Shadows of Brimstone II: this time with 1000% more review action

The Shadows of Brimstone Review

Shadows of Brimstone is a new boardgame that (as of this review) is just on the cusp of being released. Since the game has a lot of similarities to Warhammer Quest, I’m going to be making a few call-outs in this review. They’ll look like this.

Shadows comes from a little company called Flying Frog Productions. FFP makes some great, highly thematic games like Last Night on Earth, A Touch of Evil, and (Vorpal Chainsword Favorite) Fortune and Glory.


FFP is known for using photos of real people in their games. They started off on a small budget, and found it was easier to portray Jacques Moreau or Dr. Zhukov with real people (many of them are the game designers)  than to commission all of the art associated with them. This is kind of quirky and goofy, but it gives you an idea of how their games are more goofy fun than a production from a larger company like Fantasy Flight Games (FFG ... note how those two companies are very similar when they’re abbreviated. It’s kind of a thing). Here's what Jacques looks like, for instance:

Jacques Morrau will sadly not make an appearance

Because they have a lot of their "models" working at the company, there are a lot of the same characters in their different games. It’s kind of fun to see the same faces and evil organizations in their different products. They must have gotten some excellent deals on their “Order of the Crimson Hand” masks and robes, for instance.

Last year I came upon their Shadows of Brimstone Kickstarter, and I was intrigued. The premise is, well, not very simple at all actually. A mysterious substance, Darkstone, is discovered in mines in the old west. This substance can be used to power strange and wondrous technology, even gadgetry that defies the laws of physics, but comes at a cost: exposure to it can corrupt and warp the fiber of human beings.

The presence of Darkstone also strangely seems to coincide with bizarre creatures out of nightmare appearing: the walking dead, tentacled horrors, demons, and creatures from other dimensions.

This has no similarity to Chaos and Warpstone at all.

So what do you have going against all that? Why the heroes of the old west, naturally. The marshal, the sheriff team up with bandits, outlaws and even the town saloon girl to Fight Back the Darkness.

So, basically we have some Lovecraftian horror, steampunk, mutations, magic, other worlds going up against gunslingers with lots of dynamite. Sound fun? Oh, it is.

This is FFP’s very first Kickstarter, and it took off to incredible levels. FFP used the Kickstarter model to jumpstart the game. With a game like this you’d normally sell a core set, and then have expansions every year or so. The Kickstarter model allowed them to publish TWO core sets, and over two dozen expansion products all at once. At $1.3 million dollars, it’s one of the largest gaming Kickstarters ever.

I am a veteran of Kickstarters, so I know that what you end up with often times is very different than what you were expecting. When I saw the delivery date (August 2014) for this product, combined with how big it had gotten, I expected some very heavy delays.

As of Gen Con (last August) the company actually was able to deliver 100 copies of the core sets to the Kickstarter backers, and also put up another hundred for sale to the convention. From my experiences with Kickstarter, this is an amazing feat. Now I haven’t gotten my copies yet, but fellow blogger Cory picked up both of his core sets at the Con. I've had a chance to play the game and so you’re getting some actual hands on experience with it.

The first thing that I noticed was the art. I had heard that the game was going to be the first departure from the actual photography that FFP normally uses. Shadows is all artwork, and it’s beautiful. They've done a sort of comic book old west horror theme that makes the game dripping with flavor.

Shadows of Brimstone Swamps of Death

Here's the female gunslinger, ready for a fight.

So that's a very different look, but it definitely works for the game, and makes it look more upscale than some of FFP's other products. I like kitsch, but this is a much more mainstream presentation.

Did I mention that all of the characters have both male and female minis available? Very nice touch!

The second thing you notice about the game is that the miniatures are going to need some serious assembly, and that there are a lot of them. This is one of the biggest controversies that’s come out of the Kickstarter, actually. FFP’s games are full of miniatures, but they’re typically very easy to put together, if you need to put them together at all.

As the game production ramped up, FFP decided to use a harder plastic that would allow them to have more detail in the miniatures, but also necessitated assembly. This could have theoretically been done at the factory, but it would have been expensive, and taken time. Once the decision was made to change the type of plastic, I knew that it would mean either the project would be very late, or the buyers would have some serious work on their hands. Take a look at this picture, shamelessly stolen from vorpal chainsword:

What the ^&%$@^&%!!!

Now this is no big deal for some folks, but for me it’s a big thing. I have done minis before, but not for multiple decades. It is not a skill in my current repertoire so to speak. With the new plastic and production process, the minis look better than they would have, but it’s going to be a major pain to put them all together. That’s a one point deduction from the game’s rating in my book. Time to assemble them? For someone with skill? A few hours. For me? The time necessary to track down someone to do it for me.

