A Short History of Championship Formula Racing

Almost 2 months ago, Jim Dietz at Jolly Roger games emailed me out of the blue.  We had a very quick email conversation that resulted in plans to publish Championship Formula Racing based on my house rules to the game people know as Speed Circuit.  I'm going to spend a lot of time on this blog talking about Championship Formula Racing, how it came to be, why I made different decisions over the years, and what's going on right now.

Consider this post to be issue 0 -- the origin story.

CFR in action at WBC 2013

As a kid I probably played more board and card games than most American Gen-Xers.  Mom, Dad, and I played a lot of hearts because it was a card game that worked very well with 3 people.  We also had some of the Avalon Hill bookcase games: Twixt (pretty cool), Wilderness Survival (I never remember getting very far in that game), and other games of that ilk.  Most importantly we had a copy of Speed Circuit.  I really liked that game and we played a fair bit of it.  Almost always Monaco, with just the 3 of us, for 1 lap.

I also got into role playing and that took over most of my game playing life from high school through college.  Soon after college Magic the Gathering took over parts of my time and wallet.  I didn't play Speed Circuit again for many years.  Then I got back into it by chance.  My first real job out of college I ended up working at the U.S. Navy Memorial.  My boss at the time wanted to start a naval themed gaming convention to attract people to the visitor center and I joined him for a day one summer at Avalon Con.  I mostly played in open gaming that day but spent a good bit of time wandering around to see what everyone was playing and how things were set up.

And there is was -- back in a dark corner of the hotel next to the room where the Klingons were practicing their ritual dances -- they were playing speed circuit.  But this was only nominally the game that I grew up with.  Rob Cunningham ran the tournament then and he had his own custom rules bolted on to the Speed Circuit chassis and used 1/48 scale model cars and custom built tracks at the same scale and 3 lap races with 14 or so cars in each race.  It really was like a completely different game.  And I loved it even more.

I came back the next summer and many, many summer after that.  I also started up a local group and started building my own tracks at 1/64 scale (because matchbox cars are 1/10 the price of 1/48 scale cars... at least).  One year Rob stopped running the tournament at Avalon Con and I took up the reins.

I suppose this is the point at which I became one of the many nodes of speed circuit out there.  Unlike a lot of other board games, speed circuit has evolved and branched over time into multiple related games.  A good friend of mine recently compared it to card games.  There are more variations and versions of poker then any one person could probably enumerate but they all share a recognizable core.  Same with Bridge and Rummy and other games like that.  Monopoly kind of has this given the fair number of house rules that people play with.  But I can't say that I have seen this effect with many hobby board games.

There are a lot of Speed Circuit camps out there that have a set of rule modifications that they like.  Just like how some people prefer Texas-Hold-Em to 5-Card-Draw or 7-Card-Stud.  Even the Avalon Hill version of speed circuit was a pretty serious modification of the original 3M game and there are those who prefer the 3M version as their jumping off point.  Over 15+ years of modifying and tweaking rules, my list of roughly described modifications is longer than the complete Avalon Hill rules for the game.  I suspect most others who have heavily modified rules sets could say the same thing.

My version of speed circuit started with parts of Rob Cunningham's modifications (which I gather he borrow many of from another group of gamers) and branched off from there.  As I've modified things over time my flavor of speed circuit has coalesced around some core concepts:

• Don't stray too far from the path -- I want people to recognize the core mechanics.
• Accommodate ~10 drivers per track.
• Balance simulation desires with game play realities.
• Generally make multiple different strategies workable.

Subconsciously, I've also hewn to the American style of direct knife fighting as opposed to the more gentlemanly European model.  It seems like a slight thing but the difference between just finishing first and driving as quickly as possible has knock-on effects throughout the game.

If you've played at Avalon Con or WBC or in my PBeM or the official WBC PBeM, you've played Championship Formula Racing and just not known it.  And you've contributed to it's evolution to where it is today.  So thank you and welcome to the ongoing story of that game.

UFO Racing League and Collisions

My whole description of this game broke down when I tried to write about collisions... because... I still haven't figured them out completely.  This has been the piece of the puzzle that has seen the most revisions.

The collision system has always involved two things: damage and changing momentum.

Your UFO takes damage when you hit a wall or are hit by another UFO.  That damage then reduces the amount of energy you get to help you maneuver.  But you also heal so that you will eventually be back to full effectiveness.  Exactly how much damage and how much effect and how you heal have all been tinkered with over the years.

