How is this fun? – Ghost Stories The Boardgame Review

Ghost stories is a solo or cooperative game that is an adaptation of the board game designed by Antoine Bauza . The premise of the game is that you are a Taoist Monk trying to protect your village from various Ghosts and eventually defeating the incarnation of the evil Wu-Feng who is currently banished in hell. From an app perspective I think the developer has done a pretty good job of adapting the board game to the iPad. The game is responsive, the controls are intuitive and I haven't had the application crash once. There are some bugs in the program, but over all the app itself is well written. However the joy ends there! Game Play: There is almost no skill involved at all especially in when playing solo. You simply react to the barrage of cards the game sends your way. At the start of each turn, you draw and place a ghost on one of the player boards depending on the color. Guess what? Some ghosts cause yet another ghost to be placed. When this happens, you can end up placing 2 or 3 ghosts per turn instead of just one. And if that isn’t hard enough, some ghost cards are “haunters” which means that if you don’t eliminate them within 3 turns, the village tile they are adjacent to becomes haunted. If 3 village tiles become haunted, its game over. Oh yeah and I almost forgot about the curse die. Some ghosts have a special power that requires you to roll the “curse” die each turn. There is a 33% chance that nothing will happen and a 66% chance that something bad will happen. Bad things include adding yet another ghost, a village tile will become haunted, you will lose all your Tao (pronounced “dow”) tokens, or you lose 1 Qi (pronounced Chi) token. I could go on. All of this means that the game can literally end in 3 to 4 turns no matter what you do. So instead of trying to win this game, you end up trying to see if you can lose less badly than in previous games. This game just has too much randomness to have any enjoyment factor at all. You might as well just roll a single die and say "If I roll 5 or 6 I lose, otherwise I'll roll again". That would be about as much fun as this game. App bugs: There are several bugs in the program as well. I have only played the game about 15 times and have already found 2. For instance, before the game begins you are supposed to be able to change the special power of the color you have chosen. This works for all colors except red. Also, at the Initiation difficulty level the game isn't supposed to end unless 4 village tiles are haunted, it ends when there are 3. I would love to report these bugs but unfortunately there is no way of contacting the developers (try clicking on the developer website button above) so hopes of bug fixes are dismal. Summary: A well designed game should be winnable. Most games I have lost I have gone back over them and there was absolutely nothing I could have done differently to change the outcome. Perhaps the real game would be different when playing with 4 players as at least you would be able to try and help each other out, but as a solo game this fails abysmally.
Review by PhilFromIT on Ghost Stories The Boardgame.