Ghost! is a modern take on the well-known parlor game Ghost. In Ghost, players take turns naming letters (A-B-I-L-…), and the first player to name a letter that completes a word loses. Players, of course, may bluff, but they can be called out for naming a letter that makes completing a word impossible (A-B-I-X).
Ghost is a solved game, or at least a solvable game if players agree on a dictionary beforehand. Even if you play one of its numerous variants, Ghost is both bompletely deterministic and has a large tree complexity, a dangerous recipe for analysis-paralysis. Constraints breed creativity, and so introducing a little bit of controlled randomness as to which letters can be named by players does wonders: hence, Ghost!
In Ghost!, each player has a personal deck with cards, each of which features two letters. Players sit in a circle, and play cards from their hands to two words at a time, one with their left neighbour and one with their right neighbour. As the words increase in length, players may choose to voluntarily give up on them if they believe they can’t expand them without completing them with the letters they have in hand. Better to do it earlier rather than later, since the longer the word is, the more points it’s worth to their neighbour. What’s more, voluntarily giving up on a word awards you a ghost card, which you can use to shuffle letters around, potentially turning the tables on your neighbour.
To play Ghost!, all you have to do is print the following files and cut from corner to corner of the webs, separating them into 30 cards per player deck (decks are colour-coded to help with clean-up). The files also contain the two direction trackers that remind you which word you’re playing this turn. You only have to print up to the page indicated for the number of players that you’re planning to play with. If you’re printing the single-sided file, make sure to assemble the direction trackers by cutting each of their two sides out and pasting/taping them together.
Ghost! PNP files (A4, single-sided)
Ghost! PNP files (A4, double-sided) (flip on long side)