Review of Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets, a Halloween TTRPG
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Age target for Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets
Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets is a system and setting for creating adventures about striking out on Halloween for trick-or-treating and coming across a spooky mystery to solve. While this does revolve around facing fears and resolving the mystery, which has potential to get a bit scary, there’s careful attention paid to asking the GM to keep players in mind, and your group has creative freedom on where the story goes to be able to tone it to any age’s level.
For mechanics, the character sheet is easy to follow with a focus on tracking only a few numbers and allowing space for drawing a costume (instead of only writing about it). Math is also likely to not be a barrier as players will be rolling d6’s according to their attribute scores and then just totalling up how many dice hit the success number (so no adding modifiers or swapping dice). If players can recognize a few numbers and count up 6 with their dice, they should be able to follow along with the mechanics fairly easily.
I would say this TTRPG would fall into the all-ages category so long as you’re keeping an eye on your players’ needs during the game and everyone has some basic counting skills (or can get help from another player).
Setting for Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets
Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets is set in your everyday neighboorhood on Halloween night, but something is afoot! Soon after starting your run through the cul de sac to try to get your candy haul with your friends, strange things begin to happen, and you’ll need to investigate them to save Halloween!
You may be facing living Halloween decorations, a classic movie monster, a shadowy candy thief, or the wild ideas of your GM equiped with your wits and your Halloween costume.
One key element of this setting, though, is that the monsters that you’re facing are likely going to have their own motivations for doing things, and that’s part of the mystery that you need to solve. The game specifically states that combat is probably not going to be the best answer and that perspective taking is one of the main themes of the adventure. This means that, while you can go in and fight, there should also be sufficient routes planned into your particular story to allow for discover, exploration, and questions, giving a more complex journey (and also leaning it a little more flexible for fam-friendly play).
Your character in Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets
In Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets, you’ll be playing as a 10-16 year old kid who is out trick-or-treating with their friends!
During character creation, you’ll be choosing this person’s general story, one of their fears, and their costume! Fears and costumes are both key elements that double as both adding personality to your character and working with the mechanics to make gameplay unique between PCs.
You’ll also be dividing points up between three attributes, courage, cunning, and charm, which help define the ways that your character can excel at tackling certain types of challenges.
Overall, character creation takes a few minutes and is pretty straightforward while offering a lot of opportunity to make someone that’s still unique from everyone else at the table.
Mechanics for Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets
Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets relies on d6 rolls to determine your successes for challenging actions. When you want to make a move, you’ll choose the attribute that you want to use and roll d6’s equal to the number of points you assigned to that skill. Then, you’ll see how many of the dice rolled meet the success criteria and compare it to the challenge that the GM has set (i.e. something easy might need only 1 success, but something hard might need 2 or 3 successes).
You can also get bonus dice added to your pool by overcoming fears, getting help from other players, and using your costume! This allows for some creative planning and teamwork to factor in, and will help draw all the players together, as support may be really necessary for some of those larger challenges.
Now, that’s talking about successes… when it comes to failures, if you don’t hit the successes needed for a challenge rating, there is a consquence that, I thought, really fit the themes of the game well.
When you get a failure, something spooky is going to happen! The story’s stakes increase, and players will need to make a roll to see if they get scared, marking this on their “spooky scale”. Too many on the spooky scale, and… they are frightened and have to snap out of it before they can proceed.
I thought was a great alternative to health; it gives measurable consequences that fit the themes of the game while also progressing the story… and characters don’t straight up die. I love mechanics that push the story because it takes a little bit of the sting out of getting a failure by allowing something interesting to happen. If it’s just points/health getting marked down, that feels more like getting a bad grade, but if the story is impacted too… it feels like it has some meaning and gives the GM a bit of control to moderate the situation based on how the players are doing to keep things fun.
Overall thoughts on Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets
I thought was a fun game that’s VERY focused on Halloween themes in the best way. It’s about facing fears, seeing the motivations and goals behind the monster’s “mask”, having fun with your friends, and going on an adventure. The entirety of Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets is a mood that, to me, embodies everything that look forward to about Halloween, and it’s got great mechanics, setting guides, roll tables, GM advice, and more to back it up and turn it into a wonderful game. I really enjoyed checking it out, and I think this is a perfect TTRPG for Halloween parties, one-shots, post-trick-or-treating night games, and just having fun with in general.
Find a copy of Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets
You can find a copy of Tricks, Treats & Spooky Streets on DriveThruRPG and itchio!
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