Base price: $30.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Boxtop Pinball: Haunted House was provided by Pandasaurus Games.
Okay, y’all have been really good this year so I did manage to get one spooky game on the docket. It’s after Halloween now, so I’m in full Christmas Prep mode (Thanksgiving is overrated), but we gotta close down the season with the right stuff. It’s tradition. I’ve been looking forward to this game as someone who loves pinball and dexterity games, so let’s find out more about what’s going on!
In Boxtop Pinball: Haunted House, players take turns flicking dice through a complicated course made from the actual game box! Hitting other players’ dice is fair game, as it usually only matters where your dice are at the end of a round. Bounce off the walls, hit monsters, avoid traps, and try to land in the Haunted Realms or Summoning Zone to maximize the points you get! Will you be able to get a spooky high score?
Contents
Setup
Not a ton that’s too complicated, to be honest. There are a few pieces that go into the game boxes, but get them all out and align it all like so:
You’ll give each player four dice in their color:
And you’ll want to set the score pad aside, for now. The monsters get placed Medusa on Level 1, Frank on Level 2, and Bob on Level 3 on their little standees. Once you’ve done all that, you should be ready to start!
Gameplay
This one’s remarkably uncomplicated. Over three rounds, you’ll each take four turns launching dice to try and score points.
To start, shift the Launch Pad (it can’t go past the confines of the big box) and then place a die of your color, any side up. Flick it and see where it lands. If it goes out of bounds, tough; wherever it lands, it stays until the end of the round (or another die moves it).
A few possible bonuses could happen:
- Monsters: If it hits a monster (or hits another die into a monster), you check off that you hit that monster on this round’s score sheet (unless you’ve already hit it before). Then, move the Monster one level down (or back to the top if it’s already at the bottom). They’ll be worth bonus points later.
- Clues: If you hit a Clue, take it! It’s worth points at the end of the game. You can keep it secret from other players.
- Haunted Realms: Any of the circles with x2 / x3 / x5 multiply the die’s face-up value by that number if it’s still there (or touching the line) at the end of the round. Use them to get big points!
- Summoning Circle / Bonus: If you land within or touch the Bonus Circle, you immediately get to summon a new die from the supply and take another turn. You can summon up to two extra dice each round.
Once everyone has flicked their four (or more) dice, the round ends. Tally up scores, get your dice back, replace the monsters, and refill any empty clue spaces.
Play continues until the end of the third round. Add your subtotals for each round together with your Clue bonuses, and the player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
More dice is more chaos, which can work for or against you. Have a bad hit in a high player count game? As long as you’re still within bounds, you can potentially get lucky and have another player hit you into a Haunted Realm so you can get additional points. That said, the exact opposite can also happen. It’s another one of those Things I Always Say, which is that the number of players tends to increase the variance of the game because there’s just more chaos happening during play. If you enjoy high-chaos play, play with more people. If you want this to be a bit more methodical and strategic, then you probably shouldn’t be playing a dice-based pinball game, but lower player counts might be your best bet. No strong player count preference here, for me.
Strategy
I wouldn’t recommend taking this too explicitly seriously.
- Don’t just slam the dice with 100% of your strength; they’ll just fly off the board. The dice are pretty light, so you can move them pretty easily and you don’t need to put a lot of force behind them to just absolutely launch those bad boys. Keep that in mind, but also, for your first game, just give every player a couple mulligans. It’ll all go smoother.
- Insofar as you can “aim”, try aiming for the monsters or your opponents’ dice. You can try to knock your opponents’ dice out of useful areas or into holes, and hitting monsters you haven’t hit yet is always good, points-wise.
- There are high-value spots on the board; try hitting those. Generally “try to score as many points as possible” is sound strategic advice, but that is kind of the name of the game, here. You want to end up on various spots on the board that give you pretty good multipliers, or on the Summoning Circle so you can launch extra dice.
- Moving around the Launch Pad box can give you some better angles. Firing straight down the center is an okay strategy, but you can usually do better if you’re a bit more flexible with where you’re starting from.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- It’s a goofy Halloween game, so it’s perfect. It’s right up there with Shaky Manor as a perfect late-night Halloween game. I’ve got spookier games, but I don’t have many that are sillier and I’m always searching for the perfect Halloween game night. It’s a great way to pass time between trick-or-treaters.
- Love dexterity games and different ways to make pinball work. They’re all just very active, and I appreciate that.
- It’s just silly fun. There’s not a whole lot of Serious Play that you can have, here. You can try to play strategically, but there’s maybe one or two dexterity games that actually tolerate that kind of nonsense. This is neither of them.
- I like that there are a lot of different outcomes and occurrences. You can do a lot just bouncing around the board, and a lot can happen.
- There’s also a lot that can happen even when it’s not your turn. You can get knocked into special zones and gain end-of-round rewards thanks to another player’s haphazard hit, which kind of rules.
- Turns are aggressively short. It’s really one shot and then you go; it’s great.
- I do love when games use the boxes as the play surface; it’s inventive. ICECOOL did it and I loved it then, Mars Open Tabletop Golf did it and I loved it, and now here we are with another game making the box integral to the experience, and I still love it.
Mehs
- Mostly a nitpick, but I wish you didn’t have to lift up the boxes to get the dice that fell into the holes out. It can just cause things like the Clues and Monsters to shift, which can be a bit annoying.
- This may also be a first print run thing but there are spots where the images on the walls and board don’t quite match up. I think it’s partially related to the Con below but the walls seem to be slightly mismatched. It happens.
Cons
- The game has some construction issues that I assume are a byproduct of mass production, but it does mar the “aesthetic” a little bit. The cardboard inserts that go in the box, in my copy at least, lean pretty aggressively so they’re not particularly “firm” walls. The smallest box also suffers from just some lackluster structural integrity, so it got what we’d refer to in the technical sense as “smooshed”, somewhat, as it was being shipped to me. Neither of these things really negatively impact the game, but they look a bit lower-quality, which is a bummer.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think Boxtop Pinball: Haunted House is a blast! It’s a bit simple, granted, and I’d love to see more intense or elaborate offerings in the future, but what it’s got going for it is pretty good. There’s very low overhead to learning how to play, a pretty low skill floor, and it’s just fun. You can make the game a bit less frustrating for new players by giving them a few free do-overs while they’re learning how much power they need to put behind their hits, but beyond that, just kind of let everyone dive in and figure it out! It’s a slightly more complex game than, say, Shaky Manor, my go-to late-night Halloween game, but this is still a perfect pick for folks who are looking for something less complicated than Betrayal at House on the Hill but want to engage thematically with the season, which I get. Gotta ring in the start of the Winter holidays by finishing strong with Halloween. I do wonder how much of the production issues were just coming from the first print run or so, but I also imagine those aren’t going to necessarily apply across the board. I think the holes in the box needed to be narrower to keep the various extra cardboard from leaning, but as a not-materials-person, I can’t be positive. I’m looking forward to my next play of this (and if BGG is anything to bet on, the probable future releases in this series). If you’re a fan of pinball, you enjoy dexterity games, or you’re looking for a goofy Halloween game, I’d recommend to look no further than Boxtop Pinball: Haunted House! I really enjoyed it.
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