A Night of Ghosts and Gallactica

Jan 15th's Border Board Games was a quiet one with Bethany, Richard, Rob, Angela, and Carlo attending. Carlo arrived just as the game, Ghost Stories, was getting started. Richard and Bethany had played Ghost Stories before and had wanted to try again. Rob and Angela brought their copy and provided the opportunity to try this difficult game.

Ghost Stories is a cooperative 4-player game where you each control a monk (or what I call a ninja since each player token looks like a ninja) where you try to keep a village from becoming haunted and making all the inhabitants run away in fear. There are nine tiles you can move your ninja to and each tile allows your ninja to do a special action. Each ninja also has his own special power than can be used on his own turn.

When it is your turn, you draw a ghost card and place it on the board. Some ghosts are difficult to defeat, some not so difficult, and some add 'haunters' to the board. If a haunter reaches the board's edge, a tile is turned over and becomes inactive. If there tiles are turned over, the village has become haunted and the players lose. I'm not sure of other losing conditions.

On your turn, you can move one space and then take an action, either using the tile's action or fighting a ghost. Since a lot of ghosts come out, it seems ninjas spend most of the time fighting ghosts and not using the tiles' powers.

We were able to fend of ghosts pretty well but in the end, three tiles had been turned over and we ended up losing the game before even seeing the big bad ghost to even try to defeat him.

After Ghost Stories, we broke out Battlestar Gallactica complete with all the expansions. Everyone except Angela had played before. Bethany accused Rob of being a cylon even before loyalty cards were dealt. Bethany played Tory as president, Richard played Felix, Rob played Helo as Admiral, Angela played Apollo, and Carlo was Galen. It was tough determining who the trader or traders were although, as the game got near the end, it was suspected that Rob was a cylon. Carlo suggested that Rob/Helo be put in the airlock and Bethany/Tory felt that was an excellent idea. The skill check didn't pass and Rob/Helo remained alive. It was curious that there were about half the cards in favor of airlocking Rob and about half that weren't which made me (Bethany) suspect there was another trader but not sure who.

Rob/Helo then revealed himself as a cylon (see! Bethany was right!)and he tried to work his evil powers to bring the Gallactica down. And then shortly after, at Rob's urging, Angela revealed herself as a cylon too! But it was too late and Gallactica managed to jump to Kobol.

This game of Gallactica seemed a bit unusual in that Gallactica's resources didn't drain as quickly as they normally seem to, therefore, the game was in favor of the humans. We didn't play for 11 hours although I'm sure Carlo would have been happy if we did.