Advert: This game was gifted by Humble Bard Games in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are ours.

It’s here, the most wonderful time of the year! And I’m here to regale you with a new co-operative Christmas game based on the well-loved A Christmas Carol. Does Spirits of Christmas deserve a place on your Christmas gaming table?

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

👥 1 to 6 players
⌛ 30 to 45 minutes
🧠 12+ years

Game overview:

Spirits of Christmas is a game set over 3 Chapters, corresponding to each of the spirits that visit Scrooge on Christmas Eve night: Past, Present and Future. Each spirit has a separate deck of 8 Scene cards showing various parts of their story with Scrooge, which are broken up into: Shadow scenes, Coins and Torch of Plenty.

The group’s goal is to move Scrooge up and down the line of randomly dealt cards and complete the ‘Shadow Scenes’: to do this players need to play the right combination of Spirit cards from their hands – representing contentment, compassion, and charity – while Scrooge is located at the Shadow Scene. 

Each turn you can choose one action:

• Move Scrooge 1 to 3 spaces, depending on which Spirit card you choose to discard (movement is shown at the top of the Spirit cards).

• Draw 3 Spirit cards and add them to your hand.

• Give cards: any player can give the cards, and any other player can receive them (the active player does not need to be involved in the exchange).

• Play cards face-up underneath Scrooge’s current Shadow scene location (you can’t play cards under other locations).

Of course these actions aren’t free, this is Scrooge we’re talking about after all! Players select which action they want to perform by moving a Spirit Token around a Rondel, and for each step they move (1 to 4) they must pay for it in shillings. At the beginning of each chapter the group starts with a communal 15 shillings (Bob Cratchit’s salary!). If you run low, you can take a Chain token and add another 5 shillings to the pot, but if you run out of money and all 3 chains have already been taken, you’ve sealed Scrooge’s fate and lose the game.

And there’s one more trick in the tale – limited player communication! In the standard set-up, players can’t explicitly say how many of each Spirit card they have in hand, instead vaguer terms like “I have a little Compassion” or “I have a lot of contentment”. If you don’t have a card, you can say “Charity – HUMBUG!”

Of course, there are other cards in the Chapter. Coin cards and the Torch of Plenty are there to help you on your journey: coin cards give you coin(s) and sometimes extra Spirit  cards, while the torch of plenty lets one player do an extra bonus action for free. And at the start of the game, before the first act, you’re visited by Marley and choose one of three ‘Gifts’ that give an extra helping hand. 

The current Chapter ends as soon as all the Shadow scenes are completed. The group tots up their score for the round (based on how many coin cards they collected, how much is left in their shilling pool, and if the Torch of Plenty is active) and move on to the next Chapter.

Complete all three Chapters before running out of money and you win the game! Your final score is based on your total score over the 3 Chapters, plus a bonus depending on how many chains you used. You can compare this against the scoring criteria: will you come out miserly or charitable, or even score top marks and become Father Christmas himself!

“[Scrooge] became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”
– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Modes of play and variants

The designer John Bailey has included several modifiers, like different communication variants (from open talking to no talking at all). There’s also different difficulty modes, which is great if you want to adapt for younger players, or if you beat the standard game and want more of a challenge. For example:

• Very Easy mode: use all 3 gift cards, start each Chapter with the Torch of Plenty activated, and communication is fully open.

• Very Hard mode: No gift card, you only get 1 chain for the whole game, and the group gets only 3 chances each Chapter to share information about what’s in their hand.

There’s also a Counting House variant. This introduces the Counting House board, which essentially holds a face up market of 5 Spirit cards. Instead of a GIVE action, it’s GIVE or TRADE, and the player can choose to trade by discarding a card from their hand and picking 2 new cards from the Counting House.

Solo mode

Set-up and gameplay for the solo players is similar to playing the normal game with the Counting house variant. The main differences are:

• Each action costs 1 shilling regardless of how far the Spirit token has to move, but if you choose an action that is not adjacent to where the Spirit is currently placed you also have to discard a card from your hand (this also applies if you’re repeating the same action).
• Chain tokens are not used (and therefore there are no bonus points for unused chains in a solo game).
• For the GIVE or TRADE action, TRADE with the Counting house is the only option (obviously, as there’s no other player to give to).

