Shadow Ninjas
- Board's Eye View
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
In Kedric Winks' 2-5 player hidden movement game from Outset Media and Cheatwell Games, one player controls the two guards who are guarding koi carp and the other 1-4 players control ninja cats and decoy tokens. The cats are trying to reach one of the koi carp squares but the guards need only to have orthogonal line of sight to a cat to eliminate it from the game.
The ninja cat players flip all their tokens face down so that only they know which is their cat and which is a 'shadow ninja' decoy; there are always 12 decoys but these are initially divvied up between the number of ninja cat players, so in a two-player game the sole ninja cat player will place their ninja and all 12 decoys while, for example, in a five-player game the four ninja cats will each place three decoys. On your turn as a ninja cat you roll two standard six-sided dice and you move any token orthogonally, whether or not it's one that was placed by you. On the guard player's turn, they move each of their dogs.
For the ninja cats this soon becomes a memory game as, after a few moves, you can easily forget which of the tokens is your cat, particularly as pieces that would otherwise find their move blocked by another token swap position with that token. A ninja cat player can, however, at any time forego their turn at rolling the dice and instead peek at any four tokens. You might do this to help you remember where your cat is but you might also use it to try to find which token is another player's cat... Don't make the mistake of thinking this is a 'one vs many' chase game; in Shadow Ninjas it's every cat for themselves. When a guard has line of sight to any tokens, those tokens are flipped and if any happen to be cats rather than decoys then their players are eliminated from the game. The ninja cat players have just as much interest as the dog player in eliminating rival cats - so if you know, or can deduce, which token is another player's cat, you may well choose to move it into danger...
Shadow Ninjas plays in a filler-length 10-15 minutes. It's very much at its best with four or five players as there's much more scope for deduction and back-stabbing at these higher player counts. It's also a game that can be enjoyed just as well by children and families as by seasoned board gamers. Who knew a roll & move game could be such fun?
