Last night I finally got the chance to try out a few solo games of Ghost Stories.  I actually played three games, but during the first one I was also trying to watch TV and talk to my wife, so I wasn’t really that focused on what was going on and lost miserably.  It’s hard enough to keep track of all the different tokens and powers and ghosts when you’re paying attention, so in the first game I learned that this is not a game to play while distracted.

After Gwen and Samantha were all tucked away in bed and asleep, I decided to sacrifice a couple hours of rest to give it another try.  I chose my board, set up the village, and picked powers randomly (except for the red board, which I set to the “flying” power as suggested in the rules).  The way it turned out was with me playing the yellow Taoist having the “Bottomless Pockets” power (which let me take a Tao token before my movement phase).  To my left was the blue board showing the “Heavenly Gust” power (can both request aid from a villager and attempt an exorcism), across from me was the red board with (as I said) the “Dance of the Spires” (flying) power, and to my right was the green board with “The Gods’ Favorite” power (which would let me reroll either Tao dice or the curse die). 

The game itself started off pretty well, with me popping around the board putting out fires as they’d surface.  The turning point happened when three haunters surfaced at essentially the same time.  I made aggressive use of the Sorcerer’s Hut, which let me destroy ghosts at a cost of 1 Qi, and used my Yin-Yang token to flip back over a village tile to keep me from losing the game.  Unfortunately, this whole process left me with only 1 remaining Qi, and when the Grave Walker (which takes a Qi as it comes into play) came out a couple of turns later in my Yin phase, my Taoist died, therefore making me lose the game.

For about half the game, I forgot to use my Bottomless Pockets power each turn, but I don’t really know if that would have made a difference.  I certainly learned to never let myself drop down to 1 Qi, but otherwise I don’t know what I could have done differently. 
Since the game only took about 18 minutes, I decided to start over, but used the same setup (other than the ghost deck, of course) because it was already 11:30.  This time, things went a bit more smoothly.  In the first few turns (and whenever I didn’t have a real clear threat on the board), I would focus on places like the Herbalist’s Shop and the Tea House to gain extra Qi and Tao tokens, preparing for the later game.  I tried my best to prioritize threats as they emerged, and made copious use of the blue “Heavenly Gust” power, which allowed me to multitask as best I could as a solo player. 

After about 45 minutes of beating back the forces of hell, I finally found myself face-to-face with the Howling Nightmare.  After a hard-fought struggle all game long, it was actually a bit anticlimactic.  This incarnation of We-Feng is a 3-resistance black ghost with the catch that he can’t be exorcised if there is a ghost on the haunting stone opposite him.  Well, it just so happened that the one open space I had on my board was directly across from an open space on the red board, and on my next turn there was no way I could fail (considering that I was holding 3 black Tao tokens at the time). 

Overall, the solo game proved to be a lot of fun.  The use of the “neutral” boards and the power tokens to activate the other colors’ powers was a great way to give the solo player more options without having to run multiple Taoists.  As I mentioned, I made extensive use of the “Heavenly Gust” (blue) power to do two things on several of my turns, but I also used the red (flying) power several times to jump over to the most pressing threat and the green (re-rolling) power a handful of times on important checks.  Of course, my (the yellow) power to collect a Tao token was ridiculously powerful, and I don’t think that I was ever below 4 or 5 total tokens at any time during either game.  That being said, it’s important for a yellow Taoist with this power to avoid rolling the curse die at all costs, because an ill-timed “discard all Tao tokens” result could change the course of the game.

Given that I’ve only played Ghost Stories once with other people, it’s hard to compare that to the solo experience.  It’s certainly easier to coordinate your strategy and decide on priorities when you’re alone, and the ability to use multiple player powers on your turn (as long as you have the power tokens to spend) is something that you can’t do in a 4-player game.  Of course, it’s also a lot harder to get from place to place and to cover multiple threats at the same time when you’ve only got one Taoist.  Still, overall, I think that it is easier solo and I’ll be stepping up my difficulty to “normal” next time I give it a try.  And hopefully, the “next time” will be pretty soon!