Today I'll share my opinion about the iOS app Ghost Stories. I'm not going to go into detail about how to play the game but the symbols used in game are pretty easy to understand after a play or two and the rules are sufficient in explaining the game.
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By Antoine Bauza and published by Repos Production the game is an incredibly difficult yet very satisfying cooperative game that will play from 1-4 players.
The objective of the game is to fight big bad spirits until the incarnation of Wu-Fung appears and must be eliminated to win the game, while protecting the village.
Losing the game can happen in 1 of 3 ways.
1.) All monks lose their health tokens and die. (Qi tokens)
2.) The ghost draw deck is exhausted, thus failing to destroy the incarnation of Wu-Feng. (The number indicated at the bottom left of the screen, also the smaller number represents how close you are to Wu-Feng appearing)
3.) 3 Villager tiles are haunted at the same time. (This can happen in a few ways but typically by haunters as seen below.
Owning the physical game before playing the iOS app I feel that the transparency between cardboard to screen is done very well, and I even learned a few minor rules that I previously misunderstood before playing the app.
To say that the game is difficult is an understatement. Every card that is drawn is never good. Sure some spirits maybe easier to defeat than others but getting overwhelmed can happen quickly.
In the image above red's board is full and if one space isn't freed he loses a life point and then the two "haunters" located in the middle and right of red's board will haunt the two closest villagers and reset to haunt again, this time going beyond the first row and int the middle.
To help combat the ghost each villager tile can be used instead of attacking to help out and are essential to beating the game.
The game also has an undo button that is useful when deciding what action to take but will not undo a dice/attack roll.
Of the number of times I've played the app and physical version I have beat it only once on Normal difficulty... The Initiate difficulty is hard enough.
The game also allows the use of "friendship" tokens if playing with less than 4 players but I personally like to just play all 4 of the monks, as the use of the tokens skips all of the colors not playing and allows the player to call on a monks power to help them, and in the app just adds needless button pressing of each inactive monk, as seen in the image below.
When setting up the game it also allows you to change the position of where the monks will be and what special ability they will use for the game by tapping their ability in the lower right of their board or dragging a board to another side.
The two images show the different abilities of the 4 monks. In my opinion the top screen are my favorite traits to play with on each.
The physical game has 2 expansions to it while the app only has the base game, but is sure to give lots of replay ability and challenges to add to the $5.99 price tag in the App Store.
The sound is pretty minimal as well as the graphics, but to be able to pull out my device and play it whenever I want makes the game a worthwhile purchase, even without any form of multiplayer besides pass and play.
I love both the app and board game and highly suggest checking out the app if you're into a challenging cooperative game that can be played solo or with 3 other players, and them the board game if you're looking for more!
