Board Game Spotlight: Miskatonic School for Girls

www.miskatonicschoolforgirls.com/

The other night, my friend Nikki and I sat down to play a new card game I'd picked up a FORGE con 2012, called Miskatonic School for Girls! What is The Miskatonic School for Girls, you may ask? The Miskatonic School for Girls is a high class private school filled with a wonderful variety of charming children. Unfortunately, the staff of the school is made up by a variety of Cthulhu-ian monsters and cultists - all desperately trying to hide their true selves.

I'd never really heard anything about this game, and kind of picked up on a whim, and to help support indi-game makers. The game was produced by Fun to 11, a company focused on launching fun and inventive products through Kickstarter. The Miskatonic School for Girls was the first game produced by Fun to 11. The game was designed by The Geek Dynasty, led by Luke Peterschmidt - a multi-award winning game designer.

The Miskatonic School for Girls is a deck building game at heart. The rules seemed a bit confusing at first, but after watching a very handy tutorial video online we pick it up easily and turned out to be quite a lot of fun. Players take the roll of one "House" in the school. During turns, players will add new students to their deck, while adding bizarre and mind altering faculty members to the other Houses.

Student Cards

Faculty Cards

Each player tracks their house's sanity on their House Tracker (which looks like a paddle). The last player to have any sanity left in their House wins while the other houses go stark raving mad!!!

House Tracker

The game has several nice touches including, the names of their Kickstarter contributors listed on the side of the box bottom, fantastic art and part of the rules stating that you must make a crazy laugh or twitch everytime you cross into a lower level a sanity. :) It's really cute. And REALLY easy (and quick).

I could consider this game an all ages game, and a great family game becuase of all the school references. It's also an excellent way to introduce young gamers to the world of H.P. Lovecraft in a light-hearted way. It's like the card game version of Goosebumps lite...GERSBERMS!

I really liked it, and it's quickly hopped to the top of my list of games for causal gaming night, like Gloom, Fluxx and Dominion. I highly recommend it! The game was also feature on Wired.com!

Peace,
~Matt