Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town: A Game of Deduction and Puzzles

Can you get your pizza delivered in a town you don’t know, while surrounded by ghosts you can’t see? Be the first to find your way and become the best pizza deliverer in town!

Published by Allplay (BoardGameTables.com) and designed for 3-5 players (with one player taking on the role of game master) Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town is a deduction game with one of the most fun-to-say game titles any board game has ever had.

Gameplay

One player is the mayor and the other players take on the roles of pizza deliverers. The town is laid out on a grid. The mayor has a map of the town, with tokens to mark what is in each square of the grid, including where each player starts. The mayor can either use one of the town setup cards that tells him where to put everything or he can build the town himself using a few set rules. The other players each have a player board that they can draw on, and a grid in which they can attempt to map out the town.

Only the pizza deliverers have turns. The mayor acts as a game master. On your turn, you will move, attack, or play a psychic card. Psychic cards have special one-time abilities. Every player starts the game with one but also gets another one when defeating a ghost.

When you move, you say whether you are moving one space north, south, east, or west. The mayor then tells you if the move was successful or if something was blocking you, saying if it is either a fence (a fence tile or the edge of the map) or a ghost. There is also a teleport token which, if you move onto it, teleports you across the map.

If a player moves onto a house token but does not have pizza, or does not have the right pizza, the player is told. A house doesn’t get added to the board until its pizza has been picked up, and then ghosts are placed surrounding it. If the player moves onto a square with a pizza token, he takes that pizza token. If a player has a pizza token and manages to move onto the house that matches that token, he wins the game.

When a player chooses the attack action, he announces if he is attacking the space north, south, east, or west of him. If there is a ghost in that space it is defeated and removed from the board. If there is not a ghost, nothing happens.

At the end of your turn, the mayor tells you which four spaces orthogonally adjacent to you (north, south, east, and west) contain a fence (this can again either be a fence tile or the edge of the map). He then tells you how many ghosts, pizzas, or houses there are in the eight spaces surrounding your player piece, but not where.

The first player to find and successfully deliver a pizza wins.

Review

Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town is a challenging, fun, thematic deduction game. It’s a ton of fun to slowly fill out the map and get a sense of your place in the town and where things are around you. The moment when you actually manage to deliver a pizza is excellent, as are those invariable moments when you bang into a ghost or try to walk into a fence and realize you’re completely lost.

Trying to figure out other players’ movements can also give you an advantage, and the rules cleverly do not forbid you from looking at another person’s player board (although you can’t slow down the game to do so). This means that while there’s no direct player interaction, as the game progresses, it can be quite useful to have an idea of what other players are doing, keep an eye on their choices, and try to match up what they discover with what’s on your map.

Overall, the components are excellent. The player boards are useful for helping the pizza deliverer players keep track of what they’ve done and keep the maze of the town manageable, while the mayor’s board, with all the tokens to mark locations, help ensure mistakes don’t happen on his part. There’s a great aesthetic to the game, and it just looks fun. The rules are a little messy, spread out across different sheets. The basic rules are in one booklet, but key information can only be found on the mayor reference sheet and the town building guide.

Some people really enjoy taking on a game master role, running players through a system or being on the outside of the puzzle looking in. It can be a lot of fun. The mayor role doesn’t have any choices to make or control over the information they give. The game does encourage the mayor to lean into the role and have fun with the acting, though. If you have someone in the game group who enjoys this type of role, that’s great, but if not, the mayor player will definitely feel a little left out of the action. Building the town can be fun, setting out your own puzzle, and it will be necessary to do so if you play the game more than a handful of times, as there aren’t many town setup cards included.

If you enjoy deduction games, Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town keeps things contained in a pretty tight package and under an hour gameplay but can offer some challenging and fun puzzles, and a theme that would make it perfect for Halloween.

Pros: Great theme and components, solid puzzle, good game length

Cons: Mayor role will not appeal to everyone, not many town setup cards included, rules are laid out messily

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.