13 Ghosts
13 Ghosts Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Rules for 2 Players
Shuffle the set of 13 ghost cards and deal 2 cards to each player. Place the remaining cards face down in a pile to form the deck.
Each player chooses one of his two cards and places it in front of himself horizontally, face down (this is the ghost in his crypt), and keeps the other card in his hand. The player who most recently saw a ghost goes first. If none of the players has seen a ghost in reality, recall the ghosts the players have seen in movies, on television or in pictures.
On your turn, a player does one of the following actions.
- Play a card from your hand face down in front of you and resolve its effect. If the card's effect contains a question, it refers to your opponent's crypt, and that player must honestly answer "Yes" or "No".
- Play a card from your hand face up in front of you and attack (see below).
Then draw a new card from the deck and pass the turn to your opponent.
If the deck runs out of cards, continue the game, attacking every turn.
When attacking, name a number from 1 to 13. If the named number matches the number on the ghost card in your opponent's crypt, you win the round. Otherwise continue the game until one of the players makes a successful attack.
After the round ends, begin a new one, changing the first player.
The first player to win three rounds wins the game!
Rules for 3 Players
Shuffle the set of 13 ghost cards and deal 2 cards to each player. Place the remaining cards face down in a pile to form the deck.
The three-player game is played the same as the two-player game, but the turn passes between players clockwise, and the following additional rules are used.
- When you ask a question or attack, both opponents must answer.
- If a player is successfully attacked, he is eliminated from the game (without showing the other players the card in his hand), and the remaining players each receive 1 point.
- When a second player is eliminated from the game, the remaining player receives 1 more point and the round ends.
Continue playing until one of the players has 6 or more points at the end of a round. The player with the highest score wins the game! In case of a tie between 2 players, they play an additional round using the rules for 2 players to determine the winner.
Rules for 4 Players
If 4 players are playing, they divide into teams of 2 players each. Sit so that players of the same team sit opposite each other. Each team receives a separate set of 13 ghost cards, shuffles it and forms its own deck. Players of one team draw cards only from their own deck and try to find the ghosts in their opponents' crypts.
(Illustration: seating arrangement of the two teams.)
In each team, one of the players takes 4 cards from his team's deck, then chooses from them 2 ghosts that will hide in the crypts (for himself and for his partner), and passes the 2 remaining cards to his partner. Having received the cards, the other player in each team keeps one of them in his hand and returns the other to his partner.
The four-player game is played the same as the two-player game, but with the following exceptions.
- The turn passes between players clockwise.
- When you ask a question or attack, both players of the other team must answer. Each answers only about the ghost in his own crypt.
- If a player is successfully attacked, he is eliminated from the game, but his partner continues to play as usual.
- The turn always passes between teams. If one of the players has been eliminated, his partner takes a turn after each of the players of the other team.
- Some effects allow you to look at cards in the deck. In a four-player game, such effects refer only to the opposing team's deck.
When both players of one team are eliminated from the game, the other team wins the round. The team that first wins 3 rounds wins the game.
Clarifications
- Card No. 2 allows you to resolve the effect of the card previously played by a player (by you or by an opponent). You cannot, for example, resolve in this way the effect of the face-down crypt card of an eliminated player.
- When you resolve the effect of card No. 4 in a four-player game, only you can ignore the blue effects of opponents; they still apply to your partner.
- When you resolve the effects of cards No. 8 or No. 10 in a four-player game, you may tell your partner the numbers you have seen.