I've seen copies of Ghosts! many, many times and never gave it a moments thought. I assumed that it was yet another boring old American game with little or nothing innovative or exciting about it. This proved to be an incorrect assumption as I found the game to be rather interesting despite its simplistic appearance.
Each player has 8 identical ghosts, 4 are marked with a blue dot (your "good" ghosts) and the other 4 with a yellow dot (your "bad" ghosts). These markings are hidden from your opponent so she cannot tell your good ghosts from your bad. The board is a 6 x 6 grid and you set your pieces up any way you like on the middle four spaces of your two rearmost rows. Play is very simple—one your turn you may move one of your pieces one space forward or backwards, left or right (no diagonal movements). If you move onto an opposing ghost you capture it (and reveal whether it was a "good" or "bad" ghost). There are several ways to win:
1. Move one of your blue ghosts off an opposing corner of the board.
2. Capture all your opponents' blue ghosts.
If this was it, the game would be boring and trivial, however there's a third condition:
3. Your opponent captures all your yellow ghosts.
That is, if your opponent captures all your yellow ghosts, YOU win! This rather unique condition is what makes the game. If your opponent has already captured three of your yellow ghosts then he's in a bit of trouble as any capture he makes runs the risk of losing him the game. This also creates the fun of the game, namely that of trying to bluff your opponent into thinking a certain piece is a good or bad ghost.
Play is (or should be) very quick and revolves around moving your ghosts towards your opponent's corners. Since the board is so small, pieces are very constricted and furious exchanges occur. Depending on how these fall out the game then switches its focus to the other two possible victory conditions. If you've captured three blue ghosts then you can work towards finding that last one. If you've lost three yellow ghosts you can try to bluff your opponent into capturing your remaining one. Ideally you'll want to make moves that move you closer to any of the three victory possibilities. I've found that the game does allow for some very clever moves in this regard. Still, the board-play is very simplistic so it's best not to praise this aspect too highly. What raises the level of the game is how it incorporates the element of bluffing into the mix. This is a game that would be pointless if played against a computer, you really do need the inscrutability of a human opponent.
Why is this so? Well, the game is very light and while there is skill involved, there is a powerful element of luck. Quite often the game will come down to a 50/50 random chance situation. Your opponent has only one yellow ghost left and has moved a ghost onto your corner of the board. Do you capture it or not? If you do and it's the last yellow, you'll lose. If you don't and it's blue then you'll still lose (when your opponent uses his next turn to move it off the board). The "strategy" that can tip things in your favour is how well you are able to deduce which ghosts are the good ones based on how your opponent has been using them.
Generally speaking, players will be very bold with their yellow
ghosts. After all, if they lose them then it moves them closer to
victory. A little more caution is required with their blue ghosts
as they look to either preserve them or sneak them off the corners
of the board. Knowing this, you can try and figure out which
pieces are which simply by how they're being moved. Naturally,
this leads into levels of bluffing and double-bluffing, for
example by being very aggressive with your blue ghosts in the
hopes of fooling your opponent. This can lead to a
Rock-Paper-Scissors situation however, where it starts to become
irrelevant what you do. Are you thinking one step ahead of your
opponent, or two? Fortunately there's an easy way to address this
and that's by playing a series of games. An individual game is
very quick, often less than 5 minutes. (If you're taking much
longer than this I'd suggest that you're over-thinking it.) As
such it's very easy to play a best of 5, 7 or 9 games and this
allows more skillful play to affect the outcome. It also has a
secondary effect and that's that you can start to detect patterns
in your opponents' play which you can then turn to your advantage.
Still, there's no denying the heavy influence of luck.
As with many Milton Bradley games, the components are very good, in this case an attractive board and 16 large plastic ghosts. The game has been released in a couple of different versions by different companies, one of the more recent is a German edition called Geister by Drei Magier Spiele. I purchased my Milton Bradley version second-hand and while it claims that the ghosts are glow-in-the-dark, mine certainly did not seem to possess this supernatural ability.
I'm very pleased with this recent discovery and I've been playing it quite a lot. So long as it's played quickly (and over a series of games), Ghosts! deserves a high recommendation.
- Greg Aleknevicus
