Boardgaming in 2020: the year of the, uh, post-minis era? We can only hope!

Please do!

Also, are there still dice?

And how! The Last Bastion video is the debut of a dice tower a friend of mine made for me with his 3D printer.

-Tom

Ugh dice! You do all that careful thinking in Ghost Stories and the dice wipe it out. I hate that.

But I love dice towers. Hope you make the vid!

I think one of the key things in Ghost Stories, as with other games with dice that don’t exclusively rely on those dice for all actions, is to mitigate the degree to which randomness can screw you over. Have materials so you can fall back on those if you don’t get the roll you need. Use methods that don’t roll dice if you can arrange it, etc. Similarly, in Blood Bowl you take the actions that don’t involve rolls first where possible, do the stuff with a dice advantage next, and the risky rolls last if at all.

But yeah, I tend to prefer less dice rather than more. It’s still weird to me how much I like Dice Throne.

How is it solo? :)

Well, obviously not top ten worthy!

321577_sad-face-emoji-png

I know right! How good can it be then? :)

I bought Ghost Stories last year after having beaten Samurai Spirit (also vom Antoine Bauza) for the first time after a year of playing (I seem to be a bit slow). I like Ghost Stories a lot although I haven’t won a single game. It’s fast good fun. I play solo with four characters which isn’t to difficult to keep track of. I saw Bastion last year in Essen but I’m somehow not tempted. The improved mechanics may be fine but the theme doesn’t interest me that much und I don’t want to buy a game which I basically already have (same with Mysterium and Obscurio).

I don’t know anything about future plans for Last Bastion, but it’s possible that future expansions will drastically steer in the game in a direction not explored by Ghost Stories. The White Moon expansion for G.S. significantly changes major parts of the game, and I could see future Bastion stuff doing the same, in different ways. And I think that would be awesome.

New games this week:





Champ-DrStrange






Long out of stock reprint:

I picked up Last Bastion after seeing it up thread. I owned Ghost Stories for a few years but never played it after trying to decipher the rules a few times.

Set it up today and played two games so far. The rules were a lot easier to understand and watching a video play through helped.

I like it. Played solo 2 player with 2 neutral boards. Lost quickly the first game, lost, but did a bit better the 2nd. I love the card colors and art. I’m fine with the theme. Things can spiral quickly and I definitely need to work on the balance of fighting monsters vs activating tiles. I jut picked up Spirit Island and now have a couple very nice solo games.

So, about that Ghost Stories game… turns out I like it a lot. Quite a lot actually. In fact I like it so much that it has kept me from playing video games for days.

I’m still playing the game solo, and probably won’t have a good chance to sit down together with my wife and teach her how to play for a couple weeks, but at least we can still play Codenames Duet together in the meantime.

Right now I’m still playing the base game for Ghost Stories. I have probably finished about 10 games or so, but I’ve only started adding up and recording scores for the last 3. I’ve been playing on Initiate difficulty this whole time (4 QI (health) instead of 3, 4 hauntings allowed instead of 3), but I’ve had a chance to play enough with the different tao powers and city tiles that I feel ready to raise the difficulty to Normal and go from there.

In the last 6 games I’ve played and paid attention to, there’s only been one game I’ve won on Initiate that I otherwise would have lost had I been on Normal, and this was because I ended the game with 3 haunted tiles thanks to a particularly nasty ghost. Because of this I feel like the jump in difficulty shouldn’t hurt too much at all.

One of the reasons I like this game so much is that I enjoy drawing, placing, and then dealing with each ghost. Unlike a game like Onirim–where I’m always hoping for a good card, and feel completely unprepared for a (bad) dream card–I pretty much know what to expect with Ghost Stories, something bad. Now, sure, there are varying degrees of bad here, but I’m never let down that I just can’t seem to find that one particular card I’m waiting for (screw you, brown moons), but always seem to find a dream card when I least want one (which is always).

