This deck of Monster cards is the clock in Last Bastion. Skulls are particularly bad, if there are ever three skulls on the board during a player’s turn, they lose the game. Sometimes these activations will bring in more Monster cards, or skulls. After that the player checks their board, if it is full they would activate a board power specific to their board, otherwise they draw another Monster card and place it in an appropriate spot and activate any icons on the left bottom of the new card. Meaning they have an icon in the center bottom of the card, in the example above, the skeleton drummer does not have an icon in the center, so they would not do anything. The Monster phase consists of activating any Monster cards on your board that need to be activated. On a turn each player has two phases to work through, the Monster phase and the hero phase. There are black Monster cards that can be placed anywhere and if a players board is filled and you need to place another card there, you may place it on another board. If it is not, on your turn you will draw one of the Monster cards and place it on the appropriate board, matching colors if possible. If your board is full on your turn there is an action you take, usually bad. Each of those boards can hold three monsters. Each hero at the beginning of the game is given a Monster board in one of the four colors. These Monster cards come in five different colors, four of which are shared with the heroes. The game is propelled forward by a deck of cards, this deck is full of all of the evil that the Baleful Queen can summon to attack the bastion in an attempt to gain her power back. Each location in the bastion has a unique power that the players can use when they stop on it. This is where the heroes will take their stand to defend what is theirs. Each square is a different location in the last bastion for the heroes. Which is why the game is just created to feel so darn difficult, you need that difficulty to make it feel desperate, to make it feel like a challenge, which is what we always should strive for in gaming, but definitely in cooperative gaming.Ī majority of Last Bastion is played out on a three by three board. There is no clock, at least in the traditional sense, in Last Bastion or Ghost Stories though, this is not real time. The speed of the game is important, you don’t want a tower defense game to feel slow and plodding, you don’t want to feel like you have more than enough time to do everything. It’s a difficult design to pull off in the world of cardboard, usually there are lots of things going on that need to be managed in a short time frame. You generally see this a lot more in the video game world than in board games, but the genre has been prevalent over the past few years, especially with recent releases like Cloudspire from Chip Theory Games. The basic tenets of a tower defense game are that the players are defending a base from waves of enemies through the use of obstructions, including themselves. Last Bastion, like it’s predecessor, is a tower defense game. Currently Ghost Stories is sitting at number 238 on BoardGameGeek. Ghost Stories was legendary in it’s difficulty, maybe not Yggdrasil levels of difficulty, but still, Ghost Stories was known as an unforgiving and unrelenting game and that helped push it up the rankings. A long awaited re-working of the insanely difficult to win cooperative game, Ghost Stories. I am going to give a bit of a longer rules overview than Dale did, so if you prefer the shorter overview, go check out Dale’s and come back for my thoughts. Back in October, Dale took a “ First Look at Last Bastion”.
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