Your momentum is also altered when you hit something or are hit by a UFO... exactly how has also changed a lot over the years.

The damage problems have usually been about finding the right balance between making damage have a real effect without too much of an effect.  A lot of this has to do with the kind of race I want -- a race where the UFOs are barely in control, banging off an occasional wall for strategic reasons and definitely hitting other UFOs because they can -- a cross between a demolition derby and NASCAR race.

The other issue I've struggled with is complexity.  My early systems where way to complicated both in relation to the amount of damage meted out by different collisions as well as how momentum would change after a collision.  Until recentlyish, I was the only person who understood collisions well enough to play the game.  That has improved a lot.  Hopefully enough.

Right now, if you hit a wall or get hit by another UFO you take 1 damage.  You track that damage on the chart shown on the right.  I'm using the plastic orange flame to note that I've taken 1 damage.  That means that next turn I will only get 3 energy instead of 4 energy.  As soon as I get that energy, I will heal 1 damage.

Back in the day, you could essentially take infinite damage.  But then UFOs could end up in situations where they would spend several turns doing nothing but tracking their ship's damage and floating around the track aimlessly -- often taking more damage in the process.  It wasn't fun.

So one thing I've done is cap damage at 3.  You will always get at least 1 energy on a turn.  Also, if you already have 3 damage and then take another damage, you actually gain an energy in your battery.  So beating on a defenseless ship actually helps that ship.  This system seems to be working.  Taking 1 damage isn't too harmful and doing it on purpose can be worth it.  But if you take 2 or 3 it can be a pain.

Collisions themselves come in two flavors: hitting walls and hitting other UFOs.  The system involving momentum and collisions is similar for both.  In either case half of your momentum in that direction will go away and you will keep the other half.  If you hit a wall, that momentum you keep gets flipped to the opposite direction -- you bounced.  If you hit another UFO, you give half of your momentum to the other UFO -- you push it.  Both effects can be used strategically.  That other UFO may not really want to be going that fast in that direction.  And bouncing off of walls can be the best way to change directions sometimes even if it causes you damage.

I am glossing over some details here.  And the fact that there are more details is something that is constantly a concern and most of play testing these days focuses on collisions and track design.

One great suggestion I got at a play test a couple of months ago was to add more things to do with energy then just movement.  Especially if it could add more control to when and how you got hit in a collision.  Sometimes it just seemed like there was nothing you could do about that UFO bearing down on you at ramming speed when there should be.

So I added a couple widgets.  Initiative can be used to try to move before everyone else or after everyone else.  Inertial fields can modify how a collision goes down.

A UFO with two positive initiative will move before any UFO with less then two initiative.  It now supersedes total speed for determining who goes first.  Negative initiative works exactly the opposite because sometimes you want everyone else to get out of your way first.

Using the anchor field makes your heavier and harder to move around in a collision.  If you hit a wall you shed all of your momentum in that direction but you take an extra damage.  If a UFO hits you its just like that UFO hit a wall.  If you hit a UFO that UFO takes an extra damage.

Using the spring field makes you bounce more.  If you hit a wall you keep all of your momentum when you bounce it to the opposite direction.  If you hit another UFO, that UFO gains all of your momentum instead of half.  You also do not take any damage from collisions.

Each energy you place on each field allows you to use that field for one collision that turn.  Mostly, I think these effects will be used for strategic collisions with walls, especially the spring field.  However, having an anchor available can be a nice deterrent for someone is thinking about hitting you.

That said, these things need play testing beyond myself.  But if they work, I could see interesting possibilities for upgrading or downgrading your ship's capabilities before the race by making these options better or worse.

UFO Racing League: The Tracks

I know I keep promising to talk about collisions.  When I started this walkthrough with a discussion of movement I suggested that collisions would be next but instead talked about the battery, because I forgot about it when talking about movement.  I want to talk about collisions.  But first, lets talk about one of the things you can collide with: walls.  Well, sometimes I'm going to call them bulkheads so that I can use one word to describe floors, ceiling, and walls that often don't have much to differentiate themselves.

The tracks in UFO Racing League are essentially large, empty space stations designed specifically as 3-dimensional race tracks.  Each track starts with a starting box where each space ship begins the race from a standing start and each track ends with an exit out of the track and into empty space.  The winner of the race is the first to exit the track.

The tracks in this game are built from modular pieces which are reused for other tracks or can be mixed and matched to create your own tracks.  Each track piece has one job: to convey where the bulkheads are.  Lets look a piece.

