Don’t Turn Off The Lights sees you try and survive the night at a sleepover.

Will you make it or will it be lights out?

Fight monsters and keep your lights on! Every player must have the required number of lights on to keep monsters from attacking them that round, if not they will take one of your lives.

Don’t Turn Off The Lights Game Play

So each player has 5 light bulbs on their lit side in front of them and a hand with a couple of cards in it.

A monster is revealed which itself has a number of light bulbs on it.

A players turn starts with the monster attacking. If the player has equal to or more lit bulbs than the monster, the monster is fended off but that player flips a bulb over to the off position. If the player doesn’t have enough light the monster attacks and they lose a lightbulb card permanently.

Should the monster attack, then it is replaced with the next one in the deck.

Then the player draws a card and performs an action. These actions can be to turn a light on, turn another player’s light off or play a card.

These cards have varying effects that can hammer your opponents, or help you out. Some cards have a negative effect with an exclamation mark and you must play them if you draw them. Others have an asterisk that you can use to help yourself on another player turn, or of course, hinder a player on their own turn.

After this, you discard back down to 2 cards and play continues clockwise. When only 1 player has lights left, they win!

Theme

Monsters attacking kids at a sleepover, I’m sure that won’t have any lasting effects on kids playing this!

It’s a unique theme, I like it.

Setup

Shuffle and deal… Not much more to it than that really.

Components & Artwork

I played a demo of this at UKGE so have no idea if this is the finished product or not. I would prefer the lights to be cardboard tokens/tiles or better yet, poker chips! But hey, whatever keeps the cost down I guess.

I like the art for both the monsters and the cards.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s a simple game and there were 2 kids, one somewhere between 10 and 12 and another a few years younger and they picked this up no problem.

Although there was a little cheating. The youngest deliberately didn’t play an asterisk card with a negative effect and I spotted them flipping a light face up when they thought no one was watching. I didn’t say anything! Not the games fault, I blame the parents 😉

It’s an accessible game with only cards in hand secret information.

Don’t Turn Off The Lights Summary

This game does a really good job of controlled randomness…. meaning card effects, monster draw order and other bits and bobs are random. But, you can make your own luck. Yes, you’ll have 3 lights on and the monster drawn will require 4. Yes, you’ll get a few more exclamation mark cards than other players but it won’t cost you the game.

It’s not like Fluxx where your every action is hit and hope. It’s more like Tiny Tina’s Robot Tea Party where you can’t help the bad, but the best ‘player’ is probably going to go on to win.

The other thing is player elimination which as we all know is a no-no. However, lights can go off and on but no one gains broken lights back. So as the game progresses the pace of the game gets faster as fewer of the monsters can be fended off. So once one player is out, it usually means most of the other players are soon to follow.

Not to mention that if you have the most lights on you’ll get picked on by the other players so it balances out.

So I’m not sure what kind of game this is, but it’s a really fun and tense experience.

Jesta ThaRogue