Repos Production Ghost Stories

You can skip this section if you aren’t a prude:I bought this game after reading a review that made me think I could not resist. Sucked in I was. Co-operative game. Taoist monks defending villagers from ghosts who help the monks from time to time. What? The board helps me too, not just fights against me and my fellow meditators? What could possibly go wrong?Well you know I’m a prude. If you don’t, I’m a prude. My permanent black marker, and even paint brushes, have got some use when new board games have come to my home. I’m a family man. I’ve got a prude wife. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw a few cards in need of some magic-marker-modesty. But as I was thumbing through the cards I started to feel a little icky. But I’d paid good money for this game so I thought… how can I do this? When my wife saw the cards, she swore off the game entirely.I know enough about games to realize the important part about the cards are those weird symbols on them, so I’ve also got a friend who can make cards. Oh yes. I could make my own card faces and my friend could print and cut them for me. So I thumbed through the cards and identified unique sets… on and on till I decided I’d just de-gore de-terrify de-ickify those cards with my marker. So I’ve got lots of black silhouettes in my deck.So if you were thinking, yeah, I like to feel icky, then this game’s cards are for you. Hats off to the graphic artists for really getting into the theme here, and I hope they get opportunities to use their skills to make things of beauty too.Now that I have modified the cards, I think my wife will play.Game PlayThis effectively and beautifully illustrated board is actually 9 squares randomly arranged each game. Each is a villiager’s home that can either be vacant or occupied- depending on whether a nasty ghostie chased them out or not. This nine-some are flanked by four Taoist boards that have three spaces for sieging ghosts. Each turn, at least one new ghost shows up on one of those spots.You start the game with some customary cardboard tokens. Some that help you in fighting Ghosts, and one that either lets you ask a villiager for help (when you aren’t at their house) or bring a frightened villiager back. You also get four Qi (read: hit point) tokens.Each turn has two phases Yin (Bad Stuff) Announce what Ghosts are on your card. If there’s a symbol on the bottom center of the card, do it. Could send Haunter one step closer to vacating (or actually vacate) a villiager tile. Could have to roll a black curse die. Might do the haunting above, cost you a Qi point, just vacate a villiage tile, that sort of thing Then bring a new ghost into play. There’s often a little symbol on the bottom left of the card that tells you if this ghost does anything upon its arrival, like brings company (another ghost- who inevitably brings more company.) I’m telling you, you think you are doing fine until four new ghosts appear in one turn.Yang (Good Stuff) In any order you may: Move your Taoist to an adjacent villiage square. Attempt to exorcize a ghost (roll dice and possibly augment your roll with token like (magically fortified) sticky rice or Incense sticks.) Instead of trying to remove a ghost you can ask a villiager for help. Taoist Special powers: Each one has a special power. Like on can roll an additional die, or re-roll some dice, or one can move twice or he can move another character and so on. But what’s cool is you can pick up a token that will let you assume a missing players secret power.I hate to tell you what to do but…I’ve not played enough games on this to think these are winning strategies, but I think it’s kind of on the OK side to keep benign ghosts around. If he’s not sending haunters in or curing you every time, maybe it’s not so bad. Especially if I’d get cursed for killing er… exorcizing the guy.The other thing that’s nice is those Budda statues Lay those down as often as you can because sometimes you don’t want to have to get after every single one, and sometimes the Dice aren’t always your friends.Make sure to use the villager when discounts to strength of all one color of ghosts. The earlier the better!ThemeI do really get sucked in, and it would probably be worse if I’d left the cards as they were. When your villager tiles get turned over they leave a vacant dark and windblown scene. I guess it’s the same feel of all cooperative games: darkness or defeat creeping in all around you. We start talking trash to the inanimate game who never talks back but keeps dishing out the pain.BalanceSo the first time I played, we didn’t do the rules right, haunters came four times as fast as they should have and a co-worker swore it off for feeling so drained. Then I played another rule wrong making it too easy. Now that we are playing right, it’s great! We win, we lose, it’s a close nail-biting game. Not good if you aren’t trying to quit that habit: nail-biting.As far as replay-ability goes, the incarnations of Wu Feng are numerous and varied. The monks you play can have one of two powers each game, so that varies. But it’s always going to be Ghosts coming at you.InteractionInteraction is High. There’s a delicate balance in making suggestions for someone and telling them what to do. This must be reached to play these cooperative games. Respecting the sovereignty of each player is a virtue. And you can always blame them if they lose you the game. Better to have someone else to blame, eh?Learning CurveMedium. If you played this with someone who was experienced, as it’s cooperative, you wouldn’t have any trouble. But if you, like me, read the rules, and tried to figure it out, you, like me, might take a couple of iterations to get it right. You’d think I’d be better- at least I think I’d be better- but such is life. Let this be a lesson to you, if a game is too hard, or too easy, chances are, you are playing it wrong, but you may really be superior specimen.DowntimeLow. While you do have a turn to take, you get to advise and even plead with your fellow players to do the right thing(s) on their turn. Keep an eye on the other players to make sure they are doing each step. You’d have to have your victory marred by having cheated because someone didn’t know they were supposed to throw a curse die every time it was their turn.What’s not to Like?I can’t think of anything bad to say that I haven’t already said. I hate to admit that I’m probably not making good enough use of the Tao tokens and that’s why those ghosts that require 4 hits hardly ever get killed unless I can drop them on a Budda. The other thing I’d like is more players. With two expansions, one already seems to be out of print, only one adds a fifth player that controls the forces of evil. I guess 5 isn’t bad.

