I think Shadow Ninjas has me reflecting on, that I might need a new category, a wait for amazingly good sale or something. As Shadow Ninjas isn’t an avoid, but it’s equally not on the same level of other games I’ve recently given wait for sale recommendations to such as Stamp Swap, Redwood, Nunatak. But it’s not an avoid. Maybe it’s like an Age Contrived, not quite an avoid, but equally hard to give a wait for sale recommendation to. Oops, I’m getting to the recommendation without even covering the game!
Shadow Ninjas is a hidden movement game for 2 to 5 players. And sees the ninja players attempting to move their Ninja onto the Koi Carp. The game ends either when all the Ninjas are captured or the Ninjas successfully read a Koi Carp. It’s relatively simple.
At the start of the game, the ninja players take turns placing their tokens on the board before the guard player then places their two guard tokens. Once tokens are placed, they can’t be looked at again, and ninja players will share all the tokens, meaning you might be helping a fellow ninja or sabotaging them!
During a players turn, they roll two dice and assign each value to two different tokens. Ninja players can move any Shadow token. Or spend a turn to look secretly at 4 tokens. If a Shadow token moves into the line of sight of a guard token, that token is flipped, and if its a ninja, they’re removed from the game, or if it’s a Shadow nothing happens. The game is effectively and cat and mouse like game, in the guards are trying to work through a process of elimination for identifying Ninjas, whilst the ninja player wants to try and create decoys that lure the guards so that a ninja can sneak past.
That’s effectively the game. It takes about 30 seconds to explain; on your turn roll dice, assign a value to two different tokens and move them. Ninjas reach the fish and dont get caught. Guards catch the Ninjas.
I’ll be honest in that when we first sat down to play this, I thought ohh it’s like stratego. And I loved Stratego (my childhood copy went mouldy during storage 🙁 ). But actually it’s not really like Stratego at all, because there’s such a dependency on the dice and that is it’s biggest pitfall. The first game felt like it was going to be a close game, with shadows slowly advancing and a couple of Ninjas been picked off, HOWEVER, a couple of turns of double 1s as either player and you’re essentially a sitting duck. As the Ninjas, guards can work upto your starting position and essentially on mass flip multiple tokens. And as the guard, there are four channels essentially you’ll need to manage, but a few low rolls and you’ll lose the ability to manage those channels. Sadly this means the losing the game doesn’t feel like it’s at the fault of the players, but rather the mechanisms in the reliance on roll and move.
However, I equally enjoyed our first game and I suspect this game would be great for families. But it can’t be taken seriously or approached strategically and by game two, we both found ourselves getting frustrated by the dice. Now you might say well they cancelled each other out if both players have low rolls, but when one player rolls 1s and 2s a few turns in a row and the other is rolling 5s and 6s, there’s going to be a big momentum change that you have little to no control over.
My first thought goes to whether the movement reliance on roll and move could be replaced with decks of cards, or at least offer some form of mitigation to bad rolls, like for every Shadow the guard sees they get a reroll token? But then that might not help early game if you’ve lots of bad rolls. But that first game was fun, and it’s only on repeated plays that our frustrations became more apparent, and like I said above, I suspect with a family this would be great. It says 8+ on the box, but this would easily be playable for younger ages as it involves memory, numbers
As you know, I rate games on a scale of:
Buy or play
Wait for sale or play if you like game XYZ
Avoid
As I’ve mentioned above, I’m struggling with a rationale to give it a wait for sale recommendation, unless you’re looking for maybe a new family game then possibly it falls into the “play if you’re looking for a new light weight family game”, but otherwise if you’ve come from Mr Jack which is a brilliant two player cat and mouse game, Shadow Ninjas pales in comparison and gets a solid avoid recommendation.
