Ghosted is a game by Ryan Noonan where 3-6 players are ghosts trying to solve their own murders. The ghost who can figure out who killed them, with what, and why, before anyone else wins.

Components

The game comes with a rulebook, 36 cards, 12 for each category, 6 evidence boards, 6 dry erase markers, 6 tokens, and 1 die.

The cards come wrapped tightly in plastic, but there’s no specific spot in the box for the cards, so once you unwrap them they’re just free-floating around in the box. They could have at least provided a rubber band or something.

The box was strangely hard to open, but is otherwise mediocre. I like how the game boards stack. There’s some empty space just due to the nature of the components but everything fits as well as it could be expected to.

Gameplay

Each player is given a suspect, a weapon, and a motive. Without looking at them, they put them on their game board so that all the other players can see them. The rest of the cards are divided evenly among the players. On their turn, players roll the die which determines what question they’re allowed to ask about their cards that turn. The first person to correctly guess their 3 cards wins.

Thoughts

The theme is pretty weak. There is lore included for the various suspects but other than that there’s not much in the way of scene-setting here. You could easily get through a game without ever even acknowledging you’re supposed to be ghosts.

The questions are pretty imbalanced. The “yes or no” and “scales of justice” give you way more information than any of the “guess 2 X” options. I would argue that they give way more information to your opponents than they do to you. When you guess 2, you ask a specific person about 2 suspect/weapon/motive cards and if they have one or both, they pick one and secretly show it to you. Since you only ask one person, it’s possible another player could have it, and if one of the cards you ask about is actually your given suspect/weapon/motive, and the person shows you a card, everyone else automatically knows that it can’t be one of theirs, while you’re still in the dark regarding your own card. I suppose it could be argued that this is intentional, that there have to be some worse options on the dice, but it feels like it just drags the game out unnecessarily.

The game is still pretty fun. The rules are simple and easy to explain, game play generally moves pretty quickly and it’s really engaging. It functions similarly to Clue, but having everyone try to figure out a separate set of cards vs one shared set adds an interesting dimension to the deduction gameplay. Also, it’s easy to set up and put away, which is a nice bonus.

Verdict

Ghosted gets 4 out of 5 cthulhus. The theme is really weak and it could use some tweaking, but it’s still a fun game that doesn’t take a lot of setup or rules explanation to get going. You can check it out at the Amazon link below, but remember that we are an Amazon affiliate and if you buy anything from the links provided, we will get some $ back. (4 / 5)