Had some good gaming this weekend with my wife! First up, a quick game of Lost Cities Friday evening, which had me winning all three rounds for a final score of 160 - 86.
Then on Saturday while our older kid was napping, we broke out Istanbul with the Mocha and Baksheesh expansion. Due to not playing it for a while, I had to go over the expansion rules really quick and made a big error with the guild cards. I read that when youbwent to the Guild Hall, you draw two and play one card, but the correct rule is place one card in the discard pile. It wasn’t until I noticed the iconography for the Guild Hall and the Caravansary were practically the same that I double checked it. This was after my wife had made very good use of it, and even questioned if we were playing correctly because it seemed so powerful.
We started playing by the correct rules, letting me do one visit to the Hall with the wrong rule in an effort to balance things out a bit first. Too late, I think, as my wife won before too much longer, 6 - 3.
We then played a couple of games of Hanamikoji. I won the first game in one round, getting the favor of four of the geisha to secure the win. The second game took three rounds with a lot of back and forth, but I eventually won the same way. Such a good game, with a very easy ruleset, but interesting decision space.
Then we brought Ghost Stories to the table for the first time in a while. As usual, we played on easy difficulty, and also as usual, we lost. I was the red monk who can travel anywhere, and my wife was the green monk that can reroll the dice. Things were mostly under control, but then a bunch of ghosts came out at once, locked off green and yellow’s abilities, while we had a haunter or two out.
The boards completely filled up, but we got to Wu-Feng. It was an incarnation that required rolling the curse die each turn and needed 5 black pips to defeat, and the circle of protection was set to red. I died, I think froma curse die roll. My wife was able to revive me, but went to 1 Qi because her board was full too. While I had wanted to set the circle to black, I had to pay a Qi at the Sorcerer’s Hut to remove a ghost from her board, as she had 2 black tokens, and as such had a slim chance to win. She moved to Wu-Feng, rolled, and got 1 black, rerolled, but couldn’t get the two more we needed to win, and the village was overrun.
Later, we played again, and since we were “doing so well” (spoken quite sarcastically) we decided to up the difficulty to Nightmare level. So instead of starting with 4 Qi, we only had 3, we no longer had a starting black Tao token, and now there were 3 incarnations of Wu-Feng in the ghost deck.
We actually did better than we expected, and if it hadn’t been for a 4 pip red tormentor that was on the board way too long and haunted a couple of tiles, we’d likely have gone further. We beat the first incarnation, Hope Killer, which requires two each of red, yellow, blue, and green. As the yellow monk that can take a Tao token at the beginning of each turn, I was well equipped, though my wife had to come over as well and perform the exorcism, as I was rolling so badly all evening. My wife was the blue monk that can perform either action twice, which was great for getting the Buddha statues.
We got to the second incarnation, a black one which required the space across from it to be free of ghosts in order to exorcise it. I would have probably taken it out, however a 4 pip green tormentor ghost came out, and between it and the red one we were screwed. Sure enough, green rolled a haunt result, giving us our third haunted tile and another loss.
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. Probably didn’t focus my strategy enough - despite how sandboxy it feels, you do need to specialize a bit to get the big points.