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It Looks Like We’ve Got Ourselves a Mystery
Scooby Doo is a family fun game from CMON that strikes a good balance between offering enough depth for board game enthusiasts whilst still providing a simple and easy to learn ruleset that makes for an excellent gateway game.
During gameplay you will battle one of the infamous ghosts or monsters from Scooby Doo, Where Are You! Each have their own special abilities so The Creeper will block your path whilst The Green Ghost, a.k.a The Phantom Shadow will scare you wherever he’s left his mark. Finally, The Ghost Clown will scare away visitors and replace them with his scary monster token.
Much like the chaotic chase scenes of the show, this game will have you running around a colourful gameboard full of familiar locations in this fun filled game of light strategy and chance.
I Round A Rue
Gameplay essentially begins about halfway through where you would be in an episode of Scooby Doo. You’re ready to start setting traps to capture the villain as you frantically race around the game board looking for trap-making resources whilst trying to avoid becoming frightened.
The game has some mechanics that are similar to… now hear me out… Pandemic. There are 3 ways to lose the game and only 1 way to win. To win the game you need to collect resources to build 4 traps. However, whilst you’re off collecting what you need you must also prevent too many locations becoming literal ghost towns.
But There Are No Such Things As Ghosts
When a monster enters a location, it scares away one of the location’s 3 visitors. If all visitors are scared away, the location becomes haunted. If a third location becomes haunted the town is overrun with fright, creepers… you lose! As your monster travels around the board, if its ability is activated it lays monster tokens in its wake. If you run out and can’t lay a monster token, Ruh uh, you lose! And finally, you need to draw Scooby cards to determine your own moves. Can’t draw a card? Zoinks… you lose!
Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
This is a 1 to 5 player game that takes around 30 minutes to play. That’s right, you read me correctly, there is a solo mode where you can play Shaggy with his trusted pal Scooby. The game works well as a co-operative because the monster works in an AI fashion with cards determining his moves and actions. In some ways this also makes the game much more reactive because as well as needing to strategize there’s a lot of chance in the cards you pull both for the characters playing the game and for the monster itself.
Would You Do It For A Scooby Snack
To win the game you need to gather enough resources and take them to the Swamps End General Store, completing 4 traps, capturing the monster before one of the three methods of losing is triggered.
There are 3 difficulties and setup is determined by which you choose as well as how many players are playing - there are special rules for a 2 player game. On the hardest level you have fewer monster tokens and making a trap angers the monster, triggering a penalty to the gang, such as leaking petrol or bigger scares.
There are 3 phases to a round. You have the draw phase where players draw cards, the reveal phase where you show each other your chosen card, and the action phase where players perform their turns in order of initiative.
3 difficulties, 3 phases, 3 visitors; 3 really is the magic number in this game!
Jeepers, It's The Creeper
Player and monster turn order is determined by initiative, as explained later. Players can place little monster feet on the board to see the monster’s movement, which can help in planning moves and strategy. Though there is chance in who gets to go first, knowing the monster’s movement can be useful in many ways: you may, for example, need focus your efforts on replacing visitors to prevent a place becoming haunted. As the monster moves around the board, he scares away visitors and, if activated, leaves his dastardly monster tokens in his wake. Dastardly, hang on… that’s not quite the right reference here but… there is a Dick Dastardly and Muttley expansion that can be played with this game.
Friends Don’t Quit
For this game, you will play a member of the Scooby gang. Each member has a special ability they can play once during the game. You could be Scooby himself, who can be given a Scooby snack to stop the monster moving and activating that round, a really useful ability if you’re low on those monster tokens.
Or you could play Scooby’s best friend Shaggy, whose ability for some unknown reason is to take 2 resources from other players and place them on any trap. I mean, this can be a useful ability - I just don’t really get why it’s linked to scaredy cat Shaggy, though I guess he is a track runner so maybe that fast-running ability comes into play here.
Alternatively, you could play smart mystery solving Velma, who can magically find 2 extra resources as her ability. That is, assuming she doesn’t need to find her glasses first.
No longer is Daphne the damsel in distress, she is danger prone no more. If you play this fiery red head, you’ll find her kicking martial-artist status removes 3 monster tokens off the board. In hard difficulty, Daphne can really come in handy!
Finally, will you be the gang’s ascot wearing leader Fred? His special ability is to allow any other gang member to move 1 location, performing its action.
