PackOGames: Boo

We had about an hour to burn before going to a coworker's wedding, and a board game or card game is a good way to chill out.  I grabbed a few new games last week (Happy Little Dinosaurs, some weird Escape Room card game, and two PackOGames: Bus and Boo), and I felt like Boo would be a good fit.  It's another of the PackOGames series, games with cards the size of sticks of gum, packaged with the clever "PackOGames" (instead of pack of gum) name.  Our previous favorite was Dig, which was described here.  

We only got to play Boo one time through.  Basically, the cards are divided into three sets based on the color of the tick marks: black, white or green.  The green cards are used to build the initial gateway to the graveyard, an exact pattern that you always start with.  Each card had three spaces, with either a black ghost, a white ghost or a tombstone.  The basic idea is that you place one card on the board each turn, touching any other card, and then each ghost on the card will "scare" the first opposing ghost in its line of sight that is not looking back at it.  When a ghost is scared, its card is flipped over and the ghost change color and direction.  Always flip along the long axis.

So it's like a weird kind of Reversi game with ghosts.  You get to choose which ghost scares first, and different choices can give very different results.  On our first run through, we skipped the rule that the ghosts of the opposite color on the active card will scare your guys in return.  I also reversed the rule about directions.  To me, it made sense that you could only scare a ghost that was looking at you.  I mean, how can you scare someone who doesn't know you're there?  Anyway, the actual rule is that you scare the first oppposite colored ghost who IS NOT looking at you.

The first time through, we kept reading the scare rule and trying to figure it out.  I'm sure that once you get really quick at it, this could be a lot of fun.

Here is the official How to Play video from the game makers.