Vicky Aquino: ePortfolio Post 5 (Playtest 1 Unit 3)

Haunting at Midnight

Part 1. Images taken during the playthrough process of the game I chose.

Part 2. Written Component

The list of Unit 3 games I play tested for Forum Post - Rule Sheet 3 V.2 part 2

The game selected:

Hauntings at Midnight

Formal elements

Players- This game is set by default to be played by 2 people, but I advised others to play amongst 3 players for a better playthrough.
For example, when I played the game with friends, we realized that if we played with only one other player it would be obvious who was the entity in the home so with 3 players it was harder to figure out who was who.

The roles of the players are either to be a detective that gets rid of the supernatural or an entity that is haunting your home.

Player interaction pattern can go two ways either player versus player or unilateral competition.

Objective- This game is a tabletop board game with a mix of exploration and solution taking place in the setting of your home.

The goal is to look for the items that are used to get rid of the entity haunting your place. Meanwhile one of the players is secretly a ghost sabotaging your process.

Procedures- Shuffle the identity cards to randomly pick who you will play as in the playtest session. In our game session the first person got a ghost so that automatically assigned the last two players as detectives.

Due to this we had to have the ones who currently were not taking their turn during gameplay to close their eyes so no one would know who the ghost was and who were the detectives.

Detectives go first during game sessions and the ghost goes last. Since the people are not able to see who is who and what the person is doing on their turn, if it happens to be the ghost, they can place different items in different rooms to confuse what kind of entity might be in their home.

The ghost can also meddle with the progress of others by switching items out of different rooms, breaking lights, turning lights off, and when the meter is full it allows the ghost the chance to kill the other players.

Once you have enough evidence and as long as you haven't passed the 5th round you can announce your guess of what entity is there at the room of origin, if you guess right, you win the game.

Rules- The ghost can only move inside the home not outside and circulate the building and can only move 2 times per turn and only do one action at a time. As for the detective they can do two actions per turn. After 5 rounds you should have exorcised an entity by guessing correctly the entity that is there or the detectives die, and the game is over. If the ghost meter tabs get 5 out of the 5 the ghost is able to kill all the detectives and the game can also be over as well.

Resources- A dice used in order to see if an item is in the room, you are in, a meter tab, the detectives, the entities and the items used to bravely guess what entity is there from the items found are used to get rid of that supernatural being.

Conflict- the conflict/dilemma in the game I encountered as a ghost was that I had limited actions I could do per turn, although I could move to two different rooms and do one other action the detectives seemed to have the upper hand, since it was 2 against 1. My opponents were the other players I was playtesting with, it was kill or be killed.

Boundaries- The literal boundaries of the game are to stay within the home and not wander off outside the building. Other boundaries were the limited actions given to detectives and the entities and the limited number of rounds given to guess what entity might be in your home.

Outcome- The outcome of the game play went as follows along with some visible things that could be improved as well:
The game was missing 2 characters as tokens so choosing characters was limited to only a ghost and a detective. It would have been fun to have the choice to be a demon or a wraith. I am assuming that maybe the Yokai is a ghost unless the symbol for ghost represents all 3 supernatural characters.

I recommended the creators to make it clear on the rule sheet unless it was forgotten to make tokens out of the missing characters (demon and wraith). There was also no meter provided or an image of what that was supposed to look like, so we played without it by keeping all the lights on in the rooms we stepped in.

I played as the ghost and my 2 other friends played as the detectives. Since we didn’t want to figure out immediately who the ghost was, we would close our eyes every time a player was doing their turn. I believe playing with two people would have been obvious who the ghost was in the room, so this game plays out better with more people preferably with 3 but 4 also could work.

The game comes with a pamphlet that gives clues to what kind of entity you are encountering depending on the evidence you find on the home; the pamphlet came in handy when we played in order to spread out the items across the home and have the investigator guess what kind of entity, they belonged to in which the detective had to deal with.

Detective 1 moved towards the kitchen and decided to turn on the lights to avoid having the hunt meter rise and keep it low to prevent the ghost from acting in the kitchen.

Immediately detective 1 found a charm on the kitchen table after rolling a dice for number 6.

Detective 2 went after and decided to go to the living room by the fireplace and rolled to find an item in the room. Unfortunately rolled a 2 and could not find the item.

We decided to draw up a meter in order to compensate for the missing image of the meter. In this instance since we didn’t turn on the light it went up by 1. And keep in mind that a ghost can sabotage and turn off light by 1 as well until it gets to 5 to be able to attack.

As a ghost I went on and turned off the kitchen light which increased their meter to 1 more points totaling up to 2 now.

Detective 1 decided to turn on the light and roll in hopes to find evidence in the current room we were in (living room by the fireplace), finally rolled a 5 and found a paw.

Detective 2 decided to traverse across the room to the right side of the 3rd bathroom in the home and rolled the dice getting a 5 obtaining incense as evidence to what the entity might be.

Player 3- as a ghost I broke the light to sabotage them. The meter went up a point totaling up to 3 points now out of 5.

Detective 1 decided to move to the main entrance bathroom and keep the light on.

Detective 2 decided to guess the identity of the entity calling out correctly “Yokai” and won!

We finished playing and guessing within 3 rounds, this was a really fun game, I can’t wait to see the meter and the 2 other option characters added as tokens.

Consider:
A sheet that tracks how many rounds we have been playing so we know if we pass the 5 rounds the game is over and we fail or to try to guess the entity before our rounds are over since we are limited to a maximum of 5 rounds.

Vicky Aquino