Since I'm on a game roll, I'll post about the two new games we broke open in the last 24 hours. One in the last 24 seconds so my brain is still foggy from all the thinking.

Eldritch Horror
 
I've posted numerous times about my ultimate favourite game of all time: Arkham Horror. Eldritch Horror is Arkham's little brother. All of the same themes but downsized, both in size of the board, number of pieces, and layers of plot. So while it is a little like Arkham dumbed down, it's also a nice 2 hour game and didn't leave my head feeling like it was going to die. I didn't invest myself so much in this one, as normally I become crazy involved with my character and saving the world, but the urgency just wasn't as intense. Still like the game and will definitely be pulling it out more often for my Arkham fix when I really don't want to be playing until 2 in the morning. 

Hubby bought this one a while ago and we just haven't gotten around to playing it. So tonight was the night. We had both tried sitting through the unofficial online tutorial that's posted on youtube, but it was long and boring and explained in the exact way that I HATE having games explained to me... I'm a picky girl...

So we basically spent the first 2 hours of play looking like this...

Lots of Rulebook reading, trying to follow each step at a time. And of course, me being me, "But what's my motivation for doing this? Why do I want to win this bid?" I am not a fun person to learn new games with. But after about 4 hours, halfway through the 2nd stage of the game, we started to really figure things out. 

After just one play, I'm not even going to pretend that I'm ready to start explaining this game. Not a favourite of mine, but Matt's really into it, but I wouldn't be against playing it again. With a little more confidence in our game play, it would be a pretty fun night with the right kind of people. A successful game night is all about pairing the right game with the right group. 

As promised, some footage of the board game Ghost Stories!

So after Matt and I pieced together the proper rules for the game, we finally won a round and then jumped straight into "Hell". "Hell" being the highest level of difficulty, though I must say, if you don't find "Hell" to be challenging enough, play the way we were! 
No, we did not win on this level, but at least we lost knowing that we weren't playing like beginners. 

Since I haven't really done this game justice in explaining it, here's a brief overview:

In Ghost Stories, each player takes on the role of a Taoist Monk with a specific super power. You work collaboratively together to defeat the ghosts who have been unleashed by the evil Woo Fang, who threatens to rise again in one (or possibly 3) incarnations. 

The board is made up purely of tile pieces. The outside frame is for players, thus they come in 4 different colours to specify which Monk you are. All tiles are two sided, so regardless of which Monk you pick to play, you have two different powers to choose from. So if you're selecting Monks randomly at the start, you need to pay close attention to which side of the player board you've picked. No two Monks have the same power, but when you play with fewer than 4 people, you may get to "borrow" some help from the non-playing monk, or the Neutral Board. In this game, I played Blue Monk and Matt played Yellow Monk.  

Here's the view from my board, at the end of the game when we lost. But you can see the Blue board and how it looks different from the inner tiles. The tiles in the centre of the board are individual parts of a village, and thus called "Village Tiles". Each Village Tile has a special power to help you fight off of the ghosts and defend the village. Your Monk player tokens (the bright blue and yellow ones that have fallen over in defeat) always play inside of the village, while the ghosts (the scary looking cards) attack from the outside on your player board. Blue ghosts on the Blue Board, Green on Green, etc. As you can see here, I have 2 Black Ghosts on my board, one is a haunter (with the ghost figurine walking towards the village), and the other is one of the incarnations of Woo Fang (you can tell by his stylish top hat in the top left corner of his card). 

So how the game works is in two phases, Yin & Yang. Yin is the evil phase. So if I am player 1, I have to look at the ghosts on my board to see if any of them will do anything evil before I can do anything good. At the start of you game you won't have any ghosts so you'll have nothing to worry about. Different ghosts can do different things, so if you want to know if they're going to hurt you, look at the symbols on the bottom of the card:

The center symbol tells you what the ghost does on every active turn. So this Black ghost has a haunter figurine that moves towards the village each turn. You can see here that he has moved off of the card and onto my board. The Blue ghost beside him has nothing in the bottom center so he's not one I need to worry about right now.

