WE GOT ONE! A Ghostbusters Board Game Review

I had this 80s Ghostbusters board game as a micro-George: I was able to play it again just last year when I was cat-sitting for a friend that had it in her wardrobe.

After a couple of days of Christmas laziness - much of it spent stuffing as many Lindor chocolates in our mouths as is humanly possible - the good lady and I finally burst open one of my Christmas presents.  The Ghostbusters board game was set-up and we decided to spend an evening playing it to see what we made of it.

No matter how many players are in the game you always use the same amount of Ghostbusters, i.e. a full team of the four GBs themselves.  Therefore in a two person game it's two per player, so I took on Ray and Winston while Sister Superior took Peter and Egon - or as she called him, "Sexy, Sexy Egon."  (Remember she finds me sexually attractive, so obviously she has unusual tastes.

Set-up at the beginning of our first mission.  The ECTO-1 has arrived on the street, with all four Ghostbusters in tow, and three open gateways are surrounded by a multitude of ghosts of varying strengths.

So, how did things go down?  Did we like it?  Would I recommend it to my fellow geeks?

Christmas Is Over (If You Want It)

A splendiferous Christmas Torchic from DeviantArt

 I trust that you've all had an enjoyable winter solstice festival of your preferred format.  If you are anything like Sister Superior and I you are happy, albeit somewhat heavier than you were beforehand and in possession of more chocolates than you have any real use for.

The only black mark on my Christmas, really, was the death of my PC monitor on boxing day which necessitated a trip into the sales to get a new one.  It wasn't a huge surprise as it had been behaving a little oddly for a while, but once it properly failed there wasn't much to be done bar trawl about for a quick and dirty replacement.

It wasn't quite this bad - it actually just kept turning itself off and on.

There was also some cultural exchange taking place, with Sister Superior showing me a few films I hadn't seen before.  I had my first viewings of The Santa Clause, Legally Blonde and The Nightmare  Before Christmas this week - while she saw for the first time the third best Christmas movie ever made, Die Hard.

Third best because... well, there are two other films I just can't go a Christmas without watching.

 Now, inevitably, you're going to want to know if I got any interesting gaming type stuff that falls under the remit of this blog.  Well, GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE!  I have!

The Cloister Bell Ringeth

"The Nth Doctor": My Halloween costume this year, mashing elements from a few different incarnations of The Doctor.

After a one-off season which had a veritable mixed bag of games – mostly successful, including a Hellcats and Hockeysticks and Lady Blackbird nights that I should possible expand on some time - we felt it wasn’t quite time to return to one of our other three campaigns yet and that we’d maybe try a short campaign of something else instead to take us through December and the start of January.

Especially with people’s attendance likely to be spotty for the next few weeks due to Christmas nights out, journeys home and bad weather it seemed pointless to commit to a full-on game until we’re clear of Christmas and the New Year. The next game we'd be likely to play, Star Trek, really needs a fairly strict attendance because of the way Primetime Adventures works.

The contents of my pockets: UNIT ID Card, two pocket watches, a Dalek guide book,a  sonic screwdriver, Jelly Babies and some Peter Capaldi-esque flashcards.

The choice of game is one we’ve ran before for one or two sessions at a time – Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space.  I’ve never tried running this over a longer period of time and was interested in how it would feel over a four or eight week block.


Our game kept a standard “Time Lord in a TARDIS plus companions” model, with some people using pre-gens (albeit tweaking them) while a couple of others made their own.  The game could definitely be used for other things – a UNIT or Torchwood game set in a more grounded world might appeal, as might doing something more Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5-y and focusing on slightly shadier alien protagonists.  You could run a party full of Time Lords, perhaps a University class on a field trip or a special operatives team active during the Time War.  Those have never hugely appeals to me personally but others might find it easier to wrap their heads around those premises than one that apes the TV show more overtly.