Every other Monday, for the last couple of years, myself and my family go along to a local board game café and play through something new. There’s been a lot of favourites over the years, but it often comes back to the drawing games, with Ghosts Can’t Draw the most recent favourite.
Ghosts Can’t Draw is an incredibly pleasant twist on the communal drawing game formula. It feels fresh and novel because, while the core gameplay is drawing, there’s an element of detection (possibly deception) and deduction at play at the same time.
All players touch the drawing apparatus during the ‘drawing’ stage, but only one character steers the drawing, with players later guessing who the ghost is but also guessing what they’ve (struggled) to draw.
Set up and gameplay is incredibly simple. An included pen is inserted into the pen holder — which is a large shape designed so that multiple players can place fingers on it — which is placed in a central area with the included whiteboard. You then take role cards and add one prompt card to it, which you then distribute. You also give each player a ghost token in their colour, which will be used for guessing later.
The player who gets the prompt card is the ghost, and will attempt to draw that in the round that follows, which starts once everybody has their eyes shut at two fingers on the ghost-shaped pen holder. As a note, it’s not easy to draw when other players are holding onto the shape, with a Ouija board-style tug and pull as you drag the pen around the board.
Once movement has stopped, players open their eyes and point to the person who they think was the ghost. Anybody who was correct gets an extra ghost token.
The ghost then takes a handful of other prompt cards, shuffles them and lays them out. Players then bid their ghost tokens on which of the prompts they think the ghost was drawing, and if they’re correct then they, and the ghost, get points. The area is then reset, and play continues until a set number of points are earned by a player.
Ghosts Can’t Draw‘s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness, in that the more you play the more likely you are to recognise the ghost due to how people tug and pull at the pen. In addition to that, if one player is particularly heavy-handed then they might be a great ghost but also make it incredibly hard for people to even move the pen when its their turn.
Aside from that, though, it’s a phenomenal game that feels like much more than a little gimmick, it’s also incredibly easy to set up and play.
Ghosts Can’t Draw is available now from Amazon