Now in this picture, my Blue board is completely full of ghosts, which means that I won't be bringing more ghosts into play this turn, but if I had an open space, such as what Red and Green have, then I would have no choice but to draw a ghost card from the ghost deck. Each ghost has a different colour - Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, or Black - so you have to match the ghost colour to the board of the same colour if it's possible. That's why I have a Blue Ghost on my board. But, if you cannot place a ghost on the right colour, either because it's Black and has no corresponding board, or, like in my case, the board is already full with 3 ghosts, then it has to go on the board of the active player. Thus I ended up with a Black Ghost and Woo Fang on my plate. At the start of your game, your board will look pretty empty, but it will build up quickly!

Now when you place a newly arrived ghost, you need to look at that bottom bar of the card to see if it does anything evil when it enters into play. This nasty ghost with the Haunter took away one of my life points just for being brought into the world - you can tell by the symbol in the left-hand corner. For easy reference, just read as you would normally, Left=start, Middle=middle, Right=end. The Right hand symbol refers to what happens when you kill the ghost. This nasty Black ghost will give you a reward, while that not-so-nasty Blue Ghost will try to curse you when you kill it. 

When you start your turn and your board is full like mine is here, you die a little inside - literally. You typically start with 3 life tokens (4 on the initiate level), and if your board is overrun with ghosts, they hurt you by taking away one of your life tokens. It's extra motivation to do some village clean-up before your ghosts get out of hand. If you run out of life tokens, your poor Monk dies - but he's not out of the game yet, he might be resurrected if your other Monk friends happen to like you - or desperately need you back. 

But let's say that it's your first round. There's nothing on your board so nothing nasty happens. That's step 1. Then you draw. It's a Red Ghost, so you put it on any of Red Board's empty card spaces. Maybe it doesn't have an icon in the left corner, so that means that this ghost isn't going to hurt you - yet. That's step 2 and the end of your Yin phase! Now you can do something good!

Your yang phase is where the strategy comes in. As the active player, you can decide what is the best action to take. You get one movement option, you have to go to a tile that is already touching your current tile, so diagonal movement is allowed. If you're in the center, like Blue is here, you can pretty much go anywhere. If you're off center, like Yellow, then you know that you cannot get near the Red Board in this turn, at least not without some magical assistance. You do not have to move, but you must do your movement phase 1st so you can't decide to move after your other action. The 2nd part of your turn is to decide if you are getting help or fighting. Remember I told you that each village tile has a special power, well if you're getting help, you can use the tile you're standing on to use that helpful magic that it has. I know this picture isn't easy to see, but the icons on those tiles will walk you through the possibilities. The tile that Yellow is on will push a row of Haunters back onto their cards and off of the board. The tile that Blue is on usually contains Buddha figurines. You can see that it no longer does because we've asked this village for help twice now so the Buddhas are on the board, protecting our empty card spaces from evil. Blue Monk can only ask for help from this location, unless he moves to a new tile 1st. Yellow also can only ask for help, but if a ghost occupied the player board directly in front of the Monk, he could choose to fight instead. 

Imagine that I was not dead in the above image. If I were the active player, I could choose to fight this ghost. Do you see the top left-hand corner? Those two coloured circles tell me how tough this ghost is. This ghost needs 2 Black tokens to be defeated. We have 3 dice in play. Each of those dice have all of the ghost colours plus White as a wild card. I will roll all 3 dice and hope for at least 2 Black or White results. To better my odds, I can collect Dow Tokens throughout the game to supplement my dice roll results. If I equal the colour and number of toughness on this ghost, I kill him and get the reward. If I fail, he lives to haunt another day. 

When you have finished your turn, the play continues clockwise. The player beside you has his Yin & Yang phase, which means that by the time your turn comes around again, you could have a whole new set of ghosts to deal with. 

