Games
How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
I like the idea of solo board gaming. I’ve played a lot of Arkham Horror on my own, but it’s a bitch to set up and takes several hours to play. So with a small kid in the house it doesn’t get much table time these days. But sometime before christmas last year I bought Nemo’s War from Victory Point Games, and just a few weeks ago I finally gave in and purchased Ghost Stories. The former is a pure solo game based on Jules Verne’s famous novel, the latter a game for 1-4 players based on … well, kung-fu movies?
In Nemo’s War you travel ‘round the seven seas looking for hidden wonders and treasures, you have adventures, help the locals rise against imperialist bastards, and sink the occasional ship. And how well you fare in the game depends on what kind of captain you are. If you’re the militaristic type, you’d better sink some warships, whereas if you’re more into exploration, you have to spend more time searching for treasure. In my six or eight games so far I’ve only been pursuing an anti-imperialistic strategy so I don’t know how balanced things are, but it seems like different strategies require different playing style, and that’s a cool touch.
Each round you roll to see if new ships appear in one of the oceans (too many means you loose), and to find out whether or not you’re gonna have an adventure this round. The adventures are based on actual events in the novel, and can be stuff like giant squids or the finding of a giant pearl. The rewards you might have from adventures are quite crucial to your success, but even though they sport a small piece of text and are clearly taken from the novel, the adventures don’t make me feel much like I’m the “real” captain Nemo. After this you can attack ships, search for treasure, move, and other stuff. Actually it’s quite simple, even though the rules won’t let you think this the first few times you read them.
I like the game. It’s hard to beat (I’m still not faring better than not a win, but not quite a loss either), and you have lots of decisions to take as you go along: when to keep pushing an attack, what resource (crew, Nemo or hull) to risk in a crisis and so on. And though it’s no beauty the map looks nice, and so does the chits with ships. But the adventure cards are absolute shit with, for instance, a very visible number that serves no purpose but to tell you, well, what number the card is. And they’re also hard to shuffle and sort out, and that’s really my biggest gripe about the game: the production quality of tokens, chits, and cards make the game very fiddly. Don’t get me wrong, I paid ‘round 40 bucks for it (including overseas shipping), and even though it’s kinda DIY print quality, it’s well worth my money. But fiddling with six or seven sets of chits that all have to be shuffled, and removing and sorting cards that are difficult to handle feels like too much of a hassle. I may sound shallow, yet it means that I don’t get it to the table that often. And I know Arkham Horror is even more of a bitch to set up, but that’s an epic game, not something you can finish in less than an hour.
Contrast it with Ghost Stories. I bought it, as mentioned, a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve played 15+ solo games and even more with the wife just this last week. It’s simply a blast. And furthermore it’s extremely easy to set up – literally less than five minutes – and just looks like a million dollars.
I’ve been faring really well in solo games, but after a win on normal in our second game, we became cocky and has been playing on nightmare in our two player games ever since. Playing, and getting our asses handed to us. It’s just fucking hard to beat, and I know we’ll celebrate for days (or something else that’ll make us sound less sad) when we finally beat Wu Feng. Much as we did when defeating Sauron in Knizia’s LotR years back.
That I like Ghost Stories better than Nemo’s War is not the point with this. But Ghost Stories is both a better GAME and also in some way manages to tell its STORY better. I may be helping locals throw of the yokes of imperial oppression, but mostly it feels like I’m sacrificing a token to roll a die. And I don’t do it too soon, because then I might later loose what I just gained. This description may not be totally fair on Nemo’s War, but it somewhat pales when compared to liquid horrors looming over a small village and cursing you with a dreaded die roll that might cost you the game every round.
No, the point is that playing Ghost Stories made me realise that while I like soloing a board game, I also want it to be easy to handle and just as important: nice to look at. When playing with my friends I can have a blast with a butt-ugly copy of Kill Dr. Lucky because we’re playing it together. But when it’s just me and the game I need a little more something.
