Ghostbusters: Blackout is IDW Games’ co-op answer to a very clean Ghostbusters setup. A citywide blackout hits New York, the containment unit fails, and the team has to get out across the map before the situation falls apart.
Compared with the larger Cryptozoic boxes, Blackout looks built for a shorter night. The publisher description focuses on a 30-45 minute play time, dice allocation, upgrades, and keeping the city from collapsing while escaped ghosts spread chaos.
How the game works
The game is fully cooperative. Players roll dice, decide where to spend them, move around the city, capture ghosts, and buy upgrades for their gear. The whole thing is framed as a pressure cooker: you are not just chasing points, you are trying to stop the blackout from turning into a full-blown city disaster.
That design puts it in a different lane from the bigger miniatures-heavy Ghostbusters games. It still uses a familiar Ghostbusters problem, but it packages it as a tighter crisis-management session instead of a longer campaign box.
What is in the box
- Players: 1-4
- Play time: 30-45 minutes
- Publisher: IDW Games
- Designer: Jon Cohn
- Style: fully cooperative dice-allocation board game
- Premise: escaped ghosts, blackout conditions, and a containment-unit failure in New York City
Retail descriptions also mention eight playable characters, dozens of cards and tokens, and a scenario rulebook. That tracks with the game’s overall pitch: a quicker Ghostbusters co-op box with enough variety to keep the setup from feeling disposable.
Instructions
We now have a dedicated rules reference page for the game here: Instructions for Ghostbusters: Blackout.
Source note
Summary details on this page are based on the game’s BoardGameGeek listing, retailer summaries such as Board Game Bliss and FUN.com, and other product listings describing the published box.