With it being Halloween, there were lots of treats and some very fine spooky-themed attire to go along with the “Feature Game“, Betrayal at Mystery Mansion.  This is a Scooby-Doo themed re-implementation of Betrayal at House on the Hill, a semi-cooperative game, where players work together until there is a haunting and one player takes on the role of the bad guy.  So, the first task for the evening was to decide who was going to take on the roles of Mystery Inc., which precipitated lots of discussion about which was the best character.  Scrappy got short-shift from Pink, though others were less dismissive.  In any case, Scrappy was not an option, and before long, Sapphire, Pink and Pine joined Jade to solve the mystery.

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Jade, as the group leader, took the role of Fred, while Pink and Pine enthusiastically engaged in the game as Scooby Doo and Shaggy.  That left Sapphire to choose from Velma or Daphne and he went for brains over bimbette.  The group spent quite a bit of time exploring the mansion collecting clues and the like, before the haunt finally started.  As Sapphire was the one to trigger the haunt, Velma was “temporarily lost in the woods” as he took on the roles of the bad guys, a Spectre and a female character called Sharon who was being possessed and controlled by the Spectre.  As the game progressed, it became apparent that the Spectre was her great uncle who was trying to control her to gain access to documents that would enable him to take control of the family fortune.

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The Scooby Gang (minus Scrappy Doo, Daphne and the now lost Velma) had to track down and battle the Spectre and try break the spell controlling Sharon.  As the villain, Sapphire rolled very well and it was very hard for the Gang to pin him down.  Fred ended up stunned at one point, but thankfully revived after missing a turn.  Shaggy scoffed piles of Scooby Snacks in order to re-roll, but the dice weren’t with him.  Scooby himself, however, did very well and survived his battle with the Spectre then was able to recharge in one of the special rooms of the mansion.  In the end the Mystery Inc. won the day and the great uncle was unmasked and announced that he “would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you pesky kids”!

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Meanwhile, there were two other games underway on the neighbouring tables.  Blue, Plum and Byzantium eschewed Witch’s Brew (which plays better with more people) and opted for the slightly bigger, beefier, boardgame version of the same game, Broom Service.  Both games rely on the players having a personal deck of Character cards and a lead and follow mechanism.  Each player starts by choosing a set number of Characters from their deck, each with different actions.  The first player then chooses one to lead with and announces that they are either “Brave” or “Cowardly”.  If they choose Cowardly, they can take the action straight away, whereas, if they choose Brave, they must wait until everyone has played to see if they can take the more powerful action.

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The next player must follow if they have the card in hand, and has the same decision to make—be a Coward and take the weaker action, or be Brave, and risk being gazumped by a later player, as there can only be one Brave player taking the powerful action.  The Brave player (or the most recent Brave player) then leads with another card.  In the card game, Witch’s Brew, players are collecting tokens to give them points, however, in Broom Service, there is an additional “Travelling Salesman” pick-up and deliver type of mechanism.  Players have two Witch-meeples which travel the land collecting potions and delivering them locations to get points.  This time, it was a really, really close game, despite everyone doing different things.

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Byzantium prioritised collecting Lightening Bolts and Blue concentrated on collecting potions and delivering them.  While they both headed south and contrived to get in each-other’s way, Plum headed north and fell foul of one of the events which left her stuck with no good move in the final round.  Blue kept forgetting about the “Bewitched Roles” which can be used but with a hefty three point penalty and lost six points as a result.  Byzantium assumed he would be the only one to consciously choose to take the hit and thus guarantee he could be Brave, but happened to do that exactly when Blue picked them as well and lost the advantage when he led with those roles.

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As the game came to a close, it was clear it was going to be close with Blue ahead by a single point with sixty points scored during the game.  She lots of resources left while Byzantium had none but lots of Lightening Bolts, and Plum had some of both.  Initially, Blue and Byzantium tied with seventy-three, just two points ahead of Plum.  That gave Blue victory with the tie break (the most left over resources), but that was only until the miss-count was spotted and Blue lost one point and with it her Winning Witch Medal, instead taking second place by a single point.

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While the first two tables were playing spooky-themed games, Black and Purple led Teal and Cobalt in the monster-mad Finstere Flure (aka Fearsome Floors).  This is a game where players are trying to escape from Fürst Fieso before the castle collapses and without getting eaten.  The idea is very simple: first players move all their pieces the number of spaces shown on their visible side, then the Monster moves.  The Monster moves according to a stack of tiles, either moving a set number or moving until he eats.  The Monster moves one step forwards then looks straight ahead, left and then right. If he sees a player, he turns and moves towards them.

