Convention Report: The Gathering of Friends 2008: Ghost Stories & Hanging Gardens

By W. Eric Martin
April 14, 2008

The tables at the Gathering are awash in prototypes from morning until midnight, with designers looking for feedback and publishers trying to decide what to publish next or how to tweak a game that’s already in the line-up. Mum’s the word on these designs unless the designer or publisher says otherwise, and thankfully I’ve been cleared to talk about one of three prototypes that impressed me. Now I can share the goodness with you, followed by talk of a title that should be hitting the U.S. any day now.

Z-Man Games released the cooperative game Pandemic in early 2008, and the game has been met with stunning approval, selling out its first print run within weeks. This game’s success might be unexpected, but it’s not really surprising when you examine the well-made design, the variable player powers that encourage players to work together, and its compelling (and different) theme. Sure, the plague might devastate Europe (again!) in a few turns, but you can easily set up the board for another go – and once you master the beginner level, you can increase the game’s difficulty level by adding another epidemic or two.

Why am I talking about Pandemic? Well, here’s a short description of Ghost Stories, which Belgian publisher Repos Production expects to release at Spiel 08: a more gamery version of Pandemic with greater variability and gorgeous artwork. Intrigued?

The designer of Ghost Stories is Antoine Bauza, who has only one publication credit to date – Cocktailgames’ Chabyrinthe – but many other designs in the works. Players are ghost hunters who are working together in order to fight off waves of spirits and spooks, mostly from Chinese mythology. One player who initially begged off playing (due to it being 2 a.m.) perked up at the mention of Chinese hopping ghosts; once the zombies were revealed, he was sold on playing. The prototype’s artwork was mostly black-and-white line work, but the visceral style looked fantastic. Here’s one image out of dozens to give you a taste:

The gameboard is composed of nine randomly arranged tiles in a 3x3 square, with a player board on each edge that has space for three cards on it. Players, each with a unique power, start in the center of the playing area and take turns during the game, even though your goal is to win together.

On your turn, you first flip over a ghost card: if the ghost is your color or black, you place it in a slot in front of you (unless those slots are full in which case another player will take it); if the ghost is another color, that player takes the ghost. You can then move up to one space in any direction and either perform one action (based on the tile where you stand) or attempt an exorcism. Exorcisms involve die-rolling, although you can also collect and use tao tokens, as well as protective auras, in your fight against the ghosts. If all of your slots are full of ghosts at the start of your turn, you lose chi; lose all your chi and you die; you can be brought back to life, but it’s perhaps more common for everyone to lose their chi, at which point you lose the game.

Each ghost has a strength, and most of them have special abilities: arriving with a friend, forcing you to roll the ghost die (which is mostly bad), costing you tao tokens or chi, and worst of all having the ability to haunt, which is represented by a plastic token on the card. On the start of your next turn, this token advances to the front of the card; on the subsequent turn, if the ghost is still alive, the token moves back and haunts the tile in front of it. You flip over this tile, removing its special action from the game. This process continues until four tiles are haunted – you lose the game – or you kill the ghost. You can unhaunt tiles, but you’re often fighting several battles at once and might not be able to spare the time.

You have additional weapons – traps and yin-yang tokens – to help you survive the onslaught of ghosts and the devastation of haunted tiles. If you survive long enough, the boss will appear, one of several extremely menacing figures taken at random from a deck of bosses. If you fail to defeat the boss before the final ghost is drawn, you lose; if the boss goes down, you win. Three ways to lose, one to win, just like Pandemic. In addition, you can seed the ghost deck with additional bosses to boost the threat from merely scary to nightmare levels.

In my first game, our team was obliterated before we made it halfway through the ghost deck. We failed to collect enough tao tokens, so when the dice failed us, we had no back-up and the ghosts overwhelmed us. I taught the game to three others the next day, folks who had some experience with Knizia’s Lord of the Rings, and we held off a strong mid-game assault to be in good shape when the boss arrived with me sitting on a stash of tao (albeit at 1 chi) and everyone still alive and kicking.

Repos is still developing Ghost Stories, so I’ve glossed over details about game play as they might change. Suffice to say, this game was a blast, both when we won and lost. You could potentially have more town tiles and more player powers and more ghosts and more of many other things as well, giving the game a variability that Pandemic lacks. Perhaps this is the novice player in me speaking, but Ghost Stories just has more stuff going on: more options for actions that make the game play less straight-forward. The game will be for 1-4 players with a playing time of 60 minutes, and given the cool look of the prototype, the finished product should look even better.

The second title being released by Hans im Glück – and consequently by Rio Grande Games – in Spring 2008 is Die Hängenden Gärten, designed by Din Li. The box is lush and inviting; the game inside equally so, but perhaps more so for families than for gamers due to the light interaction.

The game components include a bunch of tiles that players try to collect; tiles score best in sets, so one tile of a certain color is worth 1 point, two are worth 3 points, while three are worth 20. More than one set is included in the tile deck, so you’re not shut out of the big points if another player grabs a color that you’re collecting. Different colors have different scoring charts, so you can play risky or steadily accumulate points by grabbing the lowly gates. The tile deck also includes a handful of unique people tiles, and they net you points depending on your ability to complete sets in the same color as the people.

You collect tiles by creating the gradens mentioned in the game’s title. Each player starts with a blank rectangular base card divided into a 2x3 grid. During each round, the start player (a position that rotates) turns over as many cards as the number of players, then each player drafts a card and adds it to his garden. These cards also bear a 2x3 grid, but some number of the spaces will be filled with plants in up to four colors instead of blank. When you draft a card, you must add it to your collection, matching up the grid lines and choosing a spot in which the new plants (i.e. squares) that you’re adding won’t be unsupported.

Describing this process is tricky; demonstrating it takes five seconds. Imagine playing Tetris, and the colored sqaures on your new card are the piece that you’re trying to place. You’re looking down on the playing field, and no part of that piece can hang in the air. Empty spaces on the card will create new ground to cultivate in future turns, so ideally you can enlarge your holdings substantially in the early turns to give more potential plays later.

If you create a block of color that’s at least three spaces large, you can claim one tile that turn. If you do, you mark one of the colored squares with a temple to indicate that the color was used. Later in the game, you can try to isolate that temple and reuse color spaces that remain exposed.

For the tile array, six tiles are laid out on a holding board: two of them can be grabbed only if you create a garden of at least five spaces; two of them require a garden of size four or more; and the final two can be grabbed with a garden of size three or larger. If your garden is six or more spaces, you first grab a face-down tile before claiming any of the face-up ones. When a tile is claimed, a replacement is drawn and placed in the empty slot. Since tiles don’t slide down into empty positions from the five to four to three level, a new tile can be grabbed by the player who immediately follows you, giving you no chance at taking it. Other than the people tiles, this isn’t a huge deal since multiple sets are possible, but this set-up – which obviates your ability to plan out which tiles you might grab – does make the game more family-friendly than gamery. Think Alhambra, which is first come, first served with no say over which tiles you might face next.

While you can (and will) take cards and tiles that other players might want, the game play is only mildly competitive. You’re focused on building a swinging garden of your own with little regard for what others are doing turn-to-turn. You can’t plan for the future, other than expanding your potential growing area, so you do the best you can, then see what cards come up next. If you like puzzle-style games like Ubongo or Blokus, then you’ll probably dig this one.

(I’d add a picture or two to this report, but I can’t find my camera at the moment. Somewhere among my bags a Canon is hiding; once I find it, I’ll update this post.)

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