Review – Scooby-Doo! The Game – Geeks Under Grace

CMON’s Scooby-Doo! The Board Game allows players to take control of the Scooby Gang and trap 1 of 3 monsters while visiting iconic locations, whether on foot or via the Mystery Machine. Is this a mystery worth solving, or should you, like, split? 

Review

You are the Scooby Gang, looking to create traps and capture the ghost that you know isn’t really a ghost. You win when you successfully build all the traps with the 4 building materials (each trap requires a different combination of materials). You lose if a 3rd location becomes haunted, if the monster needs to place a monster token but can’t, or if you don’t have enough Scooby Cards to go around. 

To begin, each player will choose a Scooby Gang member to play as. They’ll get their character card that determines starting location and 1-use special ability. Select which of the 3 baddies you’d like to play against (also with their own special abilities), and you’re ready to play!

Each round, players will draw 2 Scooby Gang cards which have an initiative number, a movement option, and occasionally a special ability. Players choose simultaneously which card to play, and everyone reveals their cards. The monster also reveals his card. The initiative numbers determine who goes first. 

Shaggy narrowly misses running The Creeper down with the Mystery Machine…

Each member of the Scooby Gang will move (optional) and perform a location’s action. Each location has 1 or 2 actions that can be performed, which are usually gaining certain resources or removing bad things from the map. However, each location (aside from the trap-building location) can only hold 1 Scooby Gang member (unless the Mystery Machine is there), so it’s less of a “we need these resources and let’s all go get them” and more of a “how do we maximize everyone’s turn?” This makes the cooperation piece feel like an enjoyable puzzle. 

The monster will move along the pattern determined by his card, scare away visitors, and potentially put down monster tokens. What’s cool about the monster’s movement is that it’s quite random, so you never know what to expect. If the monster moves into a space containing a Scooby Gang member, they suffer fright, which means the top 2 cards of the draw deck are discarded, which shortens the game time. 

It’s an enjoyable puzzle trying to figure out who should do what, especially given that players aren’t allowed to know what cards everyone has. Because each location can only hold 1 Scooby Gang member (2 exceptions aside), it’s incredibly important to maximize everyone’s turn, especially at higher player counts and on higher difficulty levels. Which, by the way, the hardest difficulty is very challenging. 

The components are excellent, as you’d expect from CMON. The oversized miniatures are especially cool and seem like they would hold up well to little kids playing with them (appropriate given the theming). The cards are bland, but they get their point across, and the colorful game board makes up for them: you’ll explore classic locations like Vasquez Castle, Fun Land, and the Witch’s Hut.

Everything about the classic Scooby-Doo theming works: the names of the locations, the 3 available bad guys, the Mystery Machine, the Scooby Gang’s special abilities. However, none of the Scooby-Doo theming shows up in the gameplay. As a Scooby-Doo fan, that’s a miss. There’s no deciding who splits up with who, there’s no solving the mystery, there’s no luring the ghost into your trap (you just build it and you immediately win), and there’s no unmasking the ghost. I would have liked to see some sort of mystery-solving and some sort of ghost-luring mechanic. 

Scooby-Doo! The Game provides a great introduction to cooperative games and initiative-based turns, but it ultimately doesn’t flesh out its theming as much as I would have liked to see. However, it’s still a solid game with smooth gameplay and excellent components, especially for Scooby-Doo fans looking to get younger gamers playing cooperatively. It solos pretty well too. 

CMON (Asmodee North America) kindly provided a review copy.