Got two games played today!
First, my wife, her brother, and I tried out luck against the final two monsters we hadn’t played in Horrified, namely the Mummy and the duo of Frankenstein’s Monster and the Bride. For a dead guy, the Mummy had a LOT of activations during the game, defeating me twice and I think my wife once, while it and the Bride managed to kill some villagers. We got up to 6 on the terror track pretty quickly, one step away from a loss.
Meanwhile, we had managed to break the Mummy’s curse and teach the Bride about Humanity. My wife’s brother went on to take out the Mummy, but Frankenstein and the Bride were very close to each other, and if they meet, the terror track increases by 1. I was able to interact with the Bride to get her to move away, and my wife was able to max out Frankenstein’s dial and move him to the Bride, defeating them. We were all rather amazed we won considering how dire things looked for a bit.
Then my wife, one of our friends (via Zoom), and I played Ghost Stories. We had played this once before during the pandemic and won, but only realized after the fact that I had pulled ghosts out to prepare for a three player game, but then we got a fourth player and I forgot to add them back in, so our win was not legit.
The game started out well, we were gathering Tao tokens and mostly keeping the ghosts in check. Then, as it always does, things started getting rough, with boards threatening to fill up, a die getting locked, and a couple of tormenters out. My wife had one amazing turn where (as the blue monk who can exorcise and interact with a villager on the same turn) she rolled two wilds on the dice while interacting to get Tao tokens, and then rolled three more to exorcise two ghosts.
We managed to pull through the difficulties, and got to Wu Feng on my turn, though our friend and I were down to 2 Qi, and my wife down to just 1. She had a number of Tao tokens in green, black, and red, I had none, but I was the yellow monk with the Enfeeblement token, and our friend had 1 black one. However, a black ghost was on my wife’s board that prevented the use of Tao tokens. Nameless was the incarnation, requiring one of each color to defeat, and nullifying wilds. I exorcised a ghost on our friend’s board, which was full, so he didn’t lose a Qi at the beginning of his turn. He used a neutral power token to move my wife’s monk closer to us, as we were adjacent to Nameless. We were also on the Sorcerer’s Hut, so he sacrificed a Qi to kill the ghost blocking the use of tokens.
On my wife’s turn, she drew a ghost which spawned another ghost. That one spawned another ghost which filled up all the spaces on the boards. THAT one spawned another ghost which killed her monk, losing us all the Tao tokens which we really needed to succeed against Nameless. Feeling like we had lost, we went into my turn, going down to 1 Qi since my board was full. I Enfeebled Nameless, and since our friend was on the same space, I could use his black Tao token. So I needed to roll three separate colors on the three dice with no black or white results. I rolled…green, red, and yellow. With my Enfeeblement charm acting as a blue and the black Tao token, Nameless was banished back to the hells which spawned him! Victory!
This is when Ghost Stories shines best, in my opinion. When you are just frantically trying to stay alive long enough to win and it all comes down to one last chance of victory. It felt epic!
