Harrowed Halls

We played a new game this time called Ghost Stories. It’s a 4-player cooperative game where the band of players is trying to stave off ghostly forces bent on haunting the nine villages of the game board. I’ll start off by saying this is the best cooperative game I have ever played. During the setup you get to choose one of the four levels of difficulty: Initiative, Normal, Darn Us to Heck, and the Hell level. (I can’t remember the real name of the third level, but you get the idea.) Being new to the game, we choose to start at the easiest level. That means we would have one big bad incarnation to kill during the game. To win the game, the players must kill all of the incarnations. In the higher levels of difficulty there can be more incarnations. We lose if four villages become haunted.

Each player has a specific power to aid the players in holding back the ghosts from the villages. Each of the nine villages also help the players in various ways. Reading through the rules, the players have lots of options and powers at their disposal. It sounded like a cake walk. Boy was I wrong. In our first game we lost even before the incarnation came out on to the board—overwhelmed by ghosts. We noted several errors we made along the path to disaster and vowed our second game would go much better.

The second game did go better, but it was touch and go for the last half of the game. The board filled up early with ghosts and we were sorely pressed to keep up with them. Once the incarnation did come out, we had a solid plan…that failed and failed and failed, until finally Owen was able to overcome it. I was dead by then. Possibly Mike too. Had Owen failed on his turn we would have lost the game. That’s how close it was. And this was the EASIEST level! Needless to say, we’ll be playing this game again. Until then we’ll wonder how the heck anyone survives the normal level of play.