If you ever do Ascending Empires I’d probably be down for one of those too. :D
Great Vesper. Just need one more.
Actually, wouldn’t care about the artwork- just nice plain wood with a nice grain would be fine. The trick would be getting the ‘bumpers’ (for both games)- something set into the board, but modular, so they could be moved around. Easiest solution, I could just find some appropriately-sized really heavy weights and rubberize the bottoms (so they don’t move). Then there would just need to be some sort of etched symbols to show placement.
Anyway, it was just a thought. Let me know if you’re interested in working something out someday.
Somehow I have the impression you live in Portland? If so, I’m just up in Seattle. I could drive down, no problem!
Wish I could afford the Crokinole board–always wanted to give it a try. But I bet I can convince Vesper to bring his to my game night sometime (when that’s a thing again). I think that’s an awesome project, Tman.
This is just the link Tman posted but if you’ve never watched it, you should. I’m reposting for the embed.
Definitely! We have a Crokinole board at the office where I work in WI sometimes and it’s a lot of fun. Even had a tournament once.
And @TinWisdom took the 4th and final crokinole board. I’ll post updates in the maker thread as I make these. We can look at other game boards after this run.
How try-hard do you guys get when trying to win a game of Onirim? Do you do stuff like go through your discard deck and count cards to help make your decisions etc?
Having just watched this preview of Dead Reckoning, it’s shot way up my want list:
Card crafting (think the next evolution of card crafting as seen in Mystic Vale or Edge of Darkness by the same designer) on a pirate ship exploring bounty rich islands, competing with other players and fighting them when need be.
It’s due on KS soon.
I’ve been playing the new version of Project Elite a bunch lately. It’s sort of like Escape: The Curse of the Temple with a Starship Troopers theme and enemy unit designs that feel straight out of a Tower Defense game.
The core of the game happens during a 2 minute timer where you are rapidly rolling action dice to try and get the faces for the actions you need (guns to shoot aliens, arrows to move around, hands to use laser swords…). The clever twist is that between each 2 minute timer, you do various upkeep and strategic planning. This pacing of moving between frantic real-time and strategic discussion about what each player is going to do next feels fantastic, a bit like Sidereal Confluence but way less heady and more popcorn.
I hate the art in this game. It feels like a poorly done riff on Gears of War, which is already an aesthetic that’s not working for me. It also sucks that with Kickstarter content I have like 15 characters with the game and all of them are white, which on top of guns and being ugly is going to make it a pretty hard sell to my friends. But after convincing my wife to play, we’re loving it at 2 player and I’m hoping I can get it out with a bigger group at some point. It seems like a game that will work well with up to 5. I recommend checking it out, especially if the aesthetic works for you, but maybe even if it doesn’t.
While waiting for my copy of Apocrypha to arrive, I decided to pull out another game I own but haven’t played in a while (cough, 10 years), Ghost Stories.
When I first purchased Ghost Stories I was inexperienced with board games and holy shit this game kicked my stupid ass. But losing wasn’t my issue with the game, it was how convoluted and busy so much of it felt. You see, 10 years ago I made two big mistakes when playing this game for the first and second/final time. The first mistake was playing with another player who was also inexperienced with sophisticated board games. The second mistake was playing the game with its pack-in expansion, White Moon. White Moon added all the following stuff to the table, and significantly changed the way the game is played:
I’m sure the expansion is well regarded among Ghost Stories fans, but it really shouldn’t have been played by us during our first and second attempts at the game. We bumbled our way through those first two games, and played them all the way to completion, but my god did it take 3x longer than it had too, and golly were we fatigued by the end of it. Regardless of what the game store owner had told me, Ghost Stories + White Moon was not a great entry level game for newbs like us.
Fast forward ten years. My gaming-table-turned-junk-table-turned-gaming-table again has been dusted off, games like Onirim, Arkham Noir, and Codenames: Duet are seeing play again, and I’ve got this modest Ghost Stories box pulled out of the closet and raring to go. Last week, when reading about Apocrypha, I happened across (i.e. searched for) the BGG entry for Ghost Stories and did a little reading on that one (expecting to confirm my suspicion that every body else hated the game too, but I was stupidly wrong on that front). And what I discovered was that I should have ignored all the White Moon stuff for my first dozen games or so and stuck with playing the base game until I had a good feel for what it was all about. This was news to me, because at the time I didn’t even realize that just because the content came in the box I wasn’t actually forced to play it. Well, now I know.
So yesterday I pulled the box down. Spent 90 minutes sorting the game’s parts (who’s the stupid idiot that packed this shit up the last time we played??? wait, don’t answer that), extracting White Moon cards and parts, and also extracting some freebie expansion (called The Guardhouse) what wasn’t mentioned anywhere, but showed up when I realized I had 5 or 6 cards and a tile with no explanation whatsoever that didn’t match anything in the manual’s contents list for either White Moon or the base game. And while I’m sure playing with The Guardhouse would be fine, I really did want to pare this down to its most base form for my first go at it in the year 2020.