In Ghost Stories, you are tasked with defending your village with up to 4 friends from the hordes of Wu-Feng's minions coming to destroy you and everything. Each of the 4 monks have totally different abilities and each village spot (there are 9 total) does something different. Let me allow Wu-Feng (he's the head demon whose head you need to hack off) to slay that elephant in the room, first. This game is extremely challenging and difficult YET it's totally easy to learn/teach. Some people might not like the fact that you're rolling dice which means a whole lotta chance. If this is you, I'm telling you, playing this with 4 gaming friends can cause enjoyment to break forth. You'll be telling tales of former past glories lost. Like that time when victory was torn out of your grasp because that last demon HAD to just come out or that time your mate got arrogant and thought against healing themselves to what they call "fend off" the masses to coming. Yeah, they died and that was the snowball that plowed the rest of us down.So on my buy, borrow, or bury rating scale, this is totally a buy. We still harass friends that made stupid moves in Ghost Stories, but that's part of beauty of this game. You're making your own adventure. My sole issue with this game and why it almost got a 4 star is due to that number, 4. Ghost Stories can be played with 1 to 4 player games. I've played it with 3 on several occasions and played it with 2 once. You're at a major disadvantage and it's just not as fun as playing with 4. For the total and full enjoyment you will need 4 players for it. 3 players is doable but so is Mount Everest. 2 players is a total drag.

As co-operative boardgames go, taoist monks defending a mystical Asian village from the lord of hell is pretty cool. Also, you know a game is going to be difficult when it comes with a scorecard for immortalizing your group if you actually win. The only other co-op game I own with a scorecard is Lord of the Rings. Sauron and Wu Feng evidently had similar childhoods.The artwork and components are excellent. It's a good bridge between a dice game like Elder Sign (or Cthulu Yahtzee), and a team tactics game like Forbidden Island/Desert, but Ghost Stories is much more challenging than either of those. It's not the difficulty that bothers me about Ghost Stories. It's just too random for meaningful tactics to matter like they should, and it doesn't scale all that well with less than 4 players.On nearly every player's turn, a new ghost appears - at random - from a draw pile. No problem, Shadows over Camelot has a "bad stuff" deck too. However, since many ghosts trigger the drawing of other ghosts, it's possible for the board to go from half-empty to saturated on a single player's turn. Strategy is always in flux with co-op games, but whatever the previous player just did to aid the group is now possibly useless. In addition, many of these new ghosts will force the player to roll a "torment" die where chances are just as good that you'll trigger another ghost arriving, or losing all of your tao tokens, or nothing at all.THEN, if you actually find yourself in a position to exorcise a ghost, you have to - you guessed it - roll dice to see whether you can defeat it. There are ways to mitigate poor dice rolls with tao tokens and a village protection tile, assuming ghosts didn't cause you to lose them already. Thankfully, one of the 6 sides of the dice are wild. That gives you a 1/27 (3.7 %) chance of rolling 3 results that will actually help you against a difficult foe (many of course only require 1 or 2 good results).I don't recommend playing with fewer than four players, because then the rules start changing with "neutral boards" and "power tokens" and other differences from the basic game. I suppose it could be good for 2 players, if you use all 4 monks and each play 2 of them. If you want an easier game, just start with an extra chi token or remove some ghosts from the deck.Since you have options for each monk's ability, we found a good synergy with these: Green - Roll an additional die/never tormented. Red - Move another player (useful for getting someone back to the center when out-of-turn). Yellow - Scroll of ghost-weakening. Blue - Same action twice (Get to the Bhuddas immediately and find an open corner!).Not a game for novices or sore losers. You can possibly be revived if you die, but you'll probably just die again. Wu Feng gonna getcha.