The last thing you’ll immediately notice about the game is that it has cards, chits, markers, tiles … you name it. This is a component heavy game. In fact, we recommend you use a Lazy Susan ahem, purchase the new Card Buddy that we’re producing right for this game to keep everything straight. I point this particular feature out last since it’s actually pretty standard fare for this kind of game. Plan on having a lot of space available for play.

The game itself

To play Brimstone, you first need to create a character. To do so you pick one of the basic character types which a different depending on which set you have:

City of the Ancients:

• US Marshal
• Bandido
• Saloon Girl
• Gunslinger

Swamps of Death

• Law Man
• Preacher
• Indian Scout
• Rancher

You then customize them with a skill and pick a personal item. The personal item is your first brush with the cards from the game. You get one and it’s a permanent part of your character. They’re pretty nifty items, actually.

The last thing you do is pick an item for your side bag, which is a storage bag for different one-use items. Typically these items are used to heal you or replenish other consumable features.

Once that’s done, grab a character card and get ready to play!

Character Abilities

Your character card keeps track of all of your different abilities. It gives me an incredibly convenient way to quickly describe a lot of how gameplay works, so yay character cards!

Skill Attributes

One thing that FFP has carried over from game to game is your character’s skill attributes. You have six of them and each is rated from a scale of about one to five:

• Agility
• Cunning
• Spirit
• Strength
• Lore
• Luck

At many points during the game you’ll be asked to “test [skill] X+” You might “Test Lore 6+” for instance, to decipher some magical runes, for instance. When you make a check, you roll a number of six-sided dice equal to your Attribute. If you get one or more results equal to the target, you succeed. This is fast, and really works. I like the fact that in the game sometimes you actually don’t want to succeed with a check… it can backfire on you. If you figure out the meanings of strange alien glyphs, you might be able to unlock a treasure, at the cost of some of your own sanity.

Test are the primary way to accomplish things in the game, and you'll do them a lot.

To Hit

You have two scores here, one for Melee and another for Ranged. They’re both written in the form “X+” meaning to score a hit with them you need to roll that number or higher. Common values are 4+.

This part of the card also tells you how many Combat dice you roll. Combat dice are rolled if you want to punch something (so they’re hand to hand attacks) and you can get more of them if you have a weapon.

Combat is your Attacks stat from WQ.

When you have a ranged weapon like a gun, it has a number of shots. Each shot is a die you roll against your Ranged value to score hits.

In both cases, you roll all of your Combat or Ranged dice at once, and then divide up your hits against as many different targets as you want. Combat hits have to be used on foes next to you (they're hand to hand), but ranged attacks can hit anyone within range. There’s an exception: ranged hits must be used against monsters that are adjacent to you first.

If you roll a “6” on your attack, the result is a critical hit, and the monsters don’t get to apply their defenses.

For each hit you score, roll a die and it causes that much damage. Monsters have a defense that they subtract directly from each die of damage you cause. Monsters have health just like you do.

This is so simplified from WQ and works so much better.

The other stat in this section is Max Grit. Grit is a resource you can use to re-roll dice, either in attack checks or as a part of a Skill test. You start play with one Grit and can earn more (up to you max) as you play. Grit tends to fluctuate a lot as the game plays, you gain and lose it frequently.

Grit is luck from WQ.

Health and Sanity

Healthy and Sanity are your “hit points” or how physically or mentally tough you are. When you run out, you’re KOed. You also get notes about Defense and Willpower here, with both of them being represented by “X+”.

First, note that the Sanity damage means we’re going to possibly be running into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know about. Good to know.

Whenever you might be injured, you test your Defense or Willpower to see how bad the hurt is. If you see something scary, and take 5 Sanity hits, you’ll roll five dice for your Willpower. Each roll that’s equal to or higher than your Willpower Stat means that hit is blocked. Unblocked hits come off of your Health or Sanity.

As I noted previously, rather than rolling tests, monsters simply have a defense value that’s subtracted from each die of damage you roll.

A final thing here: there’s a cool feature where you can be woken up by your friends. You have a very few “revives” you can use to come back healthy, but if you don’t use that, you get to roll on the Injury table. This is one of many tables that can give your characters permanent afflictions from being hurt. Random badness!

Initiative

The final important part of the character card is your Initiative. This tells you the order in which everyone is going to act each turn. This normally isn't too important, but once monsters show up it’s very important indeed. Fill in your own pun about the quick and the dead here.

