Players: 4-8
Playing Time: 1 hour

The Components

Shadow Hunters comes with a small set of attractive components, centering around several decks of cards.

Board: A 2-panel board printed on very heavy cardboard. It serves two purposes. First, it marks the health of each character and, second, it provides spaces to place the six location cards. It's entirely abstract, but nicely ornamented and useful.

Cards: There are four sets of unique cards: character cards, white cards, hermit cards, and black cards. They're all printed on medium-weight linen-textured cards and they all feature art that's perhaps a bit smaller than I'd like, but good-looking. The card design is quite good looking. The descriptions on the cards are entirely textual, but good use has been made of key phrases, and thus it's easy to see what each card does pretty quickly.

Wood Bits: Each player gets two colored cylinders, one to mark their current location and another to mark their current damage. These aren't very evocative, but they're good quality. Of the eight colors, I found two, orange and red, too close in color, but that's easy to avoid if you're playing with fewer than eight players.

Player Mats: Each player also gets a heavy cardboard mat in their color which serves only to remind them of their color and to offer a place to put their character card (face down).

Overall, the components in Shadow Hunters are of very good quality, and the artwork on the cards is very attractive. Some of the other bits are a little too abstract, but that's a minor concern. On the whole I've given the game a high "4" out of "5" for Style: excellent.

The Gameplay

The object of Shadow Hunters is to fulfill the goals of the character card you draw, which is usually to kill all the characters in the opposing faction--once you figure out who they are.

Setup: A special allocation of character cards is put together, based upon the number of players. It usually includes 2 Hunter characters, 2 Shadow characters, and 1-3 Neutral characters. These are then shuffled and each player draws one and keeps it secret.

The Game Board is also setup with the six Area Cards randomly placed on the board. They're grouped into three pairs of nearby locations.

Each player places a marker on the "No Damage" space.

The decks of White, Hermit, and Black cards are shuffled and placed on the board.

Character Cards. Each of these cards has three special attributes. First, each character has Hit Points; when he reaches that level of damage, he must declare that he's dead. Second, each character has a goal. The Hunters are trying to kill all the Shadow characters and vice-versa. The Neutral characters have various goals such as dying first, not dying at all, collecting equipment, etc. Third, each character has a special power. One of these, the "Unknown" lets the player lie when accepting Hermit cards. The rest give a special power which can be used only if the character is revealed: Allie can heal herself, Emi can teleport, Franklin and George can do one-time damage, etc.

Order of Play: On his turn a player takes three actions:

1. Move Character
2. Take Area Action (optional)
3. Attack Other Characters (optional)

Move Character: A player rolls the two dice (a d6 and a d4) and moves to the location that's number matches the roll. On a "7" a player can go to somewhere of his choice, but must always move from his current location.

Take Area Action: When a player lands on an Area Card he may then choose to take the special action there. They are:

• Hermit's Cabin (2,3). Draw a Hermit Card. These cards have special effects (e.g., heal, damage, etc) for certain characters (e.g., a Shadow, a Hunter, a specifically named character). You look at the card, then give it to another player, who must tell you whether it had an effect or not (and take the appropriate action if so). This is the prime way of figuring out which character each player is playing.
• Underworld Gate (4,5). Draw a card from any of the three decks (hermit, white, or black)(, as described at the other locations.
• Church (6). Draw a White Card. These are either instantaneous effects are equipment that you can use throughout the game. Lots of them heal or otherwise protect you.
• Cemetery (8). Draw a Black Card. These are also instantaneous effects or else equipment. However more of these tend to damage other characters or else let you steal equipment.
• Weird Woods (9). Heal 2 hit points or give 1 damage to any player.
• Erstwhile Altar (10). Steal an Equipment card.

Attack Other Characters: Finally, you may optionally attack any one character either in the space you land on or in the space it's paired with. To do this you roll the two dice and do damage equal to the difference between the rolls. Equipment can increase or decrease the damage or otherwise modify the attack.

Killing a Character: A character gets killed when his damage rises up to his hit points.

Winning the Game: A player wins the game when his goal is accomplished. Often, a few players will win simultaneously.

Relationships to Other Games

Shadow Hunters is a Japanese strategy game. This is a nationality of game that hasn't been brought into the U.S. very often, but Z-Man has started publishing a number of games from that country, also including Fairy Tale and Owner's Choice.

Beyond that, Shadow Hunters is a character-driven deduction game.

Being character-dirven puts it clearly in the same category as adventure games of all sorts. This one is a pretty short and light game comparatively, but you get to play an individual, collect items, and beat up other characters. I'd place it closest in feel to Bang!, a successful game with many of the same ideas and similarly hidden roles.

The deduction element of Shadow Hunters is what makes it most unique. This goes far beyond old classics like Clue and gives you a fun little puzzle to figure out each game, as you try and determine who each player really is and thus who you should be siding with.

The Game Design

It's the deduction of Shadow Hunters that really makes the game for me. Certainly, you get some pretty good info from using the Hermit cards, but you'll have pretty limited access to those, so you have to do a lot of work watching how players behave and using that to really lay out your concept of what everyone's identity is. We played this game twice, back-to-back, and although I largely managed to figure out what was going on in the second game, in the first game I had almost everyone's identity wrong; that the game allows that variety makes it really successful in my book.

The rest of the game is light and simple. You move around, you collect equipment, and you occasionally beat people up. It's colorful, and there's a lot of excitement over the attack rolls, but at the same time it's pretty random. You'll have to decide whether that's your preference or not.

In my eye Shadow Hunters is a pretty rare adventure style game that can play in an hour or less, and thus is a very good thing to play before or after an RPG session. Though a lot of the gameplay enjoyment comes from theming, the deductive element works quite well too. Overall, I give it a high "4" out of "5" for Substance: again, very good.

Conclusion

Shadow Hunters is by no means an average European game. Instead it fits strongly into the same category of games as is produced by Steve Jackson, Atlas, and others. It's got great theming, a high random element, and tends to be fun in and of itself. However, unlike many of those more American games, I think it's got very solid mechanics too, resulting in polished game play.

If you're a roleplayer looking for a complementary board game, this is a good option.

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