With this post I hope to do 2 things:
1. Explain a common issue I've found in Co-Op games
2. Give a review/recommendation to remedy this remark
#1 Qb
Today I need to confess my sins in earnest to a sympathetic ear. Often I complain about how someone sucks the fun out of a game by explaining rules poorly or playing to be nice rather than to win. In this morbid tale I was “that guy” during a playthrough of a new game.
We had just watched an explainer video online for the co-op game we were about to start. Play began and each member took their turn with confused trepidation. We were readying all our cards and tokens when I suddenly switched into hero mode. I had solved the equation to the universe and held the key to our group’s success! I was laying out everyone’s actions before they got a chance to make a decision for themselves. In that moment of folly I was the only thing worse than Nickelback, I was a quarterback.
No not that one. Not the game winning, crowd goes wild, greatest hail mary comeback variant. That kind of celebrity might actually warrant my flippant disregard for the other 4 people at the table. I was the know it all, my way or the highway, trust me I’m a doctor kind of quarterback. This type of behavior was a side effect of playing games like Pandemic in single player too many times. It was a result of years of gaming “the right way” by playing to optimize every decision. It changed my focus from having fun to winning through ice cold efficiency.
This need for perfect knowledge and using every tool at my disposal seemed to infect every cooperative game I attempted to play. Forbidden Island, Sentinels of the multiverse, Pandemic, and the Big Book of Madness described above. There was a way to use all player powers to their fullest potential and anything less than a game saving combo felt like a failure. This unreasonable expectation for always making the best choice leads to a problem known as analysis paralysis, wherein you spend the majority of your time staring at the board, creating and erasing plans to account for the best possible actions at every step in the game.
Let me be clear, planning and strategic thinking are useful in a majority of games but more often this scheming presents itself in the form of long, stupefying silence. Everyone is scared to say something stupid, so nobody ends up talking and you find yourself playing the world's most elaborate version of the silent game (You remember the one where a parent or an older sibling would challenge you to a game and whoever talked first was the loser. Fun!)
#2 GS
Then in crawled Ghost Stories with its mangled rules set, mystically modular game board, and agonizingly aggressive art style. This felt different from all the other co op games I had tried both in tone and game balance. In other games I was lulled into the notion of winning. Either saving the world from a cataclysmic outbreak or beating the biggest baddest boss who was hellbent on world domination. It was inferred that we would be victorious, it was only a matter of time. But in GS it was almost assumed that you would be overpowered by incarnations of evil it only mattered how much time you could buy for the fleeing villagers. And if you won, you were playing it wrong.
In the game you take turns battling ghosts trying to keep them from advancing on and haunting the village. The setup sounds very similar to other co-ops but the gameplay features a crucial element the others lack. Where pandemic and big book of madness lay out what cities are infected or what elements you need to break a spell, ghost stories hides a bunch of information for each player’s action. Each turn a new ghost enters the scrum landing on either the matching player color(red,green,blue,yellow cards) or serving as a sort of mini boss to be fought by whoever drew it (black cards). In having new bad things happen each turn there is no one clear strategy that can be followed all the way through turn order. The plan will need to be modified, and improvised upon as new obstacles are sprung upon you.
The game has a sense of how brutal this unrelenting apparition slaughter can get and attempts to start you out at the “initiation” level. This minute detail has two effects: For rational players you go through the game at the introductory level and barely beat it saying to your conquering colleagues “that was only the easy mode?!?!?!?” Thus giving you a sense of accomplishment and the slightest taste of victory. Oppositely, if you are a hyper competitive masochist you take the label of “initiation” as an insult. Why wouldn’t you be able to play at “normal” difficulty? You think i can’t stand a “normal” amount of difficulty? This is the type of person who orders a medium sized meal based solely on the slight sounding portions of a “small” meal.
On a less personal note, this ability to ramp up pain is echoed one- dimensionally in pandemic’s increasing outbreaks where the game gets more difficult randomly based on luck of the draw. Some games end up being completely unwinnable very early on this way. Ghost Stories pushes further, making you choose just how much pain your own group can handle. Also the game has expansions and sequels if you think that is the sort of thing you will miss by not buying every one of the pandemic reskins (I’m looking at you, Cthulhu).
So in summary
This
is for people new to co-op games, or people who like a bit more randomness and little less packaging, or people who took a three hour tour
That
is for people who want to step up the pain or people who like expansions and the ability to continually add new elements/rules/challenges or people who just like multicolored cubes.
The Other
is for people who want a true challenge, or for people who have that one friend, or for people who ain't afraid of no ghosts
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