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.
Opening Credits
With spooky season just around the corner, the quest to find seasonally appropriate games moves to the forefront of my gaming sessions. Sure, you have the classics like Fury of Dracula, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and any flavor of Horrified, but I’ve always felt like I haven’t found that quintessential Halloween game that hits the table year after year.
That is…until now with Spooktacular.
Level 99 Games titles were never really on my radar in the past, with their bread and butter being anime-themed card games like Millennium Blades, BattleCON, and Pixel Tactics. But when I demoed Spooktacular at Gen Con 2025, my head immediately turned, and I felt a tad guilty for overlooking the fine folks there.
Ever since then, I’ve been trying to track down a review copy, which proved difficult considering how quickly each printing sold out thanks to the unexpected success of what I feel will become a cult classic for years to come.
However, it wasn’t all frights, as I managed to snag a copy at this year’s Gen Con, and I absolutely could not wait to get all that movie monster glory to the table.
Monster Mayhem
Spooktacular is a highly asymmetric area-movement and set-collection game where each player takes on the role of a movie monster popping out of the silver screen to terrorize the local movie theater. While every monster plays differently, the ultimate goal is the same: be the first player to reach 50 points or have the most points when the tickets run out.
Players take actions by playing cards, moving between rooms, devouring guests, spooking them, and performing all sorts of monster-specific shenanigans. Each deck contains both basic action cards shared by everyone and abilities unique to that particular monster.
The basic actions include spooking, which moves guest meeples out of your room and can potentially trigger other effects, and devouring, which removes a guest meeple and adds it to your player board.
Once you’ve devoured one meeple of each color, you can turn that set in for a ticket. Each ticket contains a hidden point value that isn’t revealed until the end of the game.
Box Office Hit
Spooktacular is an absolute blast. As a movie fan, there’s a real charm to playing characters who are reimaginings of famous B-movie monsters and villains.
The game is so asymmetric that it’s honestly hard to describe how to play beyond “do the stuff your board tells you until someone wins.” Every monster is so unique that it almost feels like everyone is playing their own mini-game within the larger game.
It can be overwhelming trying to choose one of the 20 (yes, twenty) unique monsters that come in the base box. Luckily, they’re all coded by difficulty, but it’s a lot more fun to pick based on coolness alone.
Part of the fun is discovering the thematic ways all these monsters play. Take Chortlin Charles the clown, for example. His schtick is moving multiple times per turn, spooking everyone along the way, and raking in some sweet points while he does it. Or maybe you want Mask of the Outlander, who collects different-colored meeples and can trigger multiple actions, including stealing points.
Even after multiple plays, I still haven’t seen all the monsters in action, and I still get excited thinking about my next play.
That’s how good this game is.
It’s easy to teach, but the tactical strategy comes from figuring out how to pull off delicious combos with your character, along with the silent glee of watching the board state come back around to you perfectly positioned to kick those combos off.
The range in character difficulty also works better than I expected. Easy monsters can be just as fun as the complicated ones, and complexity certainly doesn’t translate directly to strength. In fact, some of the more straightforward characters can be brutally effective when their engine gets going.
Some characters can develop a bit of a runaway leader problem if the other monsters aren’t equipped, or experienced enough, to slow them down. In one game, I played as Grimhive, dropping hives in different rooms and collecting up to six points per turn. In a game where hitting 50 points triggers the end, that adds up fast.
The other players weren’t really able to remove my hives, so the game eventually shifted from trying to stop me to simply trying to outscore me. I don’t know if I’d call that a balance problem just yet, because Spooktacular feels like the kind of game where matchup knowledge will matter more the more you play.
Still, with 20 wildly different characters in the box, there are bound to be matchups where one monster’s strength simply doesn’t line up well with another player’s ability to interfere. When that happens, the game loses a little of the scrappy back-and-forth that makes it so much fun.
Spooktacular fires on all cylinders when everyone is scrambling to score while also keeping one eye on what the other monsters are building toward.
Thankfully, the game never overstays its welcome. It moves quickly, and the short playtime makes it easy to rerack and immediately try someone new.
There are a few other wrinkles. Some monsters require specific colored meeples to trigger abilities, and if those guests aren’t available or are across the theater, it can be frustrating. There’s also some potential for analysis paralysis late in the game as card effects begin cascading into one another.
Neither issue has derailed a game for me, but I could see the experience stretching out with the wrong group.
Post Credit Scene
Overall, Spooktacular provides exactly what you’d expect from a night watching some pulpy B-movie horror: fears, jeers, and a lot of delicious, artificially flavored buttered popcorn.
It’s the board gaming equivalent of a junk-food movie night. The gameplay is light enough to keep things moving, while the massive amount of asymmetry gives you plenty to chew on from one play to the next.
Mix in the movie poster-style art and handsome wooden monster meeples, and this easily becomes my go-to Halloween game.
Bride of Spooktacular is already in the works, and I absolutely cannot wait to return for the next iteration in what I hope becomes a trilogy, or even a full-blown saga.
Spooktacular details
- Designer: D. Brad Talton, Jr.
- Artists: Javier Roa González
- Publishers: Level 99 Games, Tcg Factory
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 5
- Age range : 12+
- Time range : 45 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Area Movement, Set Collection, Solo / Solitaire Game, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.91742 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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