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Quick Look: Spooktacular
Designer: D. Brad Talton, Jr.
Artist: Javier Roa González
Publisher: Level 99 Games
Year Published: 2025
It’s Halloween night, 1986, and the all-night Spooktacular Film Festival is running in full swing in the midst of a wild thunderstorm. Suddenly, lightning strikes, overloading the theater’s power circuits and releasing a hundred years of cinematic monsters from the silver screen. As one of those monsters, YOU are now free to wreak havoc. Terrify and devour unsuspecting moviegoers in a race to become the most terrifying monster of all time!
In Spooktacular, play as one of twenty movie monsters, each with their own way of playing the game. Easy to understand rules are the base of the game, and everything else you need to know is right on your monster board. Tons of variability and devious monster abilities to discover will keep you coming back to the theater.
Spooktacular is played over a series of rounds. Players perform the turn steps on their monster in order, then pass the turn to the player to their left. Playing cards, adding guests, moving, spooking, devouring, and interacting with your monster’s unique abilities are common things you might do on a turn
As soon as any player reaches 50 points OR there are no more tickets to take, this signals the end of the game. All players gain points equal to the points showing on any tickets they may have. The player with the most points wins.
Review
Get ready to bring Hollywood silver screen monsters to life as you take control of one of more than twenty classic monsters who want to take over and consume / terrorize movie goers in a takeover of a haunted movie theater.
Sound like your idea of a good night out at the movies? That is the role that Level 99 Games attempts to thrust players into for the game of Spooktacular.
Is this game worthy of your time, or will the name live up to its name and scare players away from it with horrendous gameplay? Let’s find out!
Spooktacular occupies a pretty strange niche for me. Although it can technically be played at any given time of the year, its dark and morbid nature makes it almost vitally and exclusively associated with Halloween for me, and that can be both a good and bad thing. On the one hand, it can be difficult (though not impossible) to find such themed games that are quick and easy to get to the table for parties and get togethers. I do have a handful of these that can fit the occasion, some are more or less complex, and given that I initially (though conditionally) find Spooktacular to sit at the “easier” end of the spectrum, so far I can say that the game should meet the condition of being facile to get to the table.
On the other hand, because of the theme, I might always save these particular games exclusively for play throughs in October and November as a result. Que sera sera I guess. But it is hard to walk away from the temptation to just consider this game for its associated season…
But now for the fun part, talking about the game itself. Let’s digest this topic a bit…
Summarizing gameplay for Spooktacular is surprisingly easy. There are some quirks and idiosyncrasies to the rules that I may not have to go over in great detail but overall the game can be synopsized as follows:
1) Players pick a monster.
2) After placing movie-goer meeples in various rooms on the board, players take turns setting up their turn. Each monster is unique in this regard, possessing both unique meeples, cards, and abilities that are totally different from other monsters aside from a few standard starting cards that are identical among all players,
3) Players then take turns attempting to gain the most points and trigger the end of the game upon reaching a score of 50.
No biggie to understand conceptually. Now here is how points are primarily scored :
1) Spooking / Scaring movie goers into other rooms using special abilities. Each monster does this differently. And sometimes this isn’t as easy as it looks, because points only count for each different door you send customers fleeing out of…
2)Devouring movie-goers. This doesn’t give immediate points, but rather lets you collect eaten souls. Collect 5 different colored meeples in your belly and you can turn them into bonus movie tickets , with varying hidden point amounts rewarded at the end of the game.
3) Monster special abilities. Too many to list here!
Now for our impressions:
—It is clear almost from the beginning that the monsters of Spooktacular are the stars of the show, much as they should be. Not only are these plentiful and abundant, they are all Spooktacularly different from each other, which is a marvel considering how simple the basic mechanics of the game are. Each monster has its own player board summarizing how it takes its turn, moves, and generates points. And each is radically different from each other.
What this leads to is a sense that each monster feels strange, foreign and alien when compared to one another. Which is a valuable part of the game’s immersion. Playing as a slithering ooze, hell chef, werewolf or possessed automobile should absolutely feel inhuman, and thanks to the way this game handles variation, every monster does in fact come out feeling like it walked straight out of the movie screen and into your home.
—Components are all great quality, and art is perfectly matched to the theme.
—The box is very portable.
—The game sets up and plays quickly and keeps up at a pace that doesn’t allow for a lot of slowdown.
—Lots of monster variation, each with rated difficulty levels for learning : Easy, Intermediate and Advanced monsters.
The negatives :
—Well, there is something to be said about the variation in monsters.
They are all, as stated earlier, truly distinct from one another. And they all function horribly (in a good way) as horror stars. However, this can make for a struggle comprehending how some of the monsters best function and generate points, especially for some of the more advanced ones. It doesn’t make them less fun, but just try to use your imagination in picturing how it is that demon stock brokers make a killing in Spooktacular to drive my point home. Thematically, it ends up working, though it can take some time to wrap one’s mind around the unique mechanics to some monsters. But this ultimately makes for a net positive.
—The theme may also, as mentioned, make users feel that the game is inevitably tied to Halloween season and only playable then. This may not be an issue to those who don’t feel bound by associations, but for me personally, this would indeed affect how often I play Spooktacular. But again, as a positive, at least when that season comes, I would know just what to reach for…
—Perhaps too macabre for young audiences. I’ll leave this up to parents in their wisdom to decide what age to let children play this game. While I don’t feel like there is too much in the way of explicit graphic material that is a turn off other than just being plain old creepy, conceptually speaking there can be some dark and sinister implications of certain monsters and monster actions that can paint a gruesome picture within minds. This is partially to be expected given the media that Spooktacular is trying to emulate, but those with vivid imaginations may see pictures in their head that they just can’t shake, leading to their own spooking.
—Lots of unique meeples and components. Each monster has its own distinct Meeple(s) for starters. And yet again, some monsters may also have multiple tokens and trackers that are exclusively their own, learning of some sorting issues at the start of the game, or the need to bag things. Bagging components for 20 monsters would be a bit messy though, so leaving them all jumbled in one or two bags seems optimal for us, but this will surely need a bit more sorting than ideal when commencing the game.
Final Thoughts :
I know I already mentioned that Spooktacular operates in a pretty unique and sometimes isolated niche.
I also know and comprehend that there are gamers that want an extremely crunchy and strategic game. Especially given the dearth of such options within the monster mash genre.
Spooktacular may not satisfy the needs of so-called “power gamers” with regards to being the deepest game out there. However, it will function as a streamlined game engine that maintains its charm through its monster variability, and will keep up this quick pace until the end game credits roll.
And though others may disagree, in my mind, this is what makes Spooktacular an optimal choice for creepy nights. Its theme may make it feel tethered to October 31, but for me this isn’t essentially a bad thing given how easy it is to set up and teach.
8.5/10
Thank you to Level 99 Games for providing me with the review copy. Stay tuned for more from them soon!
After reading Jazz’s review, if this sounds like a game for you at the time of this posting
Spooktacular is available on AMAZON for only $64.99. Check it out and get your copy HERE.
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