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Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters

#1267BGG ↗

2013 · 2-4 players · 30min · weight 1.63 · 4,361 ratings

port: no portdifficulty: Easy
BGGv4 widev4v4 deep5Sources3Rules cardCandidate0.654Deep dive
Bayes
6.52
Users rated
4,361
Owned
9,305
Wishing
1,522

At a glance — v4 wide

Controlled-vocabulary primitives + 8-axis MDA aesthetic vector. Vocab v1.

Core loop (micro)

Roll dice to move, pick up a jewel if you end on one, then fight a ghost if present on your space.

MDA aesthetic vector (0–3)
Sensation
1
Fantasy
2
Narrative
1
Challenge
1
Fellowship
2
Discovery
1
Expression
0
Submission
3
Mechanic-interaction primitives (5)
  • [3]escalating_threat— “as their ghoulish numbers grow, the treasure hunters must work together; house becomes fully haunted
  • [2]attrition_clock— “acquire all eight jewels and escape the house before it becomes fully haunted or face gruesome demise
  • [3]_other:roll_and_move_coop— “Players roll dice to determine how many spaces they move; Roll / Spin and Move cooperative game
  • [0]cooperative_with_traitor— “four intrepid treasure hunters on a quest; fully cooperative, no traitor
  • [2]cascading_failure— “as their ghoulish numbers grow, the treasure hunters must work together; before it becomes fully haunted
discovery_score: -0.350

Archetype fits — v4 deep

How well this game shape maps to mobile archetype templates. Composite is a weighted sum of the 10 fit dimensions.

ArchetypeCompositeLTFSessionComboArcShare5inOnboard
Coop
Genuine cooperative_play with shared fail-state (house fills with ghosts) maps cleanly to Pandemic-shape coop. But open-information board (no hidden hand, no communication constraint) means bluff_info_asymmetry is small — the strongest single coop signal is missing.
5.308.0847357
Balatro
Roll-and-move + escalating_threat (more ghosts spawn) gives a tense ante-climb feel, but no engine_growth, no joker stacking — pure dice-managed area-clear. Fixed map and ghost deck cap procgen extensibility.
4.807.0637367
Cozy
Coop-or-Solo tier (Cooperative Game) — no cap on loss_tolerance, scored against tone. Family-friendly tone is cozy-adjacent but escalating_threat (rising ghost count) injects pressure that breaks the no-fail spatial Carcassonne shape; only mid-tier cozy fit.
4.305.0625367
Snap
Coop kid game has no PvP shape, no factional deck composition, no hidden-card reveal — Snap's load-bearing pillars (bluff_info_asymmetry, lane combat) are absent. Wrong category.
4.006.0426356
Wordle
Family coop board crawl is an order of magnitude longer than Wordle's 60-90s, and there's no compact emoji-row output. The friendly loss-tolerance is the only Wordle-adjacent feature.
3.807.0315455

Translation candidate

Composite fit_score = bayes×0.30 + wish×0.18 + compress×0.17 + difficulty×0.20 + headroom×0.15.

bayes_norm×0.300.175
wish_norm×0.180.451
compress_norm×0.171.000
diff_norm×0.201.000
port_headroom×0.151.000
fit_score (total)0.654= 0.654
Difficulty reasoning

Simple roll-and-move coop with grid movement; trivial to port. Family-game depth limits meta-layer ambitions.

Closest loop translation
none yet

Sources (3)

Inputs to rules-card synthesis. Click any pill with ↗ to open the original source.

BGG tags

Categories (4)
AdventureChildren's GameFantasyHorror