Ghost Stories holds the distinction of being one of the most enjoyable collaborative board games I’ve played. It extremely challenging and has a steep learning curve for newbies, but once you learn the trick to playing this game, it’s incredibly fast paced and fun.
The game is beautifully designed and the artwork is fantastic. You’ll be tagging along with your fellow players to exorcise ghosts, save the villagers and ultimately prepare yourselves for the incarnation of the evil Wu-Fung, the penultimate ghost that has super evil powers.
Onto what I don’t like about this game… the rule book is terribly written. It’s vague, ambiguous and thoroughly unclear for a game of this level of complexity. I want to give a major shout out to Grudunza, whose four video tutorials on how to play this game were indispensable in learning the game mechanics.
Once we’d mastered the mechanics, the next hurdle my group faced was winning this game, and boy is that hard! We probably lost around 20 or so games before finally winning one. I created this video strategy guide to help other newbies who are trying to win Ghost Stories for the first time. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be winning all your games!
Ghost Stories is fun, highly replayable and even has a couple expansion packs, so if you’re up for a greater challenge, you’ve got it. As compared to other collaborative board games, such as Shadows Over Camelot, Ghost Stories is much faster paced. Once you’ve got the hang of it, an average 2 player game is about 30 minutes.
Playing this as a solo player is also really fun. In some ways I find it easier than playing with others since you’re given more Tao tokens and power tokens to start off with.
Overall this game gets 4/5 stars. Once you understand gameplay it’s awesome, but the poorly written rulebook make learning to play this a challenge.
Tags: board games, collaborative game, ghost stories, guide, strategy, tabletop games, video
I played the game once and wasn’t crazy about it; is it better with the expansion?
The only coops I’ve played much are Pandemic and Battlestar Galactica (which, of course, is only semi-cooperative)
I haven’t actually tried the expansion yet (it’s next on my list!). I really love Pandemic. I found Ghost Stories to have a bigger learning curve, largely because of the shoddy rule book, and harder to win. I’ve only half heartedly played BSG once and since I never saw the show it was somewhat lost on me. I do recall it being a very long game (3+ hours). Is that accurate, even when you’re experienced at playing it?