Ghost Stories

My illustrated Essen copy.

That's a great picture.

How do you like Ghost Stories? The theme looks great, but the reviews make it sound a little detached from the theme. Judging by the number of rules questions at TOS, Ghost Story also seems like it might be unnecessarily complex, or at least the rule book is ineffective. At first, I really wanted to get this game, but now I'm going to wait and see.

It may be a tad more complex than it needs to be, but the inadequacies of the rule book are by far the main reason there are so many rules issues.

Thanks, it's definitely in the 'you'll only get it off me if you prise it out of my cold, dead, hands' category. I was expecting a couple of signatures and was amazed and delighted upon opening the box.

. . . Which only occurred last Saturday as there was a couple of non-Essen games to be included in the parcel, predominantly Aggersborg. It's punched, but I'm awaiting card sleeves and have only browsed the rules book so far. Tonight I should be reading it. Given the time of year, most people that I game with have fled to the four corners of the earth, so I'll probably be trying it solo ASAP.

Regarding T.O.S. rule questions, there seems to be a lot for any game. Last Night On Earth has loads of them, yet I thought the rulebook and card text very clear. Ninety percent of them just seemed to be due to players not taking the cards literally, i.e. most answers were 'do exactly what it says'. These days I never take into account the number of rules questions when buying a game.

Bummer. Mine's not signed.

Great game, though.
It might be easiest to file it as: Pandemic but harder, a bit more personality to the diseases, rolling dice, and that does justice to the coolest theme ever in a game.

Great picture

As for the game, I really do like it, but it is a bit more abstract and puzzle-like than your typical AT. Still, the theme doesn't feel pasted on and it does have lots of tension. The rules shouldn't be a problem and compared to many AT games are really short and quite clear, although there are a couple of cases not covered, but it being a coop game I find that's not really a problem, just choose an interpretation and if your decision makes the game too easy/hard just change it for next game...

Thanks! Read the rules and it looks promising. The ghost advancement also struck me as puzzle-like and I'm not sure whether that's good or bad, but it was certainly unexpected. From the art to the figures to the rules, I think it has a wonderfully immersive feel. But I'm definitely going to try to pick players from the more AT end of the spectrum as I think Euro-AP would be the kiss of death. Though I would hope that as a cooperative game, no one would analyse it to death (maybe I'm being naive).

Trouble is, too many games are stacking up and are in the 'must be played next' category. Essen was a bitch this year for 'must buy' releases!

I've just had a run of solo sessions of this game and have come away disappointed. It seems that once you've got the strategy worked out it's rather a matter of rinse and repeat every game and hoping the deck and the dice aren't loaded too heavily against you. There's certainly some fine-tune decision making to be made, even in the face of a grand strategy, but overall I don't see this as having enough decisions or variety or story to see all that many repeat plays.

Anyone else tried it?

I've played it once and had fun but none of us had played before, so it was all over the place with repeated strategic errors. I'm disappointed but not surprised to hear it doesn't hold up well over multiple plays.

I think its a little more abstracted than it should be, the rulebook sucks ass, and it doesn't have enough variety to be a truly good solitaire or pure cooperative game, but if you are looking at it as a "pull this out from my huge shelf of games every couple of months" I think it is a solid and fun game.

Whats the uber-strategy, Thrower? In our game our main focus was to kill the ghosts that can walk over the board and everything else was secondary. We lost when several of them hit at once and we were weakened by some other stuff.

My biggest gripe about Ghost Stories was that you were doing the same thing over and over and over on your turn. This is unlike Arkham, where you would kill a monster or two, then seal a gate, then get a clue token, etc. multiplayer arkham encourages a lot of specialization but at least there is some thought and strategy involved. I didn't feel that way with ghost stories, where you were just optimizing the fastest way to kill the nasty ghosts.

hancock.tom wrote:

Whats the uber-strategy, Thrower? In our game our main focus was to kill the ghosts that can walk over the board and everything else was secondary. We lost when several of them hit at once and we were weakened by some other stuff.

Those walking ghosts are important, but not vital. Most of them give you a couple of turns leeway before they start doing damage and they reset after they've haunted one tile, giving you more grace to get rid of them. Providing you place them so that they don't haunt essential tiles such as the Sorceror, they can be managed.

I found Tormentors - ghosts which curse you every turn - to be far more damaging. They can really hurt if left unchecked, plus they're buggers to exorcise, with large resistance ratings. If you get one and you don't have the Tao or a Buddha to handle it, get rid of it with the Sorceror right away.

Aside from that, be aware of when you *need* to get rid of a ghost and when you don't. If there's no haunters, no tormentors and no board is full then there's no need to do an exorcism. If you've got haunters but none of them are directly about to haunt a village tile there's still really no need. Use these gaps to utilise the best village tiles: the Tea House, Buddhist temple and Herbalist.

Once you've got Buddhas (and if you can get two using the appropriate Tao power so much the better) get them on the board. The most efficient way to do this is right after an exorcism, placing a Buddha into the now-vacant space. Place Buddhas on the boards of in-play Monks if possible (so you can use it versus black ghosts as well as board colour), otherwise on the boards of a colour which has yet to see a Tormentor come into play.

That's the essence of it. Can't be bothered to type much more. In five games I've had one clear one, one near miss and one "ought" to have won had I spent a moment more thinking about it, and the latter was at an increased difficulty level too.

MattDP wrote:

I've just had a run of solo sessions of this game and have come away disappointed. It seems that once you've got the strategy worked out it's rather a matter of rinse and repeat every game and hoping the deck and the dice aren't loaded too heavily against you. There's certainly some fine-tune decision making to be made, even in the face of a grand strategy, but overall I don't see this as having enough decisions or variety or story to see all that many repeat plays.

Anyone else tried it?

That's a bummer...This one has been on my radar since I enjoy a good solo game, but if it gets real mechanical then I suppose I need to move on. Now for a point of reference, though not listed as a solo game, I've been playing the crap out of Red November solitaire. I don't think the game loses a whole lot with hidden vs open equip and I suppose that is a game where you just have to hope the deck and the dice aren't loaded too heavily against you.

LvT

LordVonTush wrote:

That's a bummer...This one has been on my radar since I enjoy a good solo game, but if it gets real mechanical then I suppose I need to move on.

Try it yourself - there's a Vassal module and the rulebook is freely available online. Be interested to know what you think.

I've been playing GS on Vassal and will probably pick up the actual game at some point. I do like it quite a bit. Not as much as Pandemic, by comparison, but a lot more than Red November, which to me is a lot more "samey" and seems to just be about every player putting out their own individual fires or whatever. At least in Ghost Stories there is a good measure of planning and interaction between what the different players need to do, and I like that in a coop, whether solo or with the full complement of players. I also like that the solo game plays well either by controlling all 4 roles or with just one role, due to the power token rules. Usually, I would only want to play a solo game of coops like Pandemic or LOTR by controlling multiple roles, but in this case, playing just the one role gives the solo game a different flavor that's not necessarily worse than with 4 players, just different.

I still haven't played it yet because my regular opponent is very keen on Dominion at the moment. Looks like I'll have to take it to the Oxford college group in order to get some games in.

I disagree about the rulebook, I thought it explained the rules rather well.

I guess I should check out the vassel module, but... (I looked at BSW recently to send a friend the solo Dominion link. Found intro, "basic" commands are /somecrapthatIhavetoremember (a CLI? What is this? The fucking 70s?), Instant Play link didn't help, Play Now link goes to German text, etc. After 5 minutes or so looking for such basic info, I decided not to waste my time.)