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"Wu-Feng, the Lord of the Nine Hells has found where the funeral urn containing his ashes is kept. His hordes are already marching upon the small village of the Middle Kingdom hiding them". Players are taoist priests, who will have to defend the village from the army of shadows preparing to invade it. Each of them has different special powers which will help them in this mission.
The village is represented by nine tiles, each of which illustrates a different area. Around that are placed the tiles for each player, where the ghosts will appear on their starting locations.
The players, as a group, will have to exorcise the specters which will appear as the game goes on, often faster than expected... As at the beginning of his turn, a player brings a ghost into play and places it on a free spot. And more than one can come in at the same time. There are many types of specters which will need to be sent back to hell more or less quickly, as some can haunt the village and "destroy" tiles. If there's too many of them at a given time, the players risk losing some of their life points (Ki points).
On his turn, a priest can move on a tile in order to exorcise adjacent ghosts or to benefit from the power of the villager living on the tile.
To exorcise, he must roll three dice (the Tao dice) and end up with enough face up colors of the ghosts' color. Thankfully, one of the dice's face is a wild color which can be used as any color. To exorcise a black ghost of power 2, you need to roll three black or white (the bonus color). The players also benefit from Tao tokens which can pad out the dice roll. They gain these by entering certain village tiles, by exorcising certain ghosts or thanks to their special powers. When they are on the same tile, a priest can give Tao tokens to another priest in order to help with his exorcism.
Each tile of the village allows the players to benefit from a different bonus. The cemetary allows, for example, to bring a dead priest back to life, while the herbalist allows to recover spent Tao tokens, etc. It will also be possible to get traps or move ghosts.
The priests have three or four Ki points (depending on the difficulty level of the game). They also get a Yin-Yang token they can spend in order to make two actions in a single turn. Exorcising certain powerful ghosts allows to recover a spent Yin-Yang or Tao tokens. The special powers available to the players allow to recover Tao tokens, move more than one square or move another player, to benefit from an extra Tao die, etc. They strengthen the required collaboration by giving each priest a specialty. To win, the players must defeat the incarnation of Wu-Feng, a boss who arrives at the end of the game, once the players have been worn out by the hordes of ghosts breaking in since the beginning of the game. And if you decide to play on a harder difficulty mode, there will be many incarnations, each more dangerous than the last.
The ways to lose are, of course, even more numerous. The players lose if three of the village's tiles are destroyed, if the draw pile is emptied while the incarnation of Wu-Feng is still in play, or, simply, that all the priests are dead.
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