Heroes of the Shire: Light & Shadow
- Board's Eye View
- 2 minutes ago
- 3 min read
You’d be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu about the title Heroes of the Shire. That’s because Heroes of the Shire: Light & Shadow is the third in Senior Games' series of Heroes of the Shire games. If you have the previous games then you can adapt Light & Shadow and treat it as an expansion but it’s actually a standalone game. You’re not at any disadvantage jumping in on this game never having played or regardless of whether you’ve even heard of the previous two Heroes of the Shire titles.
Heroes of the Shire: Light & Shadow is designed by Damian Senior, and its Shire has nothing to do with Hobbiton or any of the locations in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. In Heroes of the Shire: Light & Shadow, over a campaign involving multiple plays, the 1-5 players need to explore the multi-hex board and defeat the four bosses (three fixed and one roaming). The hero players are playing cooperatively and you have the option of having a player control the monsters or having the monsters controlled by the game. In short, that means you can play Light & Shadow as a fully cooperative game or as one vs many, and you've the option of playing it as a solo game. Heroes of the Shire: Light & Shadow also offers the option of ‘arena’ play so that players can fight each other.
Once you get to grips with the gameplay it all feels largely intuitive but you can expect new players to need some handholding at the start because there’s a bunch of different spells to master and as characters level up they get to add further spells and/or passive abilities from their individual spell mastery ‘tech tree’.
Key to Light & Shadow are the books of combat maps. Players are exploring the hexes that make up a modular board and their individual quests will usually direct them to particular hex locations but when combat is initiated, either with one of the bosses or due to an encounter card, the action is transferred to a numbered map in the ring-bound book of combat maps. It’s a system that’s been used successfully in a number of other games, for example, Jaws of the Lion (Cephalofair) and it differs from the combat in the previous Heroes of the Shire games. The combat maps in Light & Shadow mean your characters almost always have to manoeuvre for tactical position to target enemies and reduce the likelihood of being hit with enemy spells and effects.
Players’ individual boards do a good job of covering the book-keeping requirements, which can often be the bugbear of tabletop adventure games. In our plays at Board’s Eye View we’ve especially appreciated the way in which condition markers cool down is tracked by simply moving the markers to the left each round.
There’s a lot to discover in this game, and some tough opponents to deal with, along with some powerful effects – both positive and negative. That means this isn’t just a slash & dash game; to do well you’ll need to strategise and carefully juggle your various attack and other spells and effects.
Fully exploring the hexes, getting past the various monsters you'll encounter en route, tackling all four boss monsters and levelling up will likely take at least 25 hours of playing time. You're not going to be completing a campaign in a single sitting but the game includes a pad to aid players in saving your game position and easing set-up when you return to it; tho' it will still be a good idea to take some photos of the game state before packing it away.
