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L. G. Cunningham's The Game With No Name is a spooky adventure for 9 year olds about a pair of twins who find a very old board game behind the boiler of their new house.
Izzy Miller is twelve, sporty and the tallest in her old class. Her twin brother Noah is a genius. He's off to a special school for gifted kids, and that's why the whole family has just moved to a dusty old manor in the countryside. Izzy is not happy about any of it (and it's hard to blame her).
The house has a history. A pale boy called Walter from down the road tells her the locals call it Terror Shack. The last family to live there, about a hundred years ago, simply vanished.
It's Friday, which means family game night, and the box of board games didn't arrive with the removal van. So when Noah comes up from the basement with an old ivory game he found behind the boiler, he's delighted. Izzy thinks it looks like it's been wrapped in wrinkled old skin. There are no rules and no pieces. Just two strange dice, a grinning skull and a finishing square that says YOU SURVIVED.
Noah rolls the dice. A silver skull slides across the board by itself, a smoky pirate face appears and recites a riddle, and the three of them fall straight onto the deck of a pirate battleship. Now it's a real-life game of Battleships, with real cannons, real sharks and no idea how to get home.
It's properly exciting. Izzy nearly goes overboard. She fires off all their ammunition in a panic and has to cope with the fact that she might have just sunk them all.
What makes it more than a scary story is the twins. Izzy calls herself the dumb twin. She's tired of everything being about Noah, and she's jealous in a way plenty of brothers and sisters will recognise. Noah, for his part, is so busy being fascinated that he forgets to be frightened. Their bickering is very funny. Underneath it, though, they need each other, and you can feel that starting to matter.
The chills are the fun kind, with a creepy house, a board that won't break and a shark circling under Izzy's feet. There's nothing gory. And the game clearly isn't finished with them after the first round.
If they enjoy it, Pretty Perilous Parakeet is by the same author. It's about Archie, who's animal mad and feels outshone by his sister, the family's golden child.
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