A long, long time ago, all the way back in the seventies, three guys created a company called Games Workshop. You may have heard of GW, they’re best known for Warhammer: a miniatures tabletop war game in which players battle their armies against each other over various terrain. They’ve also brought us Bloodbowl - a fantasy football miniatures game with the emphasis on fantasy - and Talisman - an underwhelming dice and move game.
In the past I’ve dabbled in Warhammer but it wasn’t for me. Age Of Sigma and 40K (the two main versions of Warhammer) both offer unique takes on warfare. They also require a patience that I just do not possess, both from a gameplay and painting perspective, and the price point, as reasonable as it may first seem, can very quickly get out of hand. With that all in mind GW have now released ShadeSpire: a skirmish game that, for the most part, is all contained in one box. Well, that’s not strictly true as they’ve kept to the typical Warhammer model of extras to buy, but with the purchase of a base game of Shadespire you and a friend can have a well designed 1on1 game straight out of the box.
GW’s games usually come steeped in lore, playing to their strengths a lot, but there’s so much of it that you end up trolling through entire novels worth of stuff for every character, clan and place, making it almost impenetrable and incredibly intimidating to newer players. To your credit you don’t have to read through any of it if you don’t want to but you’ll end up feeling like you’ve done GW a disservice as it’s obvious how much time and effort has gone into it, though on the other hand there is an air of self satisfaction to it all to an almost elitist degree.
The story of Shadespire is actually relatively straight forward in comparison to Age Of Sigma or 40K. There was a spire made of special glass that held some sort of power, someone tried to abuse said power, something went wrong and everyone in the spire at the time was drawn into another realm. Adventurers that attempt to trespass this ancient spire are met with beings pulled through from that realm to defend their home or something worse.
ShadeSpire’s gameplay is reminiscent of the old Warhammer games but a bit cleaner: you and your opponent choose which warband you want to run, which side of the game board you want to play on (each player can choose different sides) and where to place characters from your warband on the board. Each player has two decks: an objective deck and a power deck. Your objective deck consists of cards that are exactly what they say they are, objectives, whereas you power deck will contain upgrades and ploys. Upgrades are cards that give your warband or a member of your warband a continuous effect, ploys are temporary effects that can give you a slight edge in battle.
Lastly in the setup, players place objective markers - these will be placed by each player alternately but are placed face down when they do so, so neither player knows which objective marker is where until the game starts. This part of the setup gives the game a slight randomness to it, keeping a chunk of your objectives varied and sometimes very challenging.
Each character in each player’s warband has different movement, attack and special abilities that they can use these on their turns. Characters cards have two sides: the side they start on and an inspired side that can give them additional abilities, health or attack power.
There are a lot of tactical angles to Shadespire including your chosen warband and board selection - some warbands do better in a narrower more bottle-necked environment whereas some will be faster but won’t hit as hard when others can be more powerful but slower. The construction of your objective and power deck also give you a lot of pause for thought: would you prefer easier objectives that give you a little but can be achieved faster or harder objectives that give a much bigger payoff. How defensive do you want your power deck to be? If you’re a fast but weak warband you might want more defensive cards to give your characters more longevity whereas if you are a slower, heavier hitting warband you could play defensive in addition to the power you already posses or you could have you characters hitting even harder with a more offensive power deck.
As with most GW games tactics are everything, so Shadespire has kept true to the normal model, however it has broken the mould a little by keeping everything on a much smaller scale. The warbands are much smaller than Age Of Sigma or 40K and because of that the games can be shorter, running for around 30-45 minutes.
In summary, Shadespire is a good alternative to the mass miniature games out there, it can still rack up the pounds if you want to put in but you are also good to get by with just what comes out of the box. What draws me in particularly is the deckbuilding aspect, it plays on an tcg part of my brain that loves to brew and find new and interesting combinations of cards and interactions. For others it could be the skirmish part of the game, giving players a much tighter miniatures fighting experience moving a handful of characters rather than a whole platoon. There is a lot to get out of Shadespire in terms of gameplay and a lot of different avenues to explore. I would urge any miniatures fans to try it out, even if you aren’t a massive miniatures fan there is still nice refined elements of deckbuilding and tactical warfare to enjoy.
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