LogFAQs > #977682441

25. Last Bastion
Expansions Played: N/A

Oh, hey, a co-op game. Been a bit.

This is the game on the list with the biggest need of a replay. It's been years since we last broke it out, and that's... Really not the game's fault.

Last Bastion is a retheming of Ghost Stories, Antoine Bauza's first real hit before his name was etched into relative board game immortality with 7 Wonders. That game has a reputation for being brutally difficult to win, even by the standards of popular cooperative games, and while it's generally agreed that Last Bastion isn't quite as punishing, it's far from being completely nerfed.

Initial plays backed this up. I even ran through a game solo when I first picked this up, which I hardly ever do. That was followed by a session at 3 players and then one at 2, and all three of those ended in pretty extreme failure. Then we all got together for a 4-player run wherein we got absurdly, absurdly lucky in every respect and basically stomped all over the deck that was our opponent. We'll never get dice rolls like that again.

It just left an impression best described as, "Oh. Well, okay." And like I said, I hesitate to call that a fault of the game - I don't want to criticize a game for not accounting for incredible player fortune. But it does speak to a flaw that I lambasted Eldritch Horror for and think is somewhat inherent to cooperative games in that they really have to hit a sweet spot to be fun, because when things go too well there's no feeling of accomplishment. With competitive games, you have a living, breathing, thinking opponent across from you that can learn and adapt and switch strategies and take agency. Cooperative games have only the scenario, so the only legitimate way to have replayability is to use randomness, and sometimes randomness just sucks.

Anyway, I don't want to muse on that sort of thing too much here instead of talking more about this individual game. Last Bastion drops you and your fellow heroes onto a 3x3 grid of randomly placed tiles that makes up the titular citadel and gives you what is essentially a tower defense game. Each tile on the grid and each playable character has unique abilities, which you'll be using to protect the place from an advancing horde of monsters (also with their own unique problems to cause) drawn each round from a central deck. Broadly speaking, each hero can move and fight OR move and use a tile action on every turn, in any order. Combat is mostly dice-based, but there's ways to mitigate the luck and help out your rolls. Included in the deck is a boss monster, the Warlord (though you can add more to increase the difficulty) - simply kill it when it eventually pops up and you win.

It's not a complicated game, as rules overhead is kept light and the only thing that takes some getting used to is the tile iconography. This game also distinguishes itself from something like Eldritch Horror quite a bit by having multiple good options for players on most turns, which reduces both the overall learning curve and the need for backseating - maybe you're not always making the one "BEST" decision, but you don't ever feel like you play the whole game as a fireman running to snuff out the thing that's going to cause obvious, imminent, total disaster if it's not dealt with IMMEDIATELY. The small board means you'll rarely be in a situation where you can't react to something promptly, and you've got good situational tools. You can battle two monsters at once from the corner spots, for example, but that's not necessarily always the most efficient use of actions.

In short, Last Bastion does a good job of creating a challenge that makes you think and synergize with your teammates due to its rapidly changing game state and healthy amount of viable options for success without forcing the need for extreme brain burning. Those options are simple and if you're playing the game right, bad luck shouldn't completely sink you. I've seen complaints that the theme is boring, especially compared to the spooky Chinese mythology of Ghost Stories, but I'm not bothered - I think "generic fantasy" works well for a game like this and it's still quite a pretty production.

It takes a special kind of co-op game to get past my bias against the format and I don't think Last Bastion is special, but it's a fun enough time.

Collection Status and Future Outlook: Owned by me, picked up for a good deal years ago. As I said, I'd definitely like to get this to the table again sometime soon to see if my extended time in the hobby changes my mind on any of this, and to get over our underwhelming last session. I can't imagine it will surpass Spirit Island as the go-to cooperative game for the group, though. (Since that's the only one left on the ranking, I don't think I'm spoiling anything here.)