Designed by Antoine Bauza, Last Bastion is a new take on a classic cooperative game called Ghost Stories by Repos Production. It is going to be available at Essen SPIEL '19 and everywhere else pretty much right after that!

The game, for one-to-four players, has you taking on the role of one of eight unique heroes who have just plundered the treasures of the Baleful Queen and now you must defend the walls of your castle against a seemingly unending tide of foes led by nefarious warlords. You must hold out and work together in order to win the day in this challenging cooperative experience.

A lot of the key elements that made Ghost Stories a thrilling board game to play are here once again in Last Bastion (previously known as Last Hope). The centre of the board is made up of tiles which are arranged randomly each game and offer you both resources in order to keep the hordes at bay but also important locations to defend.

Each turn your heroes will draw a monster from the deck and apply it to the matching coloured board. You will then get a number of actions to use where you can move around and fight the monsters on different player's boards using a mixture of items you've collected and custom dice. If you match the right amount of icons on a given card you'll vanquish your enemy and open up a bit of breathing room.

The game gets tough when you start to face mounting odds and monsters spill out onto other player's boards, hampering their abilities and throwing more spanners in the work. The interesting thing with Last Bastion is that they seem to have pushed the player powers to the nth degree and unlocked loads of interesting new abilities to play with.

Whilst I liked the aesthetic of Ghost Stories and its Chinese influences it was getting a little frayed around the edges and Last Bastion has a lot of additional production quality poured into it.

If the game is half as good as Ghost Stories I would recommend snapping this up.

What do you think of Last Bastion?