Spes Magna Games

I recently blogged about prizes I’d won by entering Benchleydale and Beyond contests. Since then, I’ve received the prizes. I’ve also helped a nephew, my sister, my wife, and my son fight ghosts and hunt for treasures. I do live an exciting life, don’t I?

First up: Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! from Mattel Games. I learned about this great family game from The Tabletop Bellhop. The bellhop Moe T. writes about this boardgame on his blog. You can read his words right here. Before I talk a bit about the game, let’s look at a picture.

Nota Bene: All of the pics in this post embiggen if you click them.

In short: Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! is a hoot. When we first set it up to play, we had fun sticking the ghosts on our fingers and noticing the functional backpacks on the player pieces. At first, we were a bit skeptical about the game play. It just seemed too easy to roll the dice, move to the rooms, retrieve the treasures, and escape the haunted house unscathed. You can fight the ghosts, but the ghosts can’t fight you. But here’s the rub: Each player turn, a card gets turned up, which almost always adds another ghost to one of the rooms in the haunted house.

(A quick aside about the cards: They’re delightful; details on the cards sync up with little details on the gameboard.)

But back to the increasing number of ghosts. When a room gets its third ghost, the ghosts turn into a red and scary haunt. It takes two players working together to defeat a haunt, and if the house ends up with six haunts, that’s it. Game over. Everyone at the table loses, and the undead win. Ooh, spooky.

Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! was great fun, and we just played the basic game. The advanced game ups the difficulty. This is one of funner so-called kids’ games I’ve played. If you’d like to buy your own Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters!, click over to Moe T.’s blogpost and use his affiliate link. Moe T. does great work with The Tabletop Bellhop, and his affiliate links help him ensure the great work continues.

A set of Atmar’s Cardography cards from Norse Foundry was among the prizes I won via the aforementioned Benchleydale contests. The cards come in a standard playing card sized box, and the cards themselves are sturdy and a bit glossy, just like I expect a new deck of cards to be. Take a gander at the pic below.

On a whim, I shuffled the deck and dealt out the top nine cards, which I then assembled into a mini-dungeon.

Note the numbers on the cards. The deck comes with a quad-fold mini-document that briefly describes each numbered map location. If you look at the mini-dungeon pic, you’ll see location 27. According to the key, location 27 has “Many fires with large cauldrons simmering and boiling.” Down in the southeast corner, that blurry 44 means a “Dining hall filled with fur tapestries. Magic torch in the center of the main table.”

(Another Nota Bene: It can be annoying how my hands shake.)

My Atmar’s Cardography deck is neat. Good production values, clever concept, and Norse Foundry has written downloadable modules based on the cards. The modules are available on their website, and are written for Fate and 5E D&D. I don’t how much I’d stick to the deck’s in-box location key, but I can see me dealing out the cards to create random dungeons. Between the number of cards in the deck and the various ways the orientations for card placement, the deck has the potential to generate quite a large number of dungeon maps.

Tags: reviews