If you are playing with fewer than 4 and have a neutral board in play, you do not skip this Monk's turn. The Board remains active for step 1 of the Yin phase, any ghosts on it get to do their evil trick for the turn, but you DO NOT pull another ghost card for this board (this is how we managed to make the game so much more complicated than it needed to be). The Monk of a neutral board is not actually present, so that's where his turn ends, he can't run to villagers or fight ghosts, he just houses them. 

How to Win: By defeating all of the incarnations of Woo Fang and living to tell about it.

How to Lose: 1) By having no Monks left alive, which means that every Monk has somehow lost all of their life tokens. 2) By having 3 village tiles get haunted (this is why you don't want those Haunter figurines to reach the village). 

There are so many other details to this game, and this is very much a simplified rundown of how to play, so if you want any clarification, feel free to ask and I can go into more detail. This ended up being far more detailed than I was intending to make this blog post, as I'm sure you can tell by how I try to reuse the same 4 pictures. We might have to think about making some "How to Play" videos for our games in the near future. I do enjoy teaching game play. 

Anyways, Ghost Stories, one of our favourites because it's an intense little Arkham Horror (our family staple) that doesn't go on for 4 hours (about 2 if you're close to winning, even shorter if you die early). But if your family staple is Monopoly, you may want to do a playtest run with people who are familiar with the game before launching into it head on. The rule book is not as intuitive as I think they meant it to be. 

I'll try to post about our other games, and maybe do some video, or at least more helpful picture taking, of the games we play. Should have some fun stuff come out for Table Top Day. No idea what we'll be playing but we should go through several different ones. I'll keep you all posted!

True to my last post, "I Must Enjoy Making Things More Complicated", Matt and I have finally undone my habit of making one of our favourite games ridiculously impossible! I think I introduced this game before - 

- and now that I've paused to review the very few games I've listed in my blog, it seems that I haven't... So the game that I have never before blogged about, Ghost Stories, has been near impossible for us to win, even on initiate level. Now, it wasn't always this way. A number of years ago, Matt and I replayed Ghost Stories until it was a science, even on nightmare and hell level. Then the number of years went by in which we did not play, leading us to buying our own version just a couple of years ago, remembering how much we loved it, buying all of the expansions, and then not playing. We've tried pulling it back out sporadically over this past year, but it's been driving us nuts because we know that we're good at this game. Yet, every time we play, we get overrun and dead. Finally broke down in frustration today and watched a tutorial. Clearly how I interpret the rules - which, you must understand, are set up like an IKEA manual only more cryptic and less helpful. Like "insert shield symbol here" with no explanation about what that means, but we are supposed to understand that that means you cannot roll the dice to kill that ghost. Shield means "block the dice". Granted, we figured that one out pretty quickly, and it's a very minor thing, but still, instructions assume that all symbols are to be universally understood. Even the written instructions are very scarce, and they only include the self-evident parts of turn sequence, and, once again, being very general about what they actually mean. Such as, neutral boards play only the Yin phase, not the Yang. So looking at all of the components of the Yin phase, we've been doing all of them for the Yin phase of the neutral board... rather than JUST part 1. So now we are not overrun within the first round and can actually move around the board. 

I know this makes no sense, and if I had realized that I didn't actually blog about this game before, I would have totally been taking pictures as we played, but I do intend on putting up more game posts, simply because I intend on us playing more games. In short, this is a pointless rant, but I already ranted to my husband and the only other person who would understand my frustration - and hate me for teaching the game wrong - is in England... and Julianne, but I don't have your number so we aren't at the spontaneous Ashley rants stage yet.... you have been warned that this may occur in the near future...

So more games WITH PICTURES to come. In the meantime, I will continue to post misspelled tweets that make only partial sense....