Those are the important parts of your character. Let’s talk about gameplay.

The Scenario

Once you have your character (and you can play with just one person: the game works fine as a solo game) you pick a scenario and go into the mines.

Each of the scenarios has a story involved with it. It’s the all important flavor text about why you’re going into the mines (Fortune and Glory, kid -- no, wait, that’s another game).

It will also have any special rules that apply to the game and finally the objective. Over the course of the game you’ll be trying to complete an objective, and once you do that, the game enters a final special endgame encounter called the Objective Room, where there's some sort of boss or villain.

This is the objective room and monster from WQ.

When you've gotten all of that together, you generally put out the “mine entrance” tile and start playing turns. You take the “old lantern” with you. One character has the lantern, which illuminates the tile it’s on, as well as one tile in either direction. As long as your character is within the light, you’re fine. If not, you start hearing voices and take Sanity damage.

Our heroes ready for anything

So this is the lantern from WQ. Since it’s the old lantern here, who knows? It might be the same one!

The Turn

Shadows is broken up into turns, with each one working in much the same until you have your final objective encounter.

Hold Back the Darkness

The first thing you do each turn is to roll to “hold back the darkness”. The character holding the lantern rolls 2D6, and based on how deep you are in the mines, you will either keep the darkness at bay, or cause it to move closer to the surface. An interesting and potentially troubling thing is if the darkness ever gets all the way to the surface, you lose the game, and something bad happens to your character. Important safety tip! 

Should you roll doubles, a special event happens, which is usually bad.

Another tip is that when you roll doubles, the darkness doesn't move up, the event is in place of that movement. In one of the games we played, we missed that rule, and lost the game as a result. Don’t be like us in that regard!

As the darkness progresses towards the surface (which is on a track) every so often you get something bad happening: either a darkness (play immediately, bad stuff) card or a “growing dread” card. The growing dread cards are only revealed at the end of the game, and may be cancelled if all of the characters agree to spend a grit (remember: they’re luck points, you start with one). Are you getting the idea that there are a lot of cards with this game? Well, check out our Lazy Susan Card Buddy <tm>.

Once the darkness has been magic missiled for the moment you go and activate your characters, in initiative order.


This is the equivalent of the Power Phase (Wizard Rolls a 1 Phase) in WQ

Heroes … Activate!

This is really the meat of the game. Once you’ve dealt with the darkness, you activate each of your heroes in order of their Initiative.

Should there be monsters around, they’re also activated by their initiative as well. Ties go to the badguys!

On your activation, you can move and take an action.

To move, you roll a die (or, optionally take 4). That’s the number of spaces you can move. You can move orthogonally or diagonally, but can’t move through other heroes or monsters. You also can’t move off the map except to an open “end piece.” An end piece looks like half of a puzzle piece, and it’s where the tiles connect.

Should you roll a “1” for your move you get a consolation prize: a point of Grit. This is the primary means of acquiring Grit, and some of the characters roll more than one die for movement, giving a good chance of getting it.

Once you’re done moving, it’s time for actions. If you’re in a fight, you can choose how you want to attack (hand to hand or ranged) while if you’re not, you can search.

Combat is going to have it’s own section, so I’ll detail it there.

Searching is pretty simple: each tile can be scavenged or searched for random loot. To check for this, roll three dice. If any of them come up “6” you've found something. It might be good, bad or nothing really at all, and once you scavenge a tile, you place a marker to indicate it’s been searched.

Searching is more interesting when you move to the edge of the map, to one of those open end pieces. When you do that and search, you explore: draw a card from the room deck, and place a new room on your end piece.

There are basically two kinds of tiles to place: corridors, which are nothing special, and large rooms, which is where the danger happens. When you place a room, you also draw an exploration token and place it face down. That token will be resolved during the exploration phase, at the end of the turn.

Once you place the tile, other characters can move onto it if they wish (careful about the range of the lantern!)

Exploration

When all of the characters have moved, if you placed a tile with an exploration token on it, and there’s a character on the tile, you explore it by turning over the token, which tells you what you've found. It might be a clue, which is generally part of your objective for the game, a monster, an encounter or even a portal to another world! A special note: when you move onto the edge piece, which activates the exploration process, you're considered to be on both room tiles, so a tile is going to be explored at the end of the turn it's placed.

Encounters

If the exploration token tells you that you have an encounter, you go to the encounter deck and see what’s happened. Yes, more cards. While this can mean you get attacked, most of the time it’s some kind of a unique situation that will require one (or all) of your characters to attempt a Test to get past. There’s usually a pass/fail mechanic and you can have good and bad things happen to you.

