Antler Games: Shadow Tactics Kickstarter läuft

Die Umsetzung als Brettspiel des Videospiels Shadow Tactics ist auf Kickstarter gestartet.

Shadow Tactics – the Board Game

A tactical stealth game for 2-6 players with ninjas trying to outsmart the guards! Based on the acclaimed video game. 40+ Miniatures!

About

Based on the acclaimed video game, Shadow Tactics is a fast-paced tactical stealth game for 2-6 players where you can take control of 5 unique ninja characters with vastly different skill sets or you play the role of the Daimyo, an evil mastermind who relies on superior numbers of soldiers and samurai, each with their own plastic miniatures. Immerse in this hide n’ sneak game with engaging story-driven missions in an ever-changing, non-linear campaign structure.

 

2 new cool game modes: Winter and Night, which can also be combined.

With snow, you will need to develop new tactics, for your footprints will reveal your whereabouts. But you can also use them in a clever way, to lure guards towards yourself!

In Night mode, you will have lit and unlit areas on the map, giving bonuses to ninjas or guards respectively.

With Samurai pledge, you can enjoy 3 exclusive missions, where everything turns around and it’s now the Daimyo’s turn to fulfill his mission and chase the ninjas!

   

   

This add-on is available as a bonus for backers of the board game pledge levels. Just add 5€ to your pledge to receive the video game.

Be a charitable Lord and unlock the miniature for ALL BACKERS!

Become one of the conspiring masterminds: choose a Daimyo character and have it modeled after you with custom 3D artwork! It’s also a perfect gift, you can choose anyone as a model for the character.

The three characters to choose from:

• Lord Yabu: An influential official, minion of Kage-Sama, controlling secret prisons and weapon transports.
• General Okkoto: A tall-physiqued, fearsome samurai in command of Kage-Sama’s armies.
• Kage-Sama: The mysterious mastermind behind the conspiracy against the Shogun.

(Backers may choose in a first come, first served fashion.)

You can customize the character’s face, posture, gender, age, race, physique, clothing, with respect to the game’s original era and setting (17th century Japan with no supernatural elements and respecting copyright laws.) In addition to the full Samurai pledge box, we will make a high quality 3D print of the miniature, have it painted for you by the amazing István Bertyák and send it to you separately in your exclusive game box with alternative artwork!

1 to 5 players will be playing as the loyal shinobis of the Shogun, trying to put an end to the evil schemes of Lord Yabu and other conspiring Daimyos. One of the players will take on the role of the Daimyo, who controls the guards.

Each ninja has unique skills with a specific set of action cards. Across several missions the Ninjas have to hide in the bushes, sneak around and eliminate guards trying to remain unnoticed.

Action Programming

Ninjas use actions to move, distract or eliminate guards and accomplish the mission objective. They program their action cards secretly, but before they are executed, the Daimyo player may interfere by playing his Order Cards potentially moving, alerting and spawning guards. Then the ninjas will execute their actions one by one, possibly failing them, depending on the actions the Daimyo took.

Vision Based Combat

The success or failure of an action or attack is decided by 3 factors:

• Ninja action type (card color)
• Guard vision
• Guard state

Guard vision is represented by their viewcone bases. They can either look inwards at the yard or outwards at the two neighboring hexes.

Ninja action cards can be of three types: direct, stealthy or hidden, representing their visibility.

Also, alerted guards are quicker to react than calm ones, thus can cancel the actions they can spot.

The miniatures in the game are planned to be about 30mm average height, but we are still adjusting the exact scale. Check out our profile on Sketchfab to see the 3D models of the miniatures.

The game is played through several missions which are organized into chapters (campaigns). Not only will the map and objective be different each time, but the difficulty changes according to the outcome of the previous Mission. Both the Daimyo and the ninjas can upgrade their characters between missions,  by getting rewards and purchasing items.

Together with the expansion you will get three chapters plus one exclusive chapter with 18 missions altogether. Each mission is already highly replayable, but campaigns add a lot to this. Chapters have a non-linear structure with some optional missions to choose from.

Rulebook Download

Shadow Tactics: The Boardgame is a language independent game with no text on the cards. In its current state, the game contains an English language rulebook, but we want to make other languages available as a digital download through community translations, see FAQ.

Feel free to ask questions, make comments etc. Please note that this is a rulebook still work in progress and will be different in some parts from what you see here in the campaign, and some further changes are expected, see FAQ. We still plan more work and testing on the rules. (The layout and graphic design will be completely reworked of course.)

Check out the official rules video by FunWithGeeks:

(Note that the rules used in the reviewer videos are of an earlier prototype version. You can refer to those rules here.)

Reviews

„The greatest value of Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun will be found in the game’s careful strategy. I’m aching to get another session in.“ Jason Palazini – WayTooManyGames

More reviews coming soon…!

• USA, Canada, EU and Australia: 9€
• Rest of the world: 15€
• Hungary: 9€,
• Personal pickup in Budapest: FREE (See details in FAQ)

We offer customs-free „friendly“ shipping in the USA, EU, and Canada. For Australia and Rest Of World, we ship tracked packages but we cannot be held responsible for customs inspections and fees.

Project Timeline

There is still significant development work to do for the final product before manufacturing, such as game mechanics and balance issues, the new chapters and missions, a few missing miniature models, and of course we hope you will unlock many stretch goals. We expect you to have your games delivered in 2019.

Production Risks

The project may be delayed due to special circumstances (e.g. developing stretch goals or add-ons made available during the campaign) and external/third party delays (manufacturing or assembly taking longer than quoted, holidays, customs delays etc.). We will do our best to mitigate these, but nonetheless delays may happen.

Antler Games is an indie board game developer and publisher funded by three enthusiastic long-time friends.

Shadow Tactics is our third Kickstarter board game project. Our previous games, the post-apocalyptic Saltlands and the bunker survival Critters Below were successfully funded and have already been delivered to all backers.

Originally we are engineers, so you can imagine how meticulous we are when it comes to arranging details that make manufacturing, fulfillment and shipping possible, affordable and sensible.

We are from Hungary and are based in Budapest. Our company is Antler Games Kft and this campaign is run by our subsidiary Antler BV (Amsterdam, Netherlands).

Risks and challenges

Antler Games is a team of three enthusiastic guys. We all have a masters degree in engineering and therefore, are very meticulous and elaborate when it comes to arranging little details that make manufacturing, fulfillment and shipping possible, affordable and sensible.
We have done the following to mitigate risks and make your support a ’safe bet‘, that you will surely receive your reward:
– Three people can specialize and concentrate on separate fields: Gergely Kruppa does design and art direction, András Drozdy handles testing and manufacturing, while Gergely Gombos arranges business, shipping and marketing details.
– We’ve set up a BV (LLC) in the Netherlands so that we can conduct business more easily. This helps us with tax and customs issues as well. For example we make sure that you are not charged additional VAT when receiving your reward.
– We have a detailed budget with multiple scenarios, so the project’s funding goal is sensible and it is definitely possible to accomplish the project from this amount of funding, including getting quotes for the stretch goals.
– We have been discussing manufacturing details with Panda Games for months and expect that we will be working with them because we think they can deliver a high quality product on time.
Nevertheless, shipping and manufacturing delays may occur.

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Questions about this project? Check out the FAQ

Die Kampagne hat bereits 35.533,00 USD vom Zielbetrag 45.641,00 USD erreicht und läuft noch 27 Tage.

Quelle: Shadow Tactics – the Board Game auf Kickstarter