Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
You always need to read the small print.
When the invitation arrived in the mail, you were so excited. An auction? You love auctions! Ever since you were a child, there was nothing that got your blood pumping like the sound of a gavel and competitive largesse. You wrote it on the calendar, you picked your best outfit, and you redid the budget for the month. Who needs to eat? You’re going to an auction!
Not two minutes in the door and you realize something is amiss. The furniture has eyes. And mouths. Orifices, generally. The hat rack you walked by grabbed for your hat. You look at the clothing lots and get the unpleasant feeling that they would wear you. It is only then that you notice everything in this auction is cursed.
The period solid oak dresser? Cursed. That real ivory coat rack? Cursed. That mirror? You better believe that mirror is cursed. Cursed items are the last thing you need.
Cursed!
Despite being set at an auction, Antiques Ghost Show is not an auction game. It’s a card game, and a clever one at that. At any given time, there are a number of Auctions going on, depending on the player count. Each auction starts the game with one item in it, represented by a card, and each player has an adorable token—really, I love these player tokens—in attendance at one of the auctions.
On your turn, you can either move your figure or play a card from your hand to one of the auctions. If you move your figure, you immediately claim the cards in the new location and place them on the table in front of you. If you play a card, which can only be done provided it matches either the color or the number of the most recently played card in that Auction, nothing happens unless you are playing the third card to that particular space.
If that happens, either the player whose piece is there takes the items or you move there and claim it for yourself. Somebody’s gotta take these things home. This auction house isn’t paying to store all that. The goal of Antiques Ghost Show is to walk away with as little stuff as possible, but you will walk away with plenty.
At the end of the game, when the deck runs out, everyone totals up the value of their cards in each suit. This brings us to a super-important detail, one that will bring the entire game into focus: the player with the most cards in each suit only scores one point per card in that suit, regardless of printed value. This is a game in which you’re trying to stick everyone else with high-value cards in suits they don’t have, while trying to load yourself up with cards in suits for which you have high-value cards.
That’s exactly the sort of dynamic I like, so it breaks my heart to tell you that Antiques Ghost Show doesn’t quite work for me. It takes too long to become interesting, for your choices to feel meaningful. The first 2/3s of the game float pleasantly yet anonymously by. Despite some terrific art and production choices, the game itself doesn’t make much of an impression.
At a certain point across all my games, from two to five players, Antiques Ghost Show would crystalize over the last 10 or so turns. Everything would snap into focus, every card play would be pregnant with intention, aggression, and desperation. In those last 10 or so turns, I can see the vision. I know what we’re doing here. I can see the game that’s promised by these mechanics. Antiques Ghost Show just takes too long to get there.
