Based on "The Haunted House Game", the fifth story in Even More Tales to Give You Goosebumps (the third short-story collection from the Tales to Give You Goosebumps anthology series).
Friends Nadine and Jonathan are tricked into entering a haunted house that turns out to be a giant board game, the Mansion of Terror, which they must play their way through in order to escape.
The episode provides examples of:
- Adaptational Villainy: In the original story, Noah and Anna were Jonathan's younger siblings. In the episode, they're introduced as two unrelated kids who also got lost in the Haunted House, but are later revealed to be malevolent ghosts.
- Adaptation Distillation: The episode retains the "haunted board game" plot, but the TV episode turns the story into a Jumanji-esque adventure as the two kids are sucked into the board game and forced to play for their lives against ghosts planning to add them to their collection.
- Alien Geometries: The titular house. Nadine and Jonathan enter through the front door but somehow end up in the basement. They look out of a window to get their bearings, but it only shows the giant board game they started at that contains the same house they are standing in.
- Ambiguous Situation: Are "Noah" and "Anna" autonomous entities, or just another part of the board game? The fact that they're placing bets on the outcome and don't mind sabotaging their fellow ghosts seems to suggest the former, but after they are defeated the game reappears all on its own which would seem to suggest the latter.
- And I Must Scream: Any player who dies inside the game becomes a new game piece.
- Endless Corridor: The protagonists have to escape the haunted house itself to win the game with their lives. The corridor to the front door stretches out into infinity before them, requiring them to pull it towards them with a fishing rod.
- Evil Old Folks: One of the spots the two kids land on takes them to a house where two old women are playing a game. They're supposed to ask them for something, which turns out to be an amulet that saps the life out of Nadine's arm.
- The Game Plays You: The show adapted "The Haunted House Game", but changed almost everything. Instead of being a game where the things that happen in the game also happen in reality, episode's version is a Jumanji-esque board game that two kids are sucked inside of and have to find the exit of the haunted house to escape alive.
- Haunted House: Of course. The twist is that the haunted house itself is a giant labyrinthine board game.
- Here We Go Again!: Nadine and Jonathan escape the haunted house, but the episode ends with the board game rematerializing where they found it and the little girl luring in two more children with her Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
- In Name Only: The episode retains the basic concept of the original short story, but otherwise goes in a completely different direction with it.
- Invisible Wall: At one point Jonathan decides to give up and tries to walk off the board. An invisible barrier prevents him from leaving.
- Schmuck Bait: Opening the box to Mansion of Terror makes you a part of the game. Naturally, this isn't conveyed to the players in advance.
- Sore Loser: The two ghosts who posed as Noah and Anna refuse to let Jonathan and Nadine leave the house even after they won the game fair and square.
- Title Confusion: The deadly board game takes place inside a Haunted House, but is actually called Mansion of Terror, not Haunted House Game.
- Unwinnable by Design: Mansion of Terror is deliberately rigged against the players. First, they don't know they're agreeing to play it until after they opened the box. If they ever roll a 7 (i.e., the most-common two dice combo), they die. The first stage requires collecting random items in several life or death puzzles to make it through the second stage. Any one of the challenges can kill you and if you miss an item, you're trapped forever because the second stage becomes impossible to complete. If you do somehow make it to the main lobby, the ghosts from the previous challenges reappear to block your path to the front door and kill you; Jonathan and Nadine luck out because they have a flashing camera to scare them off. Even then, the two last ghosts refuse to let them leave.
- Weakened by the Light: The ghosts are harmed by the flash from Jonathan's camera, which allows him and Nadine to escape through the front door.
- Win to Exit: The plot revolves around four kids who were separately (two at a time) sucked into a magical board game inside a creepy abandoned house. The only way to get out is to win the game while not getting killed.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: The plot kicks off when a little girl lures older kids into the abandoned house by claiming that she lost her cat there so that they'll find and play the deadly board game. At the end of the episode, she performs the same trick with another set of victims. She's probably not even a real child: after all, the two head ghosts were able to pose as children as well.