So this time I repackaged everything using zip lock bags, and it looks sorted and cared-for. I set up a game, noted the playtime on the box to be about 60 minutes, and aimed for that during my first solo run. About 15 minutes later i was dead. And not just dead, brutally massacred. The village was overrun by ghosts in short order and I guess everybody died. But the big difference this time was that the game was FUN. It didn’t seem convoluted at all, and I could already tell where I’d made some huge decision-making mistakes. So I quickly set up a new game and tried again.
The second game lasted about 90 minutes. Unlike the first game, the first ghost I drew wasn’t some unkillable bastard that I kept failing dice rolls against turn after turn. In the second game I started off by drawing a bunch of smaller ghosts, and had a chance to really get into the rhythm of the game’s Yin/Yang turn structure. And while I did make a couple strategic errors here and there, my draws were much more forgiving and my punishment much less severe. I actually won this game, and though it was mostly because the game (aka, random card draws) had gone easier on me, I could finally see where the fun had laid hidden all those years ago.
Another mistake we had made ten years ago was playing the game as a 4-player game, controlling all 4 player pieces, and making decisions for the full Yin-Yang phases of each one. There are actually instructions on how to play this game as a solo or 2-player game, but somehow we missed those back in 2010 and I can’t exactly remember why (certainly not my fault, I’m sure).
Anyway, I had a lot of fun with Ghost Stories yesterday and I’m glad I pulled it down. I’d like to play it another time or two solo before inviting my wife to sit down with me and play, since I’d like it to go as smooth as possible when she does. By keeping me from having to put the game on hold and thumbing through a manual every single turn if it can be helped, I expect the game to feel much zippier and less sloggy.
My final thought for the game is this: Fuck this card:
The village layout plays a huge role in how easy Ghost Stories it for me. My tactic is to have one player picking up statues and using them to kill the bigger ghosts while the other player kills the smaller ghosts. Since you can drop off two statues in one go from corner tiles, that’s my preferred place to do so. And then it is nice of the tile that moves ghosts is close. So if the tiles (somehow…) end up in the perfect position, I can win most of the time. On the easiest difficulty setting, of course. Why this game has more difficulty settings is a mystery to me :-)
White Moon is something else entirely. I’ve only tried it once and it felt completely hopeless. I’ve never lost a cooperative game so horribly. And that was after having a good grip on the base game.
I don’t own a copy, but I have fond memories of Ghost Stories from the larger game gathering I sometimes attend (and attended religiously, when it was easier for me to get there and the demographics hadn’t shifted so hard towards playing a lot of short filler games instead of the stuff I actually like). We did win a couple times but I’m fairly sure only because we messed up rules.
I’ve never remotely come close to winning Ghost Stories, and while I’ve nevertheless hung on to my copy through a couple of purges of my collection, I haven’t played it in forever just because of how fruitless it feels to set it up and remember the rules and play through it.
I also seem to recall that among its generally very interesting and elegant mechanics, there are a couple that are just weird and hard to manage. Maybe those were the rules for playing with fewer than four players, though? As I say, it’s been awhile.
The game is beautifully produced and has a great setting… I don’t know that I find it any fun to feel totally helplessly shat upon, though.
I just played and lost two more solo games of Ghost Stories this morning. In the first game I stopped the game early because after 3 turns in a row of using a Neutral power token each turn in order to utilize Green’s power, I finally realized that Green’s power had been disabled some time ago thanks to an active ghost currently haunting that board. Oops. I wouldn’t have been able to retract those 3 turns so I just called it.
The second game went much better, and I don’t think I committed any major rule errors, but what finally did me in was drawing a ghost that required I draw another ghost that required I draw another ghost, which caused me to overrun my Blue board, eventually killing/possessing it. I also critically mis-used my Ying/Yang token one turn when I should have saved it for a rainier day… like the next turn, and on a different tile. Whoopsie me.
Anyway, I had fun. I have been able to get into a much better flow each game as I play more. I think right now some of my biggest mistakes are wanting to charge ahead with my turn instead of thinking about each and every applicable/reachable Village Tile power and how it might be best used each turn, before just going with the first action that seems legit.
My dice rolls were particularly poor in the second game and I couldn’t roll two much needed greens to save my life.
Last year Antoine Bauza, the guy who made Ghost Stories, basically reworked it into a viable modern design. The result is a very good kind of tower defense game called Last Bastion. It utterly obsoletes Ghost Stories:
An Amazon link, because I heartily recommend it.
-Tom
Thanks for the recommendation! Always looking for good co-op experiences.
Oh, that’s tempting! Kinda too bad about the unimaginative theming, though…
That is a big strike against Last Bastion. Hey, vanilla fantasy…bleh! What a terrible substitute for the historical Chinese theming. But the design changes to Ghost Stories are aces. He put a lot of work into making three elements far more interesting and dynamic: 1) what you’re defending, 2) with whom you’re defending, and 3) what you’re defending against.
I actually shot a whole Last Bastion playthough/analysis video a while ago and haven’t edited it yet. I should go do that…
-Tom