Monsters

You've been attacked! You draw a card from one of the monster decks (based on your group size, character level and the scenario) and fight it out.

Combat

Unless you’re extremely lucky, at some point you’re going to get attacked by monsters. When that happens, the turn sequence goes normally (including Hold Back the Darkness, which can be interesting) but the monsters have turns interspaced with the heroes.

When combat starts, monsters are placed on the map. There’s a very deliberate checkerboard placing and specific rules for how to place the different monsters that you’ll probably refer to the book about for a session or two. In general monsters are placed from furthest away to nearest, that is unless you have a special ambush event, where they drop on top of you!

Each monster has a card with it’s stats, and special upgrades that can be applied to them to make them tougher as well. On their turn, monsters move to attack heroes in a random but somewhat “fair” fashion. That is, if you have three heroes and four monsters, everyone will get one opponent, and one person will get two of them.

Monsters roll for attacks (they have a simple X+ to hit ability just like heroes do) and if they hit, they do damage to your health, sanity or both in some cases. When you've been hit, you get to roll defense to mitigate some of the damage.

That’s a pretty basic combat system, but each of the monsters has just enough special unique powers to make them memorable in their own right.

As a player, on your Activation you do things in the same order: roll for movement (a 1! more Grit!) then move and take an action, which in this case will likely be an attack.

There is one key difference, however: if you’re adjacent to monsters and want to move, you have to escape them. To do so, you roll a die against their Escape value, and if you roll equal to or higher than it, you can move. You can move around any monster with the same Escape value or lower, but if you move next to something with a higher value, you have to roll again.

After you've positioned yourself, time to fight. You can attack hand-to-hand, ranged, or throw a stick of dynamite.

I've covered how the other two combat styles work, so let’s talk about the boom.

Dynamite has a range, and you throw it into a square. If you miss your ranged hit, it bounces a number of times until it comes to a halt. It then explodes and anyone within that square or adjacent to it takes damage, without any benefit of defense. Wow. One stick of dynamite can clear out a whole board of monsters if they’re tightly packed. It can also kill you if you’re not careful!

As you kill monsters you get rewarded with experience points for defeating them. Some monsters only have points awarded for the kill, but others give points even for wounding them.

Here’s a picture of what a combat might look like

The sheriff is about to lay down the law... from a safe distance

After all the monsters are slain, everyone draws a loot card (yay, another set of cards!) for each of the types of monsters that were in play. Ah, loot! Loot can be money, items, or even Darkstone. Be careful about carrying too much Darkstone: you'll have to roll to see if you're corrupted by it when the scenario ends!

Those are the basics of how the game works: you explore new tiles, while Holding Back the Darkness until you manage to accomplish the goals of the scenario, at which point you reach the Objective Room.

The Objective Room

The Objective Room has a special encounter that’s described within the mission that you’re on. If you’re rescuing the school marm, this is where she’ll be … if you can save her.

Objective Rooms have a special encounter in them and it typically involves a special boss monster. Here’s an example of what one of them looks like:

Might need to put a little overtime in on this one

The End Game

If you manage to defeat the Objective, you get a reward. If not, and you’re still alive, there’s typically a penalty at this point. When the dust settles, it’s back to town.

To get back to town, everyone makes a Test, and on failing, you have an encounter from … a random table. If you survive, you’ll make it back to the town itself.

Town is a mini-game played in days. Each day you have expenses or stay in a campsite and have encounters. You get to visit a location and do some sort of business. Buying and selling equipment, stocking up on dynamite, buying a fine new hat, you can do that sort of thing.

If you have a tentacle leg thanks to mutation, you can visit the doctor, or if you went insane from the voices, you can see the church about that.

The longer you stay in town, the more chance that something bad will happen and you’ll be kicked out or have something even worse happen, so there’s a sort of a balancing act of “get the important stuff now!”

This is also the point where you can take care of leveling and generally improving your character until their next trip back into the mines for yet another brush with darkness.

Likes

I obviously liked this game a lot. It’s a spiritual successor to Warhammer Quest, hitting all the buttons for that.

The game is dripping with flavor, and has tremendous replayability. Characters can level up to 9th level, getting abilities each time they do so.

The game is flavorful, fun and something I’m going to play the heck out of.

Dislikes

The miniatures assembly. This is going to be tough for me to do, I’m not going to lie. It turns a perfect game into a … very good one. If you love mini painting and assembly, this is obviously something you’ll like rather than dread.

It also comes with a lot of components, and takes a lot of space to set up and play.

So there’s my review. What do you think? Comments?

Until next time, Make Mine 20.