Everyone’s Heard the Stories: Dungeon Crawling in the Haunted Heartland with The Ghosts Betwixt

I see board games in the store and they always look so cool and then I buy them and bring them home, I’m so excited to open them, and then I play them, like, twice… This column is dedicated to the love of games for those of us whose eyes may be bigger than our stomachs when it comes to playing, and the joy that we can all take from games, even if we don’t play them very often.

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The Ghosts Betwixt combines two of my favorite things: dungeon crawls and Halloween haunts. It’s also made right here in the Kansas City metro area, by an outfit called Innocent Traveler Games based in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. And yet, I had somehow never heard of it prior to picking up a copy from one of the game’s creators at a local comic book convention.

Like a lot of the games we cover here, The Ghosts Betwixt was funded via Kickstarter back in 2020. Unlike some of the others, it did not superfund, raising only about $30,000 against a goal of roughly $20k – both modest figures compared to similarly ambitious games from bigger companies.

The Ghosts Betwixt is able to keep the costs down partly by being an obvious labor of love, put together by a small crew. It also eschews one of the more cost-intensive items often included in games like this – plastic miniatures. Instead, every enemy and protagonist in The Ghosts Betwixt is brought to life via two-sided cardboard standees. It’s actually a good decision that not only reduces overhead but also adds to rather than detracts from the whole package, as it further centers the artwork by Travis Hanson and Cole Munro-Chitty that may be the game’s strongest selling point.

Like just about every dungeon crawler you can think of, The Ghosts Betwixt is crammed to the gills with tokens, cards, standees, map tiles, and proprietary dice. The game’s dice mechanic is particularly involved. There are multiple dice added together to form each roll, and different circumstances increase “steps” on a character’s dashboard that can add dice for a single action.

Similarly, the deployment of monsters is complicated but relatively intuitive. Like many games of its type, The Ghosts Betwixt is made up not of randomly generated dungeons, but of specific missions, which are laid out in the hefty Mission Guide provided. These tell you what rooms and monsters to set up, and when a monster “spawns,” you determine where they are placed by rolling dice for both the room’s X and Y axes, and then counting squares. Who the monsters attack is similarly randomized by drawing from a pile of “target tokens” representing the various protagonists of the game.

It all sounds like a lot, and it can be. The box suggests that a game of The Ghosts Betwixt takes between 90 and 120 minutes to play, while a setup sample on the Kickstarter site shows an imposingly crowded and massive dinner table strewn with map tiles, tokens, dashboards, and so on.

Whether or not complexity is a necessary feature of a modern dungeon crawler, it often appears to be an unavoidable one, and The Ghosts Betwixt is no particular outlier in this regard. Where it stands out is in its concept. Rather than a quasi-medieval fantasy epic, The Ghosts Betwixt takes a cue from Stranger Things to tell a story set in the “1990s haunted heartland” about a kid who gets abducted by the denizens of a notorious Halloween haunt and the family members who come to his rescue.

The artwork may be the standout, but the game’s conjuration of its “haunted heartland” setting is admirable throughout. From the writing that accompanies the various missions to the cards that represent weapons and other useful items. There’s a pleasantly videogame-y quality to it all, while also peppering it with references that are less pop cultural than zeitgeist-y. Disc golf, for example, plays a surprisingly large role.

Like the artwork, the game itself is a mix of cartoony and straight-faced. The monsters are generally on the less grisly side, but there are some real intimations of peril throughout, and some of the monsters are particularly great. Alongside jokey inclusions such as the heavy-set “Unslenderman,” there are some classic Halloween staples such as spooky bats, somewhat-less-fake-than-advertised skeletons, “foliage fellas” made up of dead leaves, and… raccoons with Jack-o-lanterns on their heads. Not to mention robed cultists and the deranged family who operate the World of Terror haunted house.

I’m a big fan of dungeon tiles, and the dungeon tiles here are top notch. Done in the same style as the monster and character standees (and the rest of the game’s art), they feature the various rooms of the Bennert farmhouse and also the World of Terror haunt, which means we can combine everything from typical (if cluttered and sometimes gruesome) house interiors to rooms filled with coffins, torture dungeons, and more, all crammed with atmospheric details.

I don’t know the folks who made The Ghosts Betwixt but, after going through it a bit, I want to. Outfitted with casual diversity and genuine Midwestern flavor in equal measures, it feels like the game equivalent of a regional shot-on-video horror movie made for the Halloween season. Something produced out of love and enthusiasm, with profit a distant motivation.

It’s also perhaps surprisingly ambitious. Not just in the scope of the game itself, but in its belief (as announced right on the front of the box) that this is just the first installment in a series. As such, the six missions (and various side-missions) contained in the box end on anticlimax, with the story only beginning. And yet, in the run-up to that anticlimax, we introduce everything from a second, competing Halloween haunt to elaborate rituals, psychic powers, and a much bigger story than was absolutely necessary for a game like this.

Fulfillment for the Kickstarter of The Ghosts Betwixt took place in 2022. As of this writing, there has been no apparent movement toward a second installment, either on the Kickstarter page itself nor on the game’s website. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t ever be one, but does suggest a real possibility that the story of Richie and his family will never be finished.

This also underscores a drawback that is endemic to this form, at least among modern installments, which is that once you get through all of the missions contained in the core book, there’s not a lot more to do with The Ghosts Betwixt unless and until those promised additional installments come. Of course, by that time you’ve already ostensibly played The Ghosts Betwixt more than, like, twice, and at 90 to 120 minutes each time, that’s an awful lot of playing.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.