LogFAQs > #932675618

103. Ghost Stories (2008)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Point-to-point movement, dice combat, threat management
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60 minutes
Experience: 2 games with 4 players (2016, 2017)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 54.5/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player controls a warrior defending a village from a siege of ghosts. The village is a 3x3 grid, and each turn, an increasing number of ghosts spawn (via a deck of nemeses) and advance on the village from one of its four edges. Players move around across the town to defend different edges of it, rolling dice to attempt to defeat the ghosts. You win if you survive the entire deck plus defeat a boss.

Design - Ghost Stories is pretty clever and it has great table presence - a cool-looking village with different tiles where you can perform actions; enemies on cards that keep advancing; a mind-crunching puzzle. In a staple among many dudes-on-a-map co-op games where the board keeps escalating its threats, characters have slightly different special abilities, so you might want to delegate responsibilities to a future player's turn even if an issue seems urgent.

Experience - The thing is, Ghost Stories earns its "wow, this is stupid-hard" reputation. I've played it twice - once at a meetup and once on a friend's copy - and each time, it just felt punishing. That's really the single word that best describes my GS experience. Other co-op "threat management" games can overwhelm you, but either you can outrace the overwhelming threat, or you get more and more powerful.

Ghost Stories feels like it has neither. You can't outrace, because the victory condition is outlasting. But there also doesn't feel like there's a power progression, so as far as I've seen, you just get ground down. I think we got close to seeing the boss, but didn't either time.

Future - Now there's an obvious incentive to replay Ghost Stories: beating the bastard of a game. But the feeling I get after an hour of stress until finally being overcome is not "let's do that again!" but rather "oh... okay." The highs are there in the game, but they're infrequent. Maybe there's some "git gud" that needs to happen, and we just need to grind through until we get to that level. But if a difficult co-op discourages a repeat try... that's worrying.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness