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Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 45 minutes+ depending upon your knowledge of horror
Ages: 13 to immortal
Pieces: Deck of 200 trivia cards, 52 cardboard tombstones, 4 pawns, 1 die, and one grisly game board containing empty slots for tombstones.
Are you a Goth? Do you think you know all about the mysterious creatures of the night, gloomy poetry, and frightening tales of the dark? Have you seen all the latest horror movies and rented all the creepy ones from the past? And are you up-to-date on all gothic, punk, and industrial music? If you answered yes to one or more (hopefully all, in order to win this game) of these questions, then Goth is the game for you! Test your trivia knowledge in the five ghastly categories: Movie Mayhem, Alchemy (scary true facts and folklore), Music Macabre, Bloody Tales and Poetry, and Stiffs (a miscellaneous grab bag of especially difficult questions).
The object of this game is a simple one: be the first player to obtain all thirteen tombstones for your grave plot. Play starts as each ‘necromancer’ chooses a bloody square that contains their casket. Players go round and round the board, answering horror trivia questions. Each number rolled on the die corresponds to a specific category. If a six is rolled, you choose any category you want. If you answer the question correctly, you receive a tombstone. You do not lose a tombstone for an incorrect answer. But beware — the board contains horrific spaces of doom called “haunted squares.”
There are four types of haunted squares: Grave Robber, Dead, Full Moon, and Pool of Blood. When you land on a Grave Robber square, you are in fact, quite lucky, because you can steal another player’s tombstone. In addition, you get the normal question and can receive an additional tombstone! You can easily make a comeback in the game by landing on this space plenty of times. The great thing about this square is even if you’re clueless about the questions, you can still get close to winning. If you are in need of your thirteenth tombstone, you cannot steal the tombstone on the Grave Robber space. Instead, you must answer a question correctly. The Dead square simply means you lose a turn — you are not asked a question. Landing on Full Moon means that everyone in the game has a chance to answer the question. Whoever answers correctly the fastest receives the tombstone. When playing with two people, the Full Moon square can mean ghastly things: for answering the question right, you do not receive a tombstone — if you answer wrong, you lose one instead! This is the space you will grow to dread if you’re playing with two people and your knowledge of horror isn’t so great. Lastly, players in the game own their own Pool of Blood square. When an opponent lands on your square, you choose the category they have to answer a question from. If you land on your own blood, you choose any category you want. If two players occupy the same space, the person who first occupied it steals the other player’s tombstone, and that player moves back one space. Haunted squares are immune to the previous rule and can be shared.
This game is very fun for enlightened people in the “gothic” culture and lovers of horror movies and literature. I don’t recommend it for people who are not so inclined, as the game will prove difficult, boring, and could take an eternity to play. Even for people who feel they are knowledgeable within the genre (which I considered myself to be), the questions can still be bloody difficult. I realized I didn’t know half as much as I thought I did — especially when it came to Swedish Goth bands (I had never heard of any!). It simply depends upon the depth of your knowledge. Sample questions are: “Sadomasochists From Beyond the Grave was the original title for what 1987 film?” (answer: Hellraiser); “What NYC founders of punk rock bands became club CBGB’s regular band starting in 1974?” (answer: The Ramones); “Where did Mary Shelley’s inspiration come from for her novel Frankenstein?” (answer: a dream). There are questions on each side of all cards, and thus many rounds of the game can be played without duplicating questions.
Join the dark side and play along…if you dare!