While its pretty easy to figure out where the walls are, the floors and ceilings are another matter.  On the piece below you can see that there are colors on the spaces as well as outside the walls.  These colors correspond to a color bar that measures elevation.  The color of the spaces represents the floor and the color along the walls represents the ceiling.  These colors match the color bars on the spine of each spaceship's stand and is repeated on each control board as well.  You will also see numbers along the sides of each track piece that show these values numerically as well.

On the above piece the floor is blue or 3.  That actually represents lowest elevation that a spaceship can be before it hits the floor.  The floor is technically just a bit below that.  The ceiling is red or 5.  Just like the floor this is the highest elevation a spaceship can be before it hits the ceiling.  Being at the height indicated for either the floor or ceiling is always ok, anything beyond that however will result in a collision.  (Yes, I promise collisions are next.)  So on this piece of track, a spaceship can be at elevation 3,4, or 5.

For many track pieces the ceiling and floor change in the middle of the piece.  Here is one of my favorite track pieces.

If you enter this track piece from the left side of this page, you are in a very high section of track -- the floor is at 6.  As you enter the corner of the turn, the ceiling remains at 7 (the highest in the game) but the floor drops down to 1 (the lowest).  After rounding the corner, the floor stays at 1 but the ceiling drops all the way to 2.

So spaceships travelling along this section of track must not only turn 90 degrees to the right, but they must also quickly drop from elevation 6 or 7 to elevation 1 or 2 and then stop dropping so that they don't hit the floor.

This next section is also one of my favorites.

This piece has a lot of elevation changes on it.  Again, if you enter the piece from the left side of the page, it starts out low (1-3) then very slowly increases in elevation as it turns in a spiral before actually running over itself at the end.

One of the fun things about this piece of track is that when a ship is on one of the four spaces that could be either the top or bottom of the spiral, I have yet to see anyone get confused about which part they are on because of the elevation difference.  If your ship is at elevation 3 or less you are in the bottom section.  If your ship is at elevation 5 or higher you are in the top section.

When racing this part of track, the tricky bit is that elevation changes do not overlap very much which creates a very narrow gap where the elevation changes.  So when moving from the 4-5 section to the 5-7 section (green floor to red floor) you have to be at elevation 5.  Any higher and you hit the ceiling in the lower part and any lower and you end up hitting a wall (we'll visualize that later).  That makes this piece a bit of a bottleneck.

Here, I've copied the graphic showing the elevation scale on the spine of the spaceship stands so that you can see all of the colors in order.

Someone asked me recently how I picked those colors.  I essentially started with "darker" colors for lower on the track and moved up to "lighter"colors for higher on the track.  That maybe a bit subjective and I think the numbers are key.  To some degree I expect that the colors are more important for warning that the ceiling or floor elevation has changed and you need to pay attention to that.  I don't really expect people to memorize the color scheme.  Then again, I've seen stranger behavior.

Testing, Testing, Testing A New Track For Championship Formula Racing

When we last left the development of a Bahrain track I had a first draft of a track (shown to the right here) and was ready to try it out.  This is both the fun part and the part where ideas meet reality.

In order to test the track I build 10 cars based on whatever my current rule set it and run through a race with them on the track.  I try to create three kinds of cars based on three common strategy types: bid-high-race-from-the-front cars, bid-low-race-from-the-back cars, and some form of run-from-the-middle cars.  I do this right on the computer file -- moving car images around the track with blocks of car stats floating around outside the track.  If you have ever participated in my play-by-email races you have a general idea of what that looks like.

As I run through the track, I often make notes right on the track and if I see something I don't like or want to try I'll change it right away so that I can see if I like the change when the cars get back there next lap.  Here's a snap-shot from the end of one of my test races.

As I'm testing the track, I'm trying to do a couple things at the same time.  I'm making sure the corners work well.  I want the track to have a flow to it that reminds me of the race I just watched.  I want to make sure the straights are the right length -- do cars get up to the speeds I was targeting?  Also, my rough draft started testing at 84 spaces and I'm targeting 78 spaces so I'll be looking for places where I can shave off some spaces.

I had a lot of trouble with corner 3.  It started life at 120... with an arrow through the inside lane.  First off, I'm not sure I intended to make the outside and inside lanes 120.  But the bigger problem was that being able to go 140 through that corner on the line, made the corner very silly from a game perspective.  Even though the speeds were more similar to reality.

