Spirits of Christmas
- Board's Eye View
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
Designed by John S Bailey and published by Humble Bard Games, Spirits of Christmas is a cooperative game for 1-6 players that represents Charles Dickens' seasonal classic A Christmas Carol. As in the Dickens' novella, players use the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future to take Ebenezer Scrooge on a voyage of discovery, showing him the consequences of his actions with a view to reforming his character. It's a seasonal game that all the family can join in to play.
Each player has a hand of spirit cards representing the virtues of Contentment, Compassion and Charity, and the actions you take are determined by the position of the Ghost on a rondel. Movement around the rondel costs a coin from the players' shared stash, and - in keeping with Scrooge's initial character - you need to be fairly miserly with your wealth because it's Game Over when the money runs out. You start off with just 15 coins, plus 5 more in a discard pile. However, some cards will award you one or more coins from the discard pile, and over the course of the game you have three of Marley's Chains that can each be discarded to take five coins from the discard pile... at least when you're playing in easy mode...
Your actions take place in a randomised row of scene cards representing each Ghost's chapter of the story, and you'll be meeting a scene card objective by spending the various combinations of spirit cards to match the virtue symbols shown on the scene card that the Scrooge meeple is on. In that sense, the core mechanic has similarities with the Adventure Book games published by Ravensburger.
Spirits of Christmas is a fully cooperative game but players can only share broad hints about the cards in their hand. However, one of the options on the rondel is a Give action - requiring any player to give one or more cards to another player. Shared hand management through Give actions is likely to be key to players' collective success in satisfying the requirements of each Ghost's scene cards.
Like the Ghosts in Dickens' story, Spirits of Christmas is actually quite forgiving: you should expect to be able to successfully complete the chapters of scene cards for the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, but your collective score for each Ghost will depend on how efficiently you completed each chapter, as measured, for example, by the size of your remaining pool of coins. The game incorporates some variants that allow you to alter the difficulty level. Ordinarily you would start the game with a Gift from Marley's Ghost (one of three special abilities or actions) but you can step up the difficulty by foregoing Marley's Gift and reducing the number of Chains available to you. Play in Humbug! mode with no Gift, no Chains, and certain limitations on your movement, and you'll find Spirits of Christmas very much harder to beat. However you play tho', Spirits of Christmas makes a great and seasonally appropriate choice for all the family to play together during the upcoming festivities.