Jinkies monsters are terrorizing the town! By taking on the roles of the Mystery Inc. members, players of CMON‘s Scooby Doo: The Board Game will travel to familiar locations, collect resources, and build traps to capture iconic villains from the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Designers Fred Perret and Guilherme Goulart have paired up with illustrator Hannah Cardoso to bring Ken Spears and Joe Ruby’s cartoon creation to the tabletop. Will you be able to capture the monster before they overrun the town? To find out, you’d better channel your inner Fred Jones because “it’s trappin’ time!”

Scooby Doo: The Board Game is played on a board representation of the town, but not any easily identifiable one like Coolsville or Crystal Cove. Fans, however, may recognize some of the locations such as Funland or Wolf’s End Lodge. Players will begin by picking a meddling teen or mystery-solving mutt to play as and placing the corresponding miniature on their starting location as indicated on their character card. They also receive an ability token (a.k.a. “sandwich token” if you’re in our game group) to place on their character card. The Mystery Machine is placed near the bottom of the board at Vasquez Castle with its card and gas tokens nearby. Next, the Scooby Gang deck and the Monster deck are shuffled and placed in their respective locations on the board. The monster tokens are also placed in their marked spot on the board. Collectively, players will decide how challenging the encounter will be. This can mean choosing the level of trap difficulty, facing off against more than one monster, or both! Once this is decided, a set number of trap cards is placed near the top of the board based on player count and chosen difficulty. The monster or monster duo is placed at the Witch’s Shack. No town is complete without its population, so players will complete the setup by placing three visitor tokens at each location.

Much like in the show, players will be running from location to location as they try to outwit their antagonist and come out on top. By whatever means you choose, each player will draw two Scooby Gang cards from the top of the deck without revealing them to other players. These cards have an initiative number, a range of spaces that may be moved, and any special effects that will be active for the turn. Without sharing the specifics, players may discuss tactics and options granted by their cards as a group before choosing which card to keep and which to place facedown in the save pile. Then it’s time to split up and look for clues – or, in this case, trap-building resources! Simultaneously, players will reveal their selected cards as well as the top card of the Monster deck. In order from lowest to highest, each card is resolved for its owner. Should a player or monster ever end up in the same location during a turn, the player becomes frightened, which results in the top two cards of the Scooby Gang deck being added to the discard pile. There is a bit of planning and hopefully, a player can avoid this as the Monster Card will show the path they will take. Monster Cards may also indicate the monster using its special ability. These vary for each adversary and provide quite a bit of variety and replayability. When a card is resolved, it is then placed into the respective deck’s discard pile. As Monsters move about the board they will scare off the town’s citizens and should all the population of a given space (or by some other means depending on the villain) be removed then that location becomes haunted. Haunted locations can not be interacted with until they are “refreshed.” Three haunted locations or players burning through all the Scooby Gang deck will result in a loss, but if players can manage to gather enough resources to complete each trap at the Swamp’s End General Store before either loss condition, they will have caught the perpetrator and solved the case.

The Kickstarter edition of Scooby Doo: The Board Game comes with nine monsters, but can be bumped up to 11 if you have the Dick Dastardly & Muttley box. This iconic duo from Wacky Races merges its way into the world of Scooby-Doo and brings with them an all-new set of challenges. As is their style, Dick Dastardly and Muttley work together to trap the protagonists with their devious tactics – in this case, the Scooby Gang! One cool – and mostly unrelated – thing about this expansion is that the minis will actually fit in the core box so you don’t have to store them separately. Way to go CMON for doing this!

Scooby Doo: The Board Game is lightweight, silly, and fun. Though marketed as a kids’ game, there is enough substance that adults will surely enjoy it too! As adults ourselves, we found the game to be a very enjoyable, campy experience full of nostalgia. In addition to the solo rules, there are also some special rules to assist playing with just two players. Personally, we found them unnecessary and probably will not include them in our future games as we felt the game played perfectly fine as is. We understand why the additional rules are there and what purposes they serve but are choosing to leave them out for our 2-player games. We highly recommend playing it on easy mode at least once for a learning game before jumping into the higher difficulties. There is a lot to this game, between the many playable characters and their adversaries, so it’s not a bad idea to get the basic mechanics down first. The game sits nicely at a difficulty level that keeps it approachable by most gamers, as some reading is necessary, and is should have no problem fitting in to most game collections. Fans especially should consider adding this one to their shelf, as CMON has done a terrific job of creating a game that is appealing both for its components and its play. Thanks for reading our review, and we’ll see you in Coolsville.

All photos of CMON products were taken and edited by Krista.