This brings up what I think is the core balance decisions with these tracks and really any game that strives for some level of simulation: the balance between realism and game play.  Sometimes those two things are at odds and a balance must be struct.  This was a situation where I quickly abandoned the real speeds so that I could get more of the right feel by reducing the speed through that corner.  I tried 100 all around the second lap and still felt it didn't have any affect and tried 80 with the line for the last lap of my first test race.

After the first race, I decided that there were two places I could try to take out spaces.  Besides the affect taking out spaces can have on how the track races I also try to make sure that the track still fits together when I am done.  So I took out a space right before corner 3 and right after corner 4.  By taking the spaces out of straights that are effectively on either side of a sharp corner, it shortend up both straights pretty equally.  I then did the same thing later in the track -- taking a space out before corner 7 and after corner 7.  This gets me down to 80 spaces -- which is close enough to 78 for my liking.



This worked out pretty well around corner 7.  The entry into corner 7 was not impacted and I still got a number of cars up to 180 on the straight after corner 7.

It didn't work as well around corners 3 and 4.  The combination of the slower speeds in corner 3 and one less space between corners 2 and 3 meant that if you ran corner 2 with some wear expense you very often ended up spending more wear in corner 3 as well.  That did not feel like how the real track worked.  Those corners are not really that close to each other.  Also I wanted to make sure that corner 2 was still a good place to make passes and making it even harder to spend wear there doesn't feel like what I wanted.  So I change corner 3 yet again.  I essentially moved the whole corner one space farther away form corner 2 and one space closer to corner 4.  This also meant that I had to do something about the lines for corners 3 and 4.  I ended up truncating the line for corner 3 so that it ended right on the inside 60 space of the corner.


I like the track I ended up with.  It seemed like it should generate some fun racing.  Its got some seriously long straights and a lot of them.

Next I will clean up the presentation of the track before the final step of building its physical form.

Turning Research Into a New Championship Formula Racing Track

After my initial research phase, I had some thoughts on how this track would end up looking but the track doesn't really start to come together until I watch the race run with real F1 cars.

Thanks to the modern miracle of the DVR, I watched this past weekend's Bahrain race over the last couple of nights.  During the pre-race I may pick up a few thoughts from the commentators about parts of the track and sometimes I get to see another qualifying lap but the best part of the race for me are the first couple of laps -- especially lap 1.

I'm looking for a couple of things during the race itself.  Where are the best opportunities for passing on the track?  What lines do cars take through the corners -- especially when more then one car is going through the corner at the same time.  The ideal racing lines are easy to figure out.  What it looks like when 2 or 3 cars try to go through a corner wheel-to-wheel is impossible to figure out until you see cars try to do it in real life.

From the game perspective this all translates into corner layout and track width.  Corner layout, to me, is the core of track design.  The speeds and positions of the corners define a track in a very real way.  Most tracks also have a couple of corners that are either signatures for the track or just more interesting or important then the others.  For Bahrain I focused on corners 1 and 13.

Sunday night I got through pre-race and about the first 15 laps of the race.  By now I had worked through several different rough ideas about corners and track widths in different places.  Not too far into last night's watch of the remainder of the race I had settled on track widths and where the corners would be and started sketching out ideas for the layout of the important corners on scratch paper while I watched the race.

After the race was over I rewound back to the start and watched the first half of lap 1 again.  Then I sat down and roughed out the more straight forward corners and how long I thought the straights should be -- mostly based on top speeds achieved at the end of those straights and distances between corners.

Note, I'm going to start off referring to corners by their real world numbering by default.

Corner 1 was great fun during the race with lots of wheel-to-wheel action and I quickly decided that this would have to be the most interesting corner on the track.  While most corners really have one good way through them, this corner almost demanded a good secondary line.  During pre-race I decided that a couple corners I thought I could ignore might need more attention including corner 2.  But I didn't want the track to end up with too many corners so I ended up squishing corners 1 and 2 into a single speed circuit corner.  I often end up doing this.  There is a huge difference between having 2 corners a space or 2 apart and having 1 corner that is a couple spaces longer.  Although sometimes, having two separate corners makes more sense.  Corner 1 went through the most iterations during this part of the process but I like where I ended up here.

I'm still ignoring corner 3.  Corner 4 becomes the 2nd corner on the speed circuit track and looks pretty straight forward.  Corners 5 and 7 get ignored.  Corner 6 becomes corner 3 for speed circuit.  Corner 8 becomes corner 4.