Now, I actually love Onirim, and I have a lot of fun with it, and the games are much shorter and faster-paced, but it’s always such a downer for me when I get to those dream cards… Hey, wait a minute! I have an idea, maybe I’ll create a house rule where I can remove all of them. That might just work.

In addition to the drawing ghost after evil ghost in Ghost Stories, I also really like the knowledge that what I’m really just trying to do is work my way through a stack of 30 bastards (in solo), and survive just long enough to get to #31 and thumbwrestle it for control of the village (they do actually elect me Emperor if I win, right?). I love seeing my deck half gone and feeling like I’m ahead in a particular run, or realizing how horribly the odds are stacks against me when I pull out some horrible bastard on turn 2 that starts flipping tiles over almost faster than I can even gather the resources to take it out.

I love how the initial random placement of the city tiles can be so important for deciding the placement of drawn ghosts, for when you just know something is gonna be haunted before you can do anything about. So what do I want least of all on that side of the board (the Cemetery tile, it’s always the Cemetery in solo)? Well sounds like an interesting decision needs to be made!

I also appreciate how differently the game has played out for me with each different Tao Power on the different color boards. They all feel so great to use when I need them. And even though there are a couple stand-out powers that I always end up blowing all my neutral power tokens on if I’m not actually that color on a certain run, I don’t ever feel like I’m at a significant disadvantage because I randomly selected one color & power over the next at the start of the game.

I think that right now my biggest trouble in the game stems from my inability to get a good feel when to play proactively or reactively. For example, I am constantly finding myself punished for planning and preparing too far ahead. In instances where I might base my moves on stocking up on a veritable bank vault full of Tao tokens, I will invariably draw some Tormentor card that curses me relentlessly, emptying my pockets on a single bad roll of the die. It turns out that during a few easier turns I might fall into a false sense of security and begin using neutral power tokens (or, gasp, my Yin-Yang token) to acquire other tokens or replenish lost health, only to get kicked in the face in some certain way that surgically pushes the one button I can’t do anything about, sending my village into a death spiral of ectoplasmic proportions. But then if I play too reactively, I’m completely unprepared for everything else I might have drawn. So like I said, it’s a balancing act I’m still getting a feel for.

Anyway, I think I’ll keep playing just the base game for another week or two on a higher difficulty before I start to consider on when a good time might be to play the White Moon expansion that came in the box.

Any thoughts on the Roll Player Adventures Kickstarter? 10 days left.

Looks like Legacy of Dragonholt mixed with some Roll Player dice-fiddling to determine combat and skill checks.

My own thoughts: It’s very pricy and the mix of roll player and unknown quality story mean I’m not backing.

If you want a run through of the rules, the JonGetsGames video is good:

Also, the following upcoming channel I discovered a few weeks ago is really good at looking at Kickstarters more from a value proposition point of view and usually does a good job of putting forth for and against arguments on projects.

Personally, if I were to get the game, it would be cheaper at retail (it will get discounted below MSRP at some point). I see no point in the KS project.

Thanks, I had watched that rules video and the same thing crossed my mind… ‘I hope the story is really well done since that’s mostly what it is’, but there’s no way of knowing and not any info on this James Ryan’s previous works.

I think I will wait for proper reviews, and then retail, ta.

So tempted by this but I haven’t loved the other games using this mechanic and I’m afraid this is more of the same. Still, very tempted. That said, Mindclash and Intrepid both on KS now too. AAAAH too many games not enough space and money.

4 posts were split to a new topic: Apocrypha: the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game goes to a Secret World

I’ll be setting up a game to play in an hour or so. I can’t yet decide what to tackle tonight.

  • Apocrypha
  • Ghost Stories
  • One Deck Dungeon

0 voters

New gamez



LOTR-ShadowedPaths

Also remember Keyforge? I didn’t even order any of the new set. It’s a shame but demand for that game has evaporated.