Shadespire demo at Tabletop Minions Expo 2018
Our friends at the South East Wisconsin Battle Badgers put on demos of Shadespire at TMX this year. Josh and I got to play in a four player game with two others who had never tried it. Josh chose the heavily armored chaos forces of Magore’s Fiends. I was using the skaven warband, Spiteclaw's Swarm. The others were using Orcs called Ironskull’s Boyz and unarmored chaos guys- Garrek’s Reavers. The boards and decks were pre-set, so we were ready to play immediately.
In the first turn, everyone more or less rushed into battle. Garrek’s Reavers got the first strike, injuring one of the orcs. Josh and the orcs split their attacks between the other chaos group and myself. I got off to a bit of a slow start, but got one solid hit against the orcs at the end of the first turn, most of us had one or two glory (victory points in this game) and I had to exchange most of my starting hand, which seemed better suited to the end game.
By the end of the game, most players had amassed about 6-8 glory. In the end, I caught up by completing my objectives and adding four glory to my total. The selection of things I had to do worked out well. It included protecting my leader while getting all my other figures killed. Fortunately, the other players obliged in helping we with that later part. This allowed me to catch up to everyone else, scoring a final score of 8 glory and tying Josh for second.
I enjoyed Shadespire and would play again, but I won't rush out to buy it. The miniatures are pretty nice, but the game play is basically the same as many other games where you move around the board, play cards to screw your neighbor, and collect points. Overall, it feels like a contemporary style of board game that relies heavily on stacks of cards and special dice but has nothing particularly exciting at its core. I'm not all that into those games, so this one is probably not aimed at me either. 'm not sure what it is, as there are miniatures games with special dice and cards that I like, Test of Honor for instance. or a board game of this type, I like the theme and simpler play of Zombies!!! more. I will try to get one of those games to the table some time soon.
gattz says:
Thanks for the writeup! I really wanted to try a demo of this but got held up at the event.
I was afraid about it’s simplicity limiting it, which is mentioned in a lot of reviews, but it’s popularity is high and the models are nice with a relatively low buy-in.
Probably a skip for me right now, as it appears to be more of a full minis game teaser…after all, why not just actually play small scale AoS skirmish?
I am curious what AoS 2.0 and the General’s Handbook will bring about for the game. The use of models for spellcasting is intriguing.
timlillig says:
I’m interested to see what the new Age of Sigmar is like too. I have not really gotten around to trying the first edition, but I still want to try the game. From what I can tell, the edition change it is mostly tweaks.
I’m intrigued by the spell effect models too. I usually like that sort of gimmick and might pick them up for fun.
Eilif says:
Nice report.
I was speaking to Pat the other day and his group plays this occasionally, but they seem to use it as filler when they’re not up for a full game of 40k 8th.
timlillig says:
It is definitely quicker to set up than a game of 40k and probably does not take as long to play.