 
This week we played an old favorite, Ghost Stories. It’s a cooperative game where the players are Taoist monks trying to prevent a village from being overrun by ghosts. This week’s game had a completely different spin on it because we added the Black Secret expansion. With this expansion one of the players controls a variety of ghosts, demons, and curses. The best evil man for this job was Mike. Not just because he had read the rules, but mostly because he is evil to begin with. In the game Mike is called Wu-Feng.  The expansion also added a few other twists to the game too. Another board, called the catacombs, represented the area under the village. Wu-Feng can summon demons into the catacombs. There they searched for the three urns with which the Shadow of Wu-Feng can be summoned. If this happens, we are in really deep ghost poo. The monks can travel to the catacombs and confront the demons hopefully sending them back to hell where Mike lives. Mike can also cast curses on us and he gets to determine where the ghosts come into the village. All in all we thought we were doomed from the start. One thing in our favor was that when we lose Qi (our life force) instead of going back to a pool of Qi, it goes onto a mantra of our choice. These mantras, once fueled with enough Qi, are powerful spells we can use against the demons and ghosts.
In our game, my monk had the power to reroll dice. Owen’s monk could take two actions and Ben’s monk got an extra colored bean at the beginning of his turn. (Yes, I know they’re not called colored beans, but I can’t remember what they are called.) We also had a fourth monk, sort of a non-playing monk, that we could use his power of special movement if we needed to.
Our game began…
To exorcise a ghost, you have to roll dice equal to the ghost’s color or have enough colored beans to fill in for any dice that failed to roll that color. With this in mind, Owen’s monk was an unstoppable exorcising machine and regularly could kill two ghosts with one roll. Ben and I were another story completely.
Ben rolled three dice and only needed black (or the “wild†color of white) on any die. He failed.
Steve rolled SIX dice and only needed one black…and failed.
Ben later redeemed his suck-i-ness. He needed three black and rolled a black and two wild dice!
As the game progressed we were holding our own and Mike’s demons where having trouble finding the third urn needed to summon the Shadow of Wu-Feng. My monk was in the catacombs trying to kill demons when one of them found the third urn. The Shadow of Wu-Feng was summoned.
On his turn, the Shadow of Wu-Feng can take one of three actions: Attack a monk, move, or haunt a village tile. (If four village tiles are haunted, the monks lose.) Things quickly got desperate. Soon we had three village tiles haunted. Then the Incarnation of Wu-Feng appeared. Fortunately the incarnation was right where Owen could immediately attack it. And it was a relatively easy one to kill. Owen rolls his first attack. He had three dice and needed two yellows—not a single yellow showed up. Owen tried his second attack with the same result. Owen’s dice rolling had gone cold just when we needed it most. Fortunately I could attack the incarnation too. With my reroll ability I basically got to roll six dice looking for two yellows. I failed miserably. The Shadow of Wu-Feng haunted the fourth village tile and we lost.
We moved to a different village.
Chaos Steve
Some Pics:
