn’t apply to you.

End of turn

Turn ends.

Play passes to the left.

Glossary

Player piece – Coin with your characters face on it.

Character card – Card that matches the player’s character piece.

Ghost Coin – Coin with a ghost on one side. You flip it when figuring out if your investigation is a success.

Evidence card – cards with ghost on them.

Affect card – affects gameplay in someway.  

EMF – Electronic magnetic field detector.

Strategy tips and design notes

If you successfully investigate a room, you don’t have to take the card after you look at it. You can mark down that that specific card is in that room and then put back down. This will lead other players to believe that that room doesn’t have your card, which means it could have theirs. The other players will waste their time trying to investigate that room now. Of course that puts you at risk a bit because another player could find all his evidence before you.

Theme and Concept

  Out of the twenty ideas that I came up with while brainstorming, the one that I thought would deliver a memorable and entertaining experience was ghost hunting. So, the theme of my game will be just that, ghost hunting. What I'm trying to convey with this theme is the experience of what its like to go ghost hunting, going into a believed haunted location and exploring. Ghost hunting is where you collect evidence, usually on an electronic device, to try and prove that there is paranormal things happening in that location. 

  Researching ghost hunting, the obvious thing that would come up is Ghost Hunters. I watched a couple episodes to figure out what goes into ghost hunt. Everything in the show helped sell the ghost hunting theme. The color scheme makes everything seem very creepy and mysterious. There is a lot of dark colors, black and white contrasting, and greens. There are occasional bright colors when they use the thermal imagers, but overall it's a dark show. The music in the show is also very creepy, which adds to the creepy ghost hunting theme. The cameras they use are usually very close to the investigators faces, to make it seem like you're there. Like anyone can do it. When they cut to commercials they have creepy little scenes which convey the feelings of a ghost hunt. They creepy factor. They also do a lot of different camera angles. Also, the investigators are always talking about ghost hunting, so you're constantly thinking about it. 

  I'm going to incorporate as much as I can from a real ghost investigation, which includes the color schemes. So I would like to incorporate a lot of the colors used above. Ghost hunting is done in the dark, so it makes sense that the color scheme would be dark. I plan on having brighter accent colors, like the green and blue used above. I will probably try and incorporate the yellow and red also. 

Brainstorming Board Game Ideas

Trying to come up with a singular idea for a board game is overall pretty easy. That is until you have try and make it playable. Give them game rules, make obstacles, figure out the mechanics and that becomes a whole new ball game. I'm going to start off with the easy stuff, just small combos of words to generate the creative juices.

• Werewolf game. Kinda like clue. Who is the werewolf? 
• Werewolf game. Race between werewolf and hunter towards some kind of goal
• Monster game. Kid is tired of being afraid of monsters in his room so him and his sleepover buds go monster hunting
• Motherboard game
• Mob war game. Guess who mixed with Stratego 
• Game of Thrones type of game. Different families fighting over the throne of the kingdom
• Release the Kraken game
• Element game
• Ghost hunter game. Try and capture evidence of ghosts. Person with the most evidence at the end wins
• Haunted house walkthrough game
• Booby trap game where each player sets up booby traps for the other players to get through
• Kidnap game. Race other players to kidnap the CEO and get away with it. Lots of sabotage
• Flying boat game. Customize your flying boat then race it around the board. Can equip boats with guns or speed boosts. First around the board 5 times wins
• 4th floor krakens game. Collect the 8 items to become the master of the kraken!
• Pug Life. Be the baddest pug in the neighborhood
• Zombie game. Play as a horde of zombies trying to eat the last survivors
• Armadillo roll. Roll your armadillos into boxes to collect items
• Rat extermination game. Each player is a pest control worker. Exterminate the more rats in 20 mins than the others to win
• Zombie game. The first person to get through the town without getting bitten wins. If you get bitten you get to go after the other players
• Christmas light game. You are an elf trying to light Santa's christmas lights. To do so you must rush through the maze picking up as many lights as you can
• FInd Santa's reindeer. All of Santa's reindeer got out and now it's your job to find them. Whoever finds the most reindeer by the end wins

So there are 20 ideas. Good, bad, and ugly ones. At the moment my personal favorites are the mob game, the kraken ones, the ghost hunting ones, and the second zombie one. Each one has its merits and some major problems at the moment but now that I have it narrowed down a bit, I can start figuring out how they're going to work.