Speaking of locations… as you move around the board, you will perform the action of the location you finish on. Each location has two available actions, which can either give you resources needed to build traps, remove monster tokens, or return frightened-off visitors back to locations, and most importantly refill the Scooby card deck because you know what happens if you run out of cards. Jinkies, you lose!
Listen Up Gang, I Have A Plan
This is where strategy meets chance because you draw two cards from the Scooby deck and pick one to play, returning the other to the ‘save’ pile and eventually discarding the card you played to the discard pile at the end of the round. Cards are played in ‘initiative order’ which is indicated as a number at the top of the card.
Let’s Split Up, Gang
You can’t show other players your card or tell them your exact initiative, but you can say things like “I’m going to move quick this round”, or “I’ll take it slow” to help with the co-operative element of the Scooby Doo The Board Game. Of course, you never know what the monster’s initiative will be until the REVEAL phase when all cards are turned over.
If you enter a location where the ghost is, or the ghost enters your location, you become frightened and lose 2 Scooby cards to the discard pile. When you run out of Scooby cards you can use your save deck but if that’s also depleted, you’ve run out of time and the monster has won.
Some Scooby cards have special abilities, for example allowing you to gain extra resources or not to be frightened that round. Some monster cards have a monster face on them, showing that the monster’s ability will be triggered when playing the card.
And it really is as simple as that, making this game quick and easy to learn, whilst providing enough depth to be replayed over and over again.
Final Thoughts
Full disclosure: I absolutely LOVE Scooby Doo, so I was probably going to purchase this game even if it was rubbish, which thankfully it isn’t. I’m that crazy adult who still owns a teddy of Scooby Doo that takes pride of place in my bedroom, yikes, and will play any Scooby game at least once, owning a full range from more complex styles like Betrayal at Mystery Manor to simple roll and play games like Monster Madness.
With that in mind, I eagerly awaited delivery of this game and excitedly opened the parcel, then tore off the cellophane covering the box to peek into the contents inside. I can, in all honesty, tell you I was not disappointed. The figures are realistic (to the cartoon characters) and simply wonderful to move around the brightly coloured board.
In keeping with the tradition of the characters running through this door and that door, being chased by a ghost or monster, this game has many routes around it which are clearly marked by coloured arrows on the board.
Game designer, Guilherme Goulart, said he watched many episodes of the show before designing the gameplay and in many ways this attention to detail shows. However, as a Hanna Barbara fan and an obsessive of Scooby Doo, there were a few things I would like to have seen done better.
And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and their dog!
The one thing I would have liked to have seen at the end of this game is an ‘unmasking’. I feel like the perpetrator needed to be exposed for players to feel fulfilled at the end of gameplay because, let’s face it, that was always the mock, shock – *gasp!* moment in the cartoon. Yes, this might get wearisome when you’ve played the same monster a couple of times but… enter… the world of expansions!
I felt like although the Mystery Machine was an awesome figure, it was just a little too big to not be cumbersome on the board. Plus, would moving wheels have been too much to dream of? Fred’s pride and joy can be a useful feature in the game as it allows more than 1 player to be in 1 location at once, but to be honest, I haven’t really used this feature in any of the games I played. This would probably be more useful in a 3 to 5 player game but with 2 players it just seemed to take out a large portion of the board wherever it was placed.
I would have liked to have seen more done with the Scooby snacks… I mean they are like Scooby and Shaggy’s superfood, right? One delicious biscuit provides them so much bravery that wasn’t really utilised to full effect in the game.
Another loveably laughable element of the episodes I feel could have been integrated into the game was the character’s disguises. Some cards give you the ability to stop being frightened for the round, and I would have loved to have seen that built in to being because of wearing a disguise. A simple narrative sentence such as, “You pretend to be a statue, this stops you being frightened for this round” would have been perfect. Or maybe characters could have picked up disguise tokens to save and use at a later date, I don’t know. But I felt the game had missed out on this key element of the show.
There's A Very Logical Explanation For All Of This
I am a fan of co-operative games, mostly to stop my competitive monster rearing its ugly head, but I do also like a challenge and the one negative I would say of this game is that I haven’t been beaten yet. I guess I could just be ‘that’ good, but I strongly doubt it. There are 3 difficulty levels to make gameplay harder and if playing with younger children you may want to stick to easy or medium but if you did want to crack this game out at board game night, I definitely recommend going in hard.
