[Ad- gifted product] Every other week we find ourselves at our local Geek Retreat, playing a fun board game! This time, we took along Shadow Ninjas – which feels a fantastic fit for the Halloween season with our family. This is a fairly easy to play, four player board game where one of you plays as a guard cat while the rest of you play as shadow cats (or ninjas, in costumes, disguised as shadow cats) with the goal of getting to the koi ponds at the back of the board.
Setup for the round is extremely simple; the guard looks away while the ninja cats make all of their cats into shadow cats (as the player tokens are double sided) and they get placed at the back end of the board. Then, everyone looks at the board. Starting with the guard, they roll their dice and then pick which die they used for which token. It’s one die per token, with the guard having two. They then need to move their guard on the grid. It moves to the next player, who rolls their dice, and picks two shadow cats to move up to the number on each of the individual dice. It’s simple after that, each player rolling, moving, and continuing around.
The goal of the guard is to find the Shadow Ninjas and reveal them, taking that player out of the game. The goal of the Shadow Ninjas is to get to the koi pond for a tasty treat, however they need to get their actual character token to the pond, not one of the shadows. Players can move whichever Shadow Ninjas they want, so it becomes a bit of a battle to keep track of which ones are the shadows and which ones are the real thing. There is the option to skip rolling your dice and look at the bottom of any token, but even when the guard reveals a shadow character, if there is no real character at the back, it stays on the board.
For the guard to reveal a token, they just need to have that token in their line of sight. The board itself has a lot of corners, and you cannot walk through walls or bushes, meaning there is a sort of path to follow and look down. The game itself felt very well balanced and I did like that we all had our own colored dice, so didn’t need to pass them from one player to the other, making the game very quick to go through aswell – though this might be why we lost track of ourselves! Robin started as the first guard, quickly finding her way across the board and revealing shadows, but Dann moved a few of the shadows up, getting his character to the koi pond. After that, Amelia took on the role of guard where she quickly got two of them revealed, before finally getting me!
We quite liked the feel of the pieces in Shadow Ninjas – which were extremely high quality, and the game itself felt perfect for younger families or even teenagers, who like a bit of stealth action. Cats dressed up as ninjas is also a lot of fun generally too! We had such a fantastic time playing and see this being played more through the October break from school, as a fun little evening activity.