I decide that corners 9 and 10 will become a single speed circuit corner... but a more interesting corner then the usual layout.  On track, the corner speeds drop considerably from 127 to 39 MPH between the two corners.  So I end up with a corner where the speed of each space in the corner is slower then the speed of the space in front of it... in the inside lane the speed actually goes from 100 to 60 in one space.  In the outside the corner speeds start at 100 then go to 80 and then 60 in three spaces.  No line for this corner.

Corner 11 becomes a straightforward corner (#6) on the speed circuit track.

Corner 12 was another corner I was planning to ignore.  But during pre-race it was lumped in with corner 13 a lot as essentially a very long two-apex corner.  So I ended up doing something similar to the layout I used to squish corners 9 and 10 together, but made it longer and more gradual.  Its also a corner that gets slower as it goes, so that seems like it will work.

Finally, corner 14 becomes the speed circuit tracks final corner #8 and I ignored corner 15.

Note that I'm now going to refer to corners by their speed circuit numbering.  (See below.)

I went back and forth on track width.  Visually I found it hard to tell if there were parts of the track that were noticeably wider then others.  But when I do a track, I end up paying as much attention to how a track races then how wide it really is.  Most of the wheel-to-wheel action was on the front straight through corner 1 and onto the next straight.  In the end, I made everything from the front straight through to corner 2 3-wide (minus the back half of corner 1).  Then its 2-wide through what is essentially the in-field and then back to 3-wide for the run down to the last corner and onto the front straight.

I find that I always start off sketching out straights that are too long.  My first pencil and paper sketch of the speed circuit track was 94 spaces long when I was targeting 78.  But I'll deal with that in my next step.

My next step is to take my many pieces of paper sketches and create a rough outline of a track on the computer.  This doesn't take me too long because I'm mostly laying out straights and very roughly indicating corner speeds, spaces, and lines.  This is where I often end up having to change straight lengths again in order to make the track fit roughly the shape it should be.  So now I'm look at the relative physical lengths of straights to help me cut down the overly long straights I sketched out based on top speeds and some innate desire to have a 24 space long 3-wide straight on every track.

As it all comes together for the first time, everything gets tweaked a little more -- even corners.

Now I'm ready to race the track for the first time.

Preparing to Build a New Track for Formula Championship Racing

For years now, I've been on a mission to create a track for Championship Formula Racing (my flavor of the classic 3M Speed Circuit) for every modern F1 track I could.  Hard for me to believe, but I've got 19 1/2 in the bag over the last 6 years (I've got two version of Silver Stone after a revision to the track in 2010).  One of the three tracks in the 2013 F1 calendar that I do NOT have done yet is coming up this weekend -- Bahrain.  This time, I'm going to do my work in public and let everyone ride along on my process.

Its the Friday before F1 races at Bahrain and that's the day I normally do my prep work.  Before I watch the race on Sunday, I want to have a track map with corner speeds, straight-line speeds, and a rough idea of how many corners I think I will end up with and how many spaces long the track will be.

First thing I need is a good track map.  The official F1 site has some good ones.  I'll crop that out and print it as a primary place to make notes on before and during the race.

The main thing I want to do before a race is find as much speed related data as possible for different parts of the track.  The two best sources of this information are the official F1 site and the Brembo brakes F1 site.

The official F1 site.  They will give you speeds in many corners and also speeds through a number of speed traps -- usually at the end of the longer straights.  This gives me a lot of good speed numbers from lots of the track.  For Bahrain I get 16 different speeds.  That's more raw information then I get from Brembo but I then supplement with the great data from Brembo.

Brembo provides brakes for many of the F1 teams and after Friday practice, they put all the braking data they get from every partner team together and report out on the braking areas of the track.  Specifically I'm looking at the initial speed (speed before they start braking) and the final speed (slowest speed in the corner).  This data is much better then the official F1 site data because its completely current (the official F1 site data rarely changes from year to year whereas the Brembo data does.  The other nice thing is that Brembo is specifically tracking braking events which is different then just displaying speeds at different points.  Where as the official F1 map claims that Bahrain has 15 corners, Brembo reports that it only has 8 braking events.

Now I convert all those speed from KPH to MPH and write them down on my track map.  Between my two sources I've got pretty good coverage on my map.

Next I calculate how many spaces long I think the track should end up.  The way I do that is to multiply the length of the track in kilometers by .069.  Bahrain is 5.412 kilometers long so I will be trying to get the game version to about 78 spaces.  This will just be a guide for me, however, not a hard requirement.