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Thus, the Monster looks, moves, looks, moves until he either runs out of spaces to move, or eats someone.  The game ends after fifteen rounds.  It is simple enough, but there are a few little elements that add to the fun.  Firstly, each player piece moves a total of seven spaces over two turns, but while some alternate three and four space moves, others are more variable, with the most extreme moving six spaces and then one space on the next turn; these different pieces require different tactics.  Players can’t land on another player, if they walk into a rock they push it and if you step in a pool of blood, they slide across it.

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Finally, if the Monster walks into a wall he appears elsewhere on the board adding a further layer of unpredictability.  The game opened with a bang when the first Monster tile revealed was a “Two Kill”, that is to say, the monster keeps moving until he’s eaten twice.  From there, it was carnage.  Everyone had someone eaten, with some multiple times.  There were people who managed to escape from Fürst Fieso, though it wasn’t easy of course.  Everyone managed to get at least one piece out of the castle, with Purple and Cobalt managing to get two pieces out.  The winner, however, was Black who liberated three of his people.

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They were the first to finish, so moved on to play the recent release, Ticket to Ride: Ghost Train.  This is really just a variant of First Journey, a simpler version of the group favourite, Ticket to Ride, aimed at children and non-gamers with super-sized pieces.  Like the original game, players take it in turns to either take “two parade float” cards (in this case blind), or pay cards to place trains on the map.  However, instead of scoring points for placing trains, the game is essentially a race game.  Players start with three Tickets and every time they complete one, they draw a replacement.  The winner is the player who completes the most Tickets.

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This time, Teal took an early night, but Black, Purple and Cobalt went at it with spooky enthusiasm.  As a different take on the original, they found this a very enjoyable alternative.  As well as Tickets, players can also win “Trick or Treat” bonuses for connecting the Dark Forest region to the Seashore region.  Black and Purple both took a “Trick or Treat” bonus, but the winner was Cobalt who finished with six Tickets, one more than Purple who would have taken another if she’d had just a little more time.  That wasn’t the only Ticket to Ride game of the night however, as the Scooby Gang played a quick game of Ticket to Ride: Berlin once they had solved their mystery.

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Ticket to Ride: Berlin is one of the mini versions, and there was a little chat about these and which ones people had played.  The first mini version was a “demo” game the publisher used to introduce people to the game at conventions.  Since then, there have been a series of City versions, with New York, London, Amsterdam and San Francisco all featuring and Berlin being the most recent (with Paris to come next year).  These all feature the same basic mechanism as the original game (including the scoring of points for placing trains unlike the First Journey type games), but they have fewer train pieces and a smaller map.  The Berlin map, is long and thin, but the big difference is that players have mixture of Trams and U-Bahn pieces.

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Tram and U-Bahn routes are paid for in similar ways, though only one U-Bahn piece is needed to mark them and they score slightly more points.  Once the differences had been highlighted by Pine and Pink (who played this together a few weeks back), everyone got down to business.  Jade and Sapphire dominated the West while Pink and Pine concentrated on the East, though the geography of the map meant everyone had to include East-West connections in their network.  It was a hard-faught close game with both Jade and Sapphire taking negative points due to incomplete Tickets.  Pine completed five Tickets and Pink finished six.

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Pine’s Tickets were more lucrative, however, and he took victory with sixty-one points, while Jade with forty-nine just pipped Pink by two points in the struggle for second place.  Everyone had enjoyed the game, and Jade commented that it was one of his favourite renditions of Ticket to Ride so far—indeed, the addition of a second set of transport seems to have been much more successful in this mini version than it was in the full-sized Rail & Sails where it made it longer and more fiddly without making it significantly better.  While everyone else was playing and then discussing the merits of different versions of Ticket to Ride, the Crafty Trio, Plum, Blue and Byzantium had finished Broom Service and squeezed in a quick game of Dinosaur Drafting with Draftosaurus.

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This is a fun little game that we play quite a bit, where players choose one Dinosaur from a handful, add it to their Park and then pass the rest on.  Dino-placement is slightly restricted by the roll of a die, with everyone getting points for how they occupy their pens.  Usually, the group plays with the Summer board, but with the cold weather, the group decided to play with the alternate, Winter board which introduces new and different pens.  These include the Well-Ordered Wood (Dinosaur types must alternate); Lovers’ Bridge (giving six points for each pair of Dinosaurs separated by the bridge); the Lookout (contains one Dinosaur and scores two points for each one of that type in their right neighbour’s pen).

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The most challenging, however is the Pyramid, which holds up to six Dinosaurs in a layered structure, but dinosaurs of the same species may not be placed adjacent to each other (horizontally or vertically).  Blue got into a mess with this, and was stuck with a Dinosaur she could not place at the end as a result.  Plum and Byzantium did slightly better and were able to capitalise more on the Quarantine Zone, which allows players to move the single occupant at the end of the game.  In the end, it was a tight game (though not as tight as Broom Service), in which Plum ran out the victor, three points ahead of Byzantium.

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Learning outcome: They’d have got away with it if it weren’t for those pesky kids!