Ghost Stories is a game of relentless assault, though you never feel hopeless or limited in your ability to fight back. In games like Pandemic, or Wonder Woman: Challenge of the Amazons, it can be common to feel a tedious sense of push/pull as things are undone and redone. As you watch opposing cubes pop up, you sigh as you consider how many actions you’ll spend playing catch-up. But this is exactly where Ghost Stories shines. At any point, you are a maximum of two turns away from any spot on the board, and the options of what you can do just feel so much more important and so much more satisfying.

Each turn, a new ghost will appear on the periphery, and you will spend your turn either taking advantage of your villager’s support or fighting back against these ghosts. This means each turn is relatively simple in terms of decision making, moving to one of 3-8 available tiles, and then deciding whether to fight ghosts or use a villagers power. However, simple this may sound, these choices cannot be taken lightly. This game is one of, if not the most, difficult co-ops I have played. Just a few wrong decisions can drastically change the course of the game. Nevertheless, even when you feel moments away from defeat, surrounded by a wave of enemies, these same choices, when done well, can be important enough to bring the game back from the brink, and that is incredibly satisfying. Each action leads to important consequences minimizing any sense of tedium with your play. The game will remain tense, it will remain difficult, and it will remain rewarding until the very end, every time.

In my experience, the variable player powers and scalable difficulties add to the replayability of the game, and the powers feel very balanced. The biggest con I see, is that the random elements from the ghost deck draws and die rolls can make the game a bit swingy, with a few turns that are aggressively overwhelming, as well as a few very manageable turns. However, in the end, I think these random elements tend to balance out creating a very enjoyable experience (albeit intense and terrifying at times) overall.

It’s scary that I waited so long to give Ghost Stories a try.

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Information for this review is based on my plays with 2, and 3 players.