Scream!

In Scream!, subtitled Campers vs Creatures, the 2-5 players are competing to end the game with the lowest value of cards in their line up. Your line of cards represents your camp site and the cards themselves represent spooky creatures that are haunting the campers.

Scream! is designed by Ted Alspach and published by Bézier Games. It's a sequel to and variant of the card game Scram! (Bézier Games); in effect, a melding of Scram! and the card game Cheat. All but one of the cards in your camp site start off face down, and tho' you can look at all your cards at the start of the game you'll then need to remember which cards are where because each turn you'll be drawing a card, either from the face-down draw pile or from the top of the discard pile, and an option will be to swap it with a card in your camp site. If you have two or more cards of the same value, you can swap all of them for the card you draw, and if they are face-down cards you can claim they are the same when in reality they are not. It's up to other players to decide whether or not to call you out on a bluff. You'll be penalised for a bogus claim, and the player who challenged you will be rewarded with a free discard, but that player will be penalised if they called you out and it turned out you weren't in fact bluffing.

As an alternative to swapping cards in your camp site, cards taken from the draw deck can be played to take the action set out in their text. And again there's similar scope here for bluffing because cards with a value of 7 or more let you take actions affecting other cards with particular values, and you can claim a face-down card qualifies regardless of its true value, provided of course that none of your opponents challenge you...

It can be tough to maintain an accurate recall of exactly which cards are where. And that's not entirely surprising, particularly at higher player counts, because there are several card actions that let players swap cards with those of other players. That means that even the most honest of players can find themselves having to take a chance on a bluff...

Tho' players will almost certainly end up lying to each other and getting caught out in their lies, it's all good-natured and you'll find it gives rise to much hilarity, so that Scream! has much of the feel of being a party game. Unlike Scram!, Scream! can be played with just two players, tho' it's at its chaotic best at higher player counts. The game is played over three rounds, with a round usually taking 10 minutes provided players don't dither over whether or not they want to challenge.

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