Bustin' Some Ghosts

I played a "learning game" of Ghostbusters with some friends who don't play wargames but have been known to partake of the occasional boardgame. Needless to say it was quite messy at first, but things were moving a little more smoothly near the end.

Dramatis Personae:
Dr. Peter Venkman........... NeoXFire
Dr. Ray Stantz................. Soul Samurai
Dr. Egon Spengler............ Fish
Winston Zeddemore......... Plastic Man

Ironically, the only one of us who is an actual doctor is Plastic Man. Anyway, the game started with us all hopping out of the car and catching some of the smaller ghosts... and getting slimed.

The slime really bogged things down, plus we had problems with ghosts escaping from our traps, so we started to stick closer together to clear the slime off each other, focus our proton beams on the tougher ghosts, and deposit ghosts as soon as we caught them.

Thanks to slime and some bad rolls, it didn't feel like we were making much progress for a while.

But eventually we managed to focus on the gates and shut them down.

By the end of the first game everyone had reached level 2, with Dr. Plastic Man leading in experience. Interestingly enough none of his experience came from his characters' special ability (unlike myself and NeoXFire). Either he caught a whole heap of the ghosts, or he was subtly cheating...

The game played a lot slower than I was expecting; it felt like you couldn't do very much in a single turn. However, I think our inexperience was part of the problem; perhaps next time we'll get through turns quickly enough that not doing as much in a single turn won't feel like such a limitation.

There's a few rules I'm still not sure about. It seems that getting into or out of the Ecto-1 requires a "maneuver", but you can also get into it by just walking "onto" it? Also, do you get experience when you catch a ghost or when you deposit it? We played it as being when you deposit it, which I suspect makes more sense since there's ways in which ghosts can escape.

The first scenario at least didn't really have a realistic loss condition. I haven't read the loss conditions on later scenarios, but I hope they will be slightly more threatening. We'll see I guess.