KarakSindru

10 new characters to play with! Doubling the number of available characters also increases set up time as you randomly determine which characters to use. Each character shares their first initial with a character from the base game, so they’re still easy to find on the hit point track.

The other five cards in the pack are mostly fixes and updates to existing cards. The character list on the hermit cards and Chocolate card are updated to include new names, and Bob’s text is revised.

Overall a worthwhile addition to the game.

On its surface, Shadow Hunters is about finding your allies and killing your enemies, but there are subtle nuances in playing some of the Neutral characters.

At first the game seems complex, but most of the complexity comes in the characters’ special abilities and win conditions.

They say the minimum players is four; I wouldn’t recommend playing with less than five. This is definitely a game that gets better as you add more players.

My main complaint is in the coloring of the Yellow and Orange tokens. In anything other than sunlight or white electric light, the tokens look almost identical, leading to accidentally moving the wrong token on the hit point track or location cards.

Identities are dealt out in secret, so at the start of the game only you know who you are. Through play, mostly by use of the green Hermit cards, players will learn about each other and make educated guesses about whom to attack.

Players may also voluntarily reveal their identity at any time to use their special abilities. Here the game is weighted slightly toward the Shadows, as their abilities are reusable, once per turn, whereas the Hunters’ special abilities are mostly Once Per Game. To compensate, the other aspects of the game seem weighted toward the Hunters, with some Neutral characters having “all shadows are dead” win conditions.

One of the things I really enjoy about this game is that winning is not necessarily exclusive. Just because the Shadows won doesn’t mean no one else can. Most Neutral characters can share in the victory no matter who wins. Hunters and Shadows also win or lose as a team. If the Shadows manage to kill all but one Hunter, but that Hunter manages to kill all of the Shadows, all the Hunters share in the victory.

The first game can take up to an hour as new players learn the game, but subsequent games should go faster. Experienced players have a slight advantage over new players because they have a familiarity with the characters and what their abilities are. This does not unbalance the game and new players quickly gain an equivalent familiarity to remove that advantage.

Was the River I too short for you? Not enough forks creating interesting farm shapes? Now your worries are over! The River II comes with a fork to have two river segments, one of which will end at a city wall, and the other ends at the usual lake. River II tiles come with support for the Inns & Cathedrals expansion, with an inn on a road segment that crosses the river, and the Princess And Dragon, with a dragon-summoning volcano at the lake.

If you want to play with all the expansions and have a large surface to play on, combine both River expansions for an epic river to start (take out the duplicate spring and lake)

As awesome as the dragon meeple is, I tend to play without the rules for this expansion, just the new tiles. I find farm and city politicking tedious enough as it is without the addition of being able to remove followers.

I can’t really argue that D&D 3.x is better or worse than D&D 4 because they are different games for different types of gamers.

D&D 4 returns to the D&D roots with a focus more on tabletop battle simulation. With 3rd Edition, a battle map was useful, but not strictly necessary for combat. With D&D 4 you will find combat vastly simpler and less confusing if you have a battle map and tokens. If you don’t want to spring for the nice adventure tiles and monster tokens, grid paper with a 1″ grid and LEGO Minifigs work well as replacements.

The mechanics of battle are also, in many ways, streamlined and simpler than third edition as well, with a selection of Powers usable each encounter.

Character creation is also more categorized, with each class’s role in the party well defined.

High quality pieces and very simple rules set this game up as a great introductory board game or a palate cleanser between more complex games.

The scoring mechanic lends itself both to simple plays for a few points and strategic plays for loads of points.

The game rewards a balanced play style more than a power-gamer style of building chains to score dozens of points at once. Players place colored tiles trying to build up chains of colors, scoring more points for longer chains, to increase the points in a single color on a player’s scoring track. The win condition is to have your lowest scored color have a higher value than your opponent’s lowest scored color.

The basic rules couldn’t be simpler, but as the game goes on the rules get more complex. Sometimes they get to the level of completely absurd and a single players turn can take 20 minutes. Sometimes the whole game is over in three minutes, before some players have had the chance to play.

Because of random and ever changing nature of the Goal and Rules, long term strategy is non-existent and strategic decisions come down to “What can I do this turn?”

Pros:
-The pieces are very high quality and just fun to handle.
-No two games play the same thanks to the way the board is laid out and the treasure is found.
-Simple rules that are easy to learn.

Cons:
-Sometimes a treasure is narrowed down to three or four locations but players are not drawing playable cards to narrow it further.

I would recommend the game for anyone, and the scenario mentioned under Cons is a corner case which doesn’t break the game, merely slows it down, and there are built-in ways to eliminate the situation without resorting to house rules.

These cards add a different strategy aspect to the game. Sometimes the upcoming event card can ruin your plans, but usually by planning appropriately you can take advantage of the event and earn big points each round.

A great expansion to add more variety to your Small World games.

I agree with just about everything MrNonRespondo said. The hundreds of seldom-used tokens seem almost like a committee said “We should have a token for every possible scenario.” “Yeah! And then we can justifiably charge more for the game!” “But there’s no way to organize the tokens in the box … won’t people be frustrated when they have to put the game on hold to find that one specific token they need?”

The house tiles in my set warped almost instantly, not all in the same direction, so stacking the tiles for the draw pile yields a jenga-like tower of ~3-inch square cardboard tiles, a normally very stable structure. The character tokens are at least painted molded plastic, rather than more cardboard tokens, but the warping on the character stats boards means the marker tokens tend to slip off in some cases.

Replayability is limited with a finite combination of races/powers, but still replayable enough to keep me happy. Easy to teach new players the rules, and quick turn-times make this a favorite game for our group.

Very simple once you’ve learned the iconography used to denote cards’ actions and resource generation.

There’s a lot to keep track of in this game, but when each stage is broken down it’s fairly simple.

I love Carcassonne, but must choose my friends and environments carefully when playing. More than once a game has ended early when someone picked up the score track without paying attention and the meeple slid a few points or off the board entirely.