Because of my epic NaNo fail this past November, I did vow to do CampNaNo, both sessions. Now, this seemed like a good idea when the first camp was months away. Well now it's just a few weeks away and I've realized that my odds of avoiding my next epic fail are not in my favour. Not only do I already lack time/justification to sit down and write, but April will not be in any better. Now, I did come up with a scheme to help me. One of the reasons that I believe my November novel was really difficult to get through is that I misjudged the format. The story is so visual in my head that I think I was suffocating it with description. So my thought to salvage the story, which I still like, is to change from novel to graphic novel format. Which basically will just leave me with a skeleton script until I magically produce a network of artistically inclined individuals whom I trust, both to understand the world inside my head and to not say "I want to illustrate for you!" and then disappear into the world of "I've been super busy lately" for the next 5 years... As much as I love all of my friends and acquaintances, the enthusiastic support that leads to initial promises that never get kept are why I (possibly in vain) to keep my work to myself. I believe that you mean well, and that you are truly super excited, but whether it's for editing, BETA, or illustrations, "at somepoint when the stuff you actually want to do isn't in the way" is a long time for me to wait. And as cruel as this may sound, that I don't respect that I am not your first priority in life, the truth is that having any work so close to being complete that you can taste it, and yet having zero control over those last few stages is painful. It's like having a child that you've been enthusiastically preparing for the first day of school, and they've picked out their clothes, their school supplies, and cataloged all  the cool stuff they will bring to "show and tell" for the next 15 years, and as the little tyke's face is pressed against the livingroom window, waiting for that yellow school bus to drive in front of the house, you hear on the news that the teachers are all on strike, and you have no idea when that school bus will be coming, and your little one looks up at you everyday with tears in his eyes wanting to know what he did wrong to not be able to go to the wonderful place you've told him about all summer, and you do your best to explain to him that it's not his fault, that other people are just trying to work through some important things, but when they've finished, everything will be alright again... but every morning you have this same conversation because the strike is still on... and you can see that innocent little being already start to lose faith in humanity...

Creative works aren't like homework that you just "get around to" here and there. It's a life unto itself. So it's painful to have its fate out of your hands.

Now I do know the counter argument to this. Somewhere out there is an illustrator or graphic artist screaming at the screen "stop asking your friends and hire someone!". I know this because of how often I read threads about artists who are fed up with being asked to work countless hours for free. I totally understand. And believe me, if I have a graphic novel script in my hand, I am 100% looking to hire rather than to belittle the hardwork that goes into their creative genius. But it just seems unfortunate that in knowing some amazing artistic people who I would love to support, I just don't have the heart to ruin a friendship over a joint project. In summary, I would love to be able to work with my friends, but I don't trust that I wouldn't get all pissy about something along the way...

Hey look, a spontaneous rant. I must be over due for a blog post. Anyway, what I was going to say is that while graphic novel script seemed like the best way for me to approach Camp NaNo, which admittedly after my last attempt I am finding really hard to take seriously as a NaNo event, I was haunted by a dream that had "new novel!" written all over it. I know that it's very common for stories to come out of dreams, but I don't think I've ever had one pretty much come out 95% intact. That's what happened on Wednesday night. Had a crazy dream about things I can't even begin to place what movie/book/life event inspired. I've already put the synopsis up on my Camp profile, but in short it's about an alien race of gaseous beings... and a romance, and the end of the world. I don't know how this happened, but it all began with a phone call that my mother made me make to some guy I have never met, and he was a total purposeful asshole on the phone. Somehow this leads into all of the sci-fi stuff... the things that go on in my head when no one's at the helm...

So now I am quite possibly dedicating myself to a new novel, which doesn't make things easier on me, and adding a new title to the lineup I already have formed. I had 2 possible graphic novel projects which would have worked out perfectly for both camps. And normally I don't allow line-cutting. Then Freakhouse happened but that proved to be exactly what I needed in my life at the time. So I'm going to try this random dream idea and see how it fairs. Luckily the whole thing plays out in my head in fragments, and I have figured out why it does that, so writing it in fragments should be an interesting approach for me. It could also lead me to disregarding it as a complete story and abandon it. 

I'm also feeling guilty about trying to start a new project in under a month when I'm still on the first chapter of Knightsbridge editing. But, it's not April yet, so we'll see what happens come April 1st... and what keeps going by April 10th... no promises. 

Stay tuned!
http://campnanowrimo.org/campers/olanthea/novels