Tom's Top 50 - No. 49 GHOST STORIES

Coming in at No. 49 is Ghost Stories by Antoine Bauza and published by Repos Production.

The Ghost Stories Cover

My BGG Rating and Co: 8. "My wife and I love this game. Make no mistake this game is very hard, and requires players to be willing to sacrifice their resources and make tough decisions. Likemost coops, it can suffer from dominant player syndrome but the dice roll element mitigates that (while making it harder).

Mostly play this game with 2 players and works well. Also good with 3 or 4.

Rule book was quite poor and hard to learn from. Took a few plays to work it out, and still have to consult the rulebook, even after 15+ plays."

What type of game is it?

It's a fully cooperative (I generally dislike full coops) tower defense game of using actions, location powers, and player powers, to protect a village from ghosts until the big bad shows up and you need to defeat him.

What do you do in the game?

Like a lot of coops (though this one gets extra credit because it came out in 2008, among the earliest of the first wave of coops) a turn consists first of doing something bad (advancing ghosts who might haunt a village tile), then adding new ghosts to the board following specific placement rules (or losing a life token if you're unable to).

Then, after the evil step, you take your turn which consists of:

1. An optional move action - moving your figurine to an adjacent space within the village (the 9 Location tiles)

2. Your main action:

   1. Attempting an exorcism to remove ghosts or

   2. Activating your current location and resolving its effect

   
   

At any time on your turn you may spend a special yin yang resource to trigger additional actions that you will definitely need, or you may have a neutral power token (at lower player counts) where you can spend them to access the special player powers of the unused characters.

You need to clear out the ghosts before the build up too much, and you do this by rolling a coloured dice and spending coloured Tao tokens to try and match the requirements on your target ghost(s). But you may not have the tokens you need, or you're not in the right location to do that, so instead you'll enlist the help of the villager tile you're on to gain tokens, or push ghosts back, or even kill a ghost from anywhere (at a cost).

Players keep taking turns, managing the ghost horde, trying to keep the villagers alive, until Wu Feng shows up, then you need to try and exorcise him by meeting the ghastly requirements on his card in order to win the game.

Depending on how well you did, you'll get a score, but really the feeling of winning and losing comes down to whether A) you avoided defeat (easier said than done) and B) whether you defeated Wu Feng. The points don't really matter.

What does it do well?

As with Abyss, the art and theme are terrific and unique.

The game is oppressively difficult, and feels so tight with that single action each turn. The way the game pushes you into spending your precious resources, and then plan on how you're going to get them back leads to a real tense and thematic experience.

The dice roll element adds a bit of unpredictability and difficulty, and only a fool would rely on the roll of the dice to get them out of trouble. But when the dice DO fall in your favour, then it feels amazing and like you can conquer the world. Spoiler: you won't.

The choice trade-offs between your actions vs activating the villager powers, and when and how to use your player powers just feels so finely tuned and tense.

Why not higher?

Firstly, the rulebook is a mess, and the rules are not quite memorable enough that you don't need to refer to it, especially if you haven't played it for a while.

It's also an oppressive game, that always feels too hard - and your little wins throughout the game really do feel very minor as a new and worse threat will almost certainly emerge immediately. So moments of celebration and success are hard to come by, which can make it feel like a slog, and winning more like a relief than a triumph.

The end game is also a bit sloppy: the scoring system doesn't feel integral to the win/loss conditions, and seems a bit like an afterthought. There's not much incentive to keep playing after Wu Feng is defeated, and the drama kind of dissipates.

It is, also, a coop and has the same problems as most open information coops: alpha player dominance.

What would I play instead?

Well I generally try to play non-coops if given the choice. But this is close to the top of my list in terms of pure coops, especially those that are a bit longer or more involved. This probably competes most closely with Aeon's End in our house, where we usually favour lighter shorter coops like Sky Team or The Crew.

Where do I land on it?

8/10. It's a good coop experience, but not one I seek out regularly, and rarely hits the table (maybe once every year or two). Still, its unique theme and experience mean I am unlikely to let it leave my collection.