“It’s Christmas
time…and there’s no need to be afraid.” Unless you’re playing the Ghostbusters board
game, that is.
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I spend the day
at my sister-in-law’s flat with my mother-in-law, my wife and our friend
Richard, who was kind enough to give us the game as a family gift. We settled
down to play it after dinner, and like any new board game tackled on a festive
occasion, it took some getting to grips with. While the design is excellent,
and was clearly put together with fans’ interests at heart, the instructions
are unbelievably complicated. You need the Enigma Machine to decipher them.
Either that, or some sort of code-breaking degree (though I’m sure there’s no
such qualification).
While it left us
flummoxed for at least an hour, with Richard taking responsibility – and therefore the
brunt – of the instruction manual translation, by the time we’d got our brains
around it, it was a lot of fun. I would have happily played it again
straight away. What’s great about it is the attention to detail, and the fact
you can put the board's pieces together in a variety of formations to keep
things interesting. It may not have the clarity of rules of Red Hot round on
Big Break (“You’ve got to pot as many balls as you can”), but it’s a good game,
good game. Sorry for the game-show catchphrase paraphrasing, but it’s late in
the day.