Where does .069 come from?  I'm not exactly sure how it started.  Before I did my first track in this style, I did an analysis of the old Avalon Hill tracks looking at trends: average number of corners = 9; average corners speed = 99, average longest straight = 17 spaces, average 3-wide track = 15%; average track length = 72 spaces (for the statistically inclined, the medians were very close to the averages except that the median 3-wide percentage was 0%).  However, there did not seem to be any consistent conversion ratios that I could discern.  So I started out building Catalunya with a target to build tracks that were a little shorter then the old Avalon Hill tracks: closer to 60 spaces and 8 corners then 72 and 9.  Catalunya came in at 60 spaces and 8 corners but -- in hind sight is probably a good bit shorter then it should be.  But after that I had a rough conversion of track length to spaces that I could use as a guide for later tracks.  Early on I used it a very rough guide but now that I'm 20 tracks into this, .069 is the average of the ratios for all 20 tracks I've done so far.

Random fact: based on the current ratio a space in my tracks is 4/100th of a mile or 76 yards long.

Finally, I stare at the track a bit and look at the Brembo data especially and guess at how many and where the corners are for game purposes.  For Bahrain, it looks pretty straight forward. I don't see any reason why Brembo's 8 braking areas can't turn into 8 corners for the track.

Something else I can do prior to the race is watch a video of a lap on the official F1 site in their video section.  Besides, being very fun to watch, this can confirm some things I'm seeing in the data,  For instance, corners 2 and 3 don't get tracked as braking events by Brembo and sure enough Vettel is accelerating through both of those as he exits corner 1.  Corner 6 is very fast but tracked as a braking event by Brembo and yes, Vettel hits the brakes there and doesn't just coast some using the gearing to slow down.  Corners 8 and 9 are essentially one corner -- Vettel brakes before 9 and coasts into 10, not back on the gas till he leaves 10.  Now I thought 12-13 might be like that as well, but Vettel flies through 12 before hitting the brakes in front of 13, so I was wrong there and note on my sheet that 13 is the corner, not 12-13.  And finally its clear that 14 is the final real corner here with 15 being where Vettel begins the acceleration onto the front straight.

Next, I watch the race... well assuming my DVR records the race despite being apparently on its last legs.

Ghost Stories, Is It Bad To Be Hard?

I have a love-hate relationship with Ghost Stories.  On the one hand, its a good game.  On the other hand, IT IS SO HARD.  I bought the game years ago in cardboard and it took me many, many plays to win my first game on the easiest level.  But it doesn't get a lot of plays.

In February, I bought the iPad implementation.  I figured it would be a good game for the iPad.  Its got the draw back / feature of most pure cooperatives: its essentially a solitaire game.  I thought maybe playing it more often would allow me to win some games.  Not so much.

Above: me getting crushed.  Below: a snapshot of my leader board.  Notice, mostly me getting crushed.

A week or so after I got the game, I won 2 games in 20 attempts, on the easiest level of the game.  I basically gave up after that.  I decided that the game was just too hard.

Then, I read an interview with Ghost Stories' creator, Antoine Bauza, on Little Metal Dog Show.  The interviewer actually asks Mr. Bauza early on why he made Ghost Stories so hard and the answer is basically, yea we didn't want it to be so easy like some other cooperatives.  Then he reached out through the computer and smacked me in the face:

But to tell you the truth, the game is not so hard and when you know it well you cannot lose at all in easy mode and almost never lose in normal or nightmare mode.

...

What?  Are you kidding me?  I'm losing 90% of my easy games!  Am I doing this wrong?

So, I went to the internet -- specifically BGG's strategy forum for the game.  Wow.  I was seriously doing this wrong.

Since then, I've won 8 games in 14 tries and I seem to be getting better: 6-2 in my last 8 games.  I may even be ready to move up to whatever level is above beginner.

I think this may say more about me then the game.  I tend to like games that I can jump into quickly with some competence and enjoy.  My last instinct is to research strategies online.  I'm usually the opposite of a min-maxer.  I like my games with flavor more then ideal efficiency engines.

The other thing about Ghost Stories is that it really introduces the concept of "hard" to board games.  Normally, the difficulty of a board game is defined by your opponents, not the game itself.  And here Mr. Bauza is correct, most cooperative/solitaire games are not this hard.

And you know what?  Now that I'm competent (at easy), I'm addicted.  So maybe this hard thing is good.