Players may move up to the number of spaces shown on the die. If they end their movement in a space with a treasure, they may pick it up and place it in their backpack.

If they end their movement in a space with a ghost, they fight that ghost by rolling a fight die. If they roll the matching symbol, they remove the ghost from the game board.

If the players must add a third ghost to a room, it transforms into a haunting. A haunting requires at least two people in the room to attempt a fight with it.

Players win if they can get all eight treasures and their whole team out of the house; they lose if all six hauntings are on the board.

In Geister, Geister, Schatzsuchmeister each player takes the role of a young adventurer. The goal is to retrieve 8 jewels from the haunted house before it is overwhelmed with ghosts.

In an advanced variant, the jewels are numbered and must be retrieved in numeric order. The advanced variant also hides the values of the jewels until an adventurer enters the same room as the jewel.

In all versions of the game you roll a dice to see how far you can move. If the player rolls anything but a 6, a card is drawn and adds more ghosts to the rooms indicated on the card with a mechanic similar to Pandemic or locks certain doors if playing the advanced version.

If you end your turn in a room with a ghost, you can roll the ghost-fighting die. Roll a ghost face on the die, you can remove a ghost.

If there are any other adventurers in the room with you, they can roll too which means teamwork and coordination are key.

I wonder if they could somehow tweak that rule to shuffle the gems around. Changing that would certainly change the game quite a bit. The board is fixed and hence the room layouts are the same each game.

I thought it would be amazing if Geister had modular rooms which one could construct the mansion differently each time. Then again, I just preached the qualities of a simple game and these suggestion are probably extraneous and not necessary at this level.

Overall, Geister has really straddled the adult-kid difficulty levels very well. The balance is quite exquisite: the rules are simple but not dumb-downed and the game is challenging without being overly complex.

As parents, I actually look forward to gaming with my child. This is a perfect example of a game that can be enjoyed by all age groups and parents can look forward to a good time without being forced to endure hours of Snakes and Ladders.

As for gamers, I think there is enough there for a few plays or if one needs an occasional co-op fix. In fact, if you marginally enjoy a co-op, this may actually be a better fit seeing that removes a lot of bloat that plague other co-ops.

The art is stylized and for the most part, do not look scary and more cartoonish. I do not think parents have to worry for a five year old unless the kid is sensitive to the topic.

The only scary looking thing is the giant red uber ghost sculpt but even then they look harmless. My five year old did not internalize any of the imagery.

Game play wise, my kid can grasp the objectives quickly and play is intuitive in a way that she know what needs to be done.

Although, she likes to grab the easily available gems out near the front part of the mansion and we just let her do that. She also likes to flip the ghost cards to populate the mansion with ghosts.

Right now with 3p, the basic game is more than enough for us to handle and I do not intend for us to up the difficulty. We are winning slightly less than half the games and it is fun and challenging for us still.

With 3p, the game is slightly more difficult than 4p, I feel. But there is a slight way to make things easier. One way to do that is to just shuffle the cards that are in the discard pile with the reshuffle cards come out and to add that to the bottom of the current draw deck instead of shuffling the entire deck.

This will give you an advantage.