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, which they must play their way through in order to escape.
The episode provides examples of:
- 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.
- 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 the girl'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.
- In Name Only: The episode retains the basic concept of the original short story, but otherwise goes in a completely different direction with it.
- Sore Loser: The two villains refuse to let the two protagonists leave the house even after they won the game fair and square.
- 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.