Our thoughts:

A Christmas Carol is such a well-known, possibly THE most well known, piece of Christmas literature – so much so it’s never been out of print. While I’ve never read the original, the Muppet’s adaptation has been my favourite Christmas film since I was a kid, and so I’m thrilled to see the original story adapted into a game! And a lot of thought has gone into the design: each Scene card references specific parts of the story and even includes a quote from the book itself.

Each Chapter is like a puzzle for you and your team to solve, and to solve it successfully you need to be efficient with your rondel actions and complete the Shadow Scenes before you run out of shillings. It’s almost putting you in the position of Bob Cratchitt, stretching your wage out as far as possible. In our first game we were jumping around the rondel a little too much, spending shillings left right and centre… and we ran out of money and chains in the final chapter. Soz Scroogey!

I wasn’t expecting to see limited communication in Spirits of Christmas and it was a pleasant surprise (if you’ve read our Take Time review you’ll know we’re fans of this mechanic). It adds a bit of character to the game without being too restrictive (you don’t have to be sat in festive silence!) and we really ‘got into the spirit’ of it, playing along as merry misers: “I’m feeling VERY compassionate right now, but not very content; charity? BAH HUMBUG”. I also liked to read out the quotes on each card as we completed them to build on the story immersion. The more you can throw yourself into character and story, the more fun you’ll have.

“There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked.”
– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

The way the Chapter cards are dealt out in a random order each time reminds me a little bit of A Nice Cuppa from Buttonshy Games. And even though the gameplay is different – in A Nice Cuppa, you’re constantly rearranging the row to get the correct order – the puzzle still felt similar. The random order of the Scene cards is the main source of variability in the game – that and the Spirit cards you draw. It also affects the Chapter difficulty; you could have a game where all the Shadow scenes are closer together, or you could have one on the opposite end of the row (meaning more travelling, which means more spending). In a few games we had the Torch of Plenty card at the far end of a row, and we found it wasn’t really worth wasting turns (and money!) to get to it – although we might have felt differently if we were trying to beat a high score, and not just trying to win.

The artwork in Spirits of Christmas is lovely, and in my opinion really in keeping with the games’ vibes. The box cover is a bit dark, but that makes sense because it’s showing Scrooge at the start of the story; I liked the juxtaposition between that and the brighter, busier scene on the rulebook. The components feel really good quality too, especially the different character tokens – if I was being really persnickety I think the Scrooge token should have been in his nightwear rather than his day suit (and we won’t talk about the shillings being gold).

Like with the original story, the game acknowledges some darker aspects of humanity, like poverty and death, particularly in the last Chapter with the spirit of Christmas future. Interestingly, Matt told me that for him, the story makes him feel “Christmassy, but not festive”. But I definitely feel the festive fuzzies playing Spirits of Christmas – probably because I’m such a fan of the Muppet’s version, but also because I think Scrooge’s story epitomises the true meaning of Christmas for me: be merry, be generous, be compassionate and, most importantly of all, send giant unsolicited turkeys to your friends.

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year”
– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

What we like:

• A Christmassy game! We don’t have many, and there needs to be more. Also I love A (Muppet’s) Christmas Carol, so the theme is right up my alley.

• Each Chapter is a quick but tricky puzzle, and every move counts. You really have to work together and optimise your actions to help Scrooge succeed.

• Limited communication but in a fun, not too restrictive way – you can really ham it up and get into character.

• I really like the art, it fits the game well. And the components, especially the tokens, are of lovely quality (we’ll ignore the golden shillings!)

Considerations:

• Some of the story themes are dark (it’s A Christmas Carol, duh!).

Final verdict:

We don’t have many Christmas games, especially ones that are actually Christmas-themed. I am so glad this is now one of them. We can see Spirits of Christmas becoming part of our yearly Christmas traditions: including it in our ‘December 1st box’, playing it in the run up to the big day, and marking each year’s top score inside the lid as a living record over the years.

Spirits of Christmas is available directly from Humble Bard Games and is currently on sale!