Spøkelser

Spøkelser - snille og slemme (Ghosts - good and bad), is a tactical game for two players. There are no dice or event cards here - it is the tactic and intuition of the players that decides who wins.

Each player gets eight ghosts each, four good ones and four bad. The good ghosts are marked with a light blue dot at the back and the bad with a pink one. In front the good and the bad ghosts look excatly the same. This is because the opposite player should not be able to determine which of your ghosts aregood and which are bad just by looking at them.

The game board reminds of chess, but is built up of only 6x6 squares. When a new game starts, each player puts their ghosts on the game board like this:

	G	G	G	G
	G	G	G	G
	G	G	G	G
	G	G	G	G

When it is your turn you might move one of your ghosts a square up, down, left or right, but not diagonally. If you move to a square where there is a ghost of the opposite player, this ghost is captured and removed from the game. The ghosts move and captures in the same way as the king in chess (but may not move diagonally).

Winning the game

Winner is the player who did either:

• capture all of the good ghosts of the opposite player
• lose all of his bad ghosts
• manage to move one of his good ghosts through to one of the corner squares on the opposite side of the game board

Poor marketing?

Ghosts - good and bad, has never got the recognition I think it deserves. Litors way of marketing this game - with a name and a graphical design that suggests it's a game for little children - must take most of the blame for this. Ghosts is actually a tactical game which reminds more of Checkers and Othello, and I think it would have done better with a more "mature" design. (Actually, Litor is kind of innocent. The graphical presentation of this game comes from Germany. Litor translated Schmidt Spiele und Freizeit's "die guten und die bosen Geister"). Geister was recently republished for the German market by Venice Connection. This time the graphical presentation looks better.

Geister was nominated for Spiel Des Jahre (Game of the Year) in Germany 1982.

Reader comments

meredith norris:

Hi. We played this game once at a game night for kids. We would like to order it for Christmas...any ideas of US distributors of the game?

je:

dvbfd

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