Clayton Capra
United States
Prior Lake
Minnesota
-
Be warned this is a negative review, I didn’t like this game. First of all here are the things that I did like and are great about this game. The classical Japan theme with Samurai and Ninja
 is way cool. It should also be mentioned that the art work is superb. All of the artwork in both the rule book and cards is done in the same style and works well.
They need to hire a new editor for their rule books. This is from the rules download PDF “In a 3 player game, the first player places 3 Shrines, while the second and third players place 2 Shrines each.” That’s great except the game comes with 4 shrines total. Granted they fixed this one in the print rule book but I was reading the PDF rules to learn the game and spent some time looking for my lost shrines. 
From the rules “If you use a Move action on your Court phase to move your Hero adjacent to a Shrine, you cannot search the Shrine and take a Treasure Card until your next turn, as searching a Shrine is a Hero Phase action.” To me that means you move adjacent to a Shrine to search it. But later in the rules “Move your Hero into a space with a Shrine maker” So which is it? Do you have to be adjacent or move into the same space? OK the rule book later makes it very clear that you move into the space with the shrine.
Also when you search a Shrine you might “bind a monster”. Binding a monster sounds fun but I think they mean find.
OK so I am a little annoyed by some of the typos and a contradiction in the rules but I love games, everyone makes mistakes so who cares. On to game play.
To resolve fights the game uses the Hero Card Engine. We played out a few duels with just the cards and two players. This is pretty much how it went. Player one attacks and player two defends. This could go either way. Now it’s player two’s turn. Player two gets to clear cards so they are at full power while most of player ones power is used up by the cards they played on their turn. The cards stay there doing nothing using up their attributes severely limiting their chance of defending. So Player two hits. Now it’s player ones turn again so they get to clear their cards back to full power and attack player two. Oh guess what player two is now severely limited in what they can do so player one hits and back and forth they go.
If you are attacked and you played cards on your previous turn the chances are your going to get smacked. The game lends itself to picking on the player who just attacked or just defended against someone else apparently by design. I wish the rules where all players took their discard, draw and the all important clear phases at the same time and then go around clockwise taking turns taking actions.
The board that comes with the game seemed small, and was a little warped. Again not a big deal but now all these little things added up to me not liking this game. I guess I have become spoiled by the Euro games with big colorful boards and rules by game companies like Rio Grande where you are hard pressed to find typos. I taught this game to some of the guys in my gaming group and when we were done none of us had that lets play again feeling.
-
Jason Nachtrab
United States
St. Charles
Missouri
-
We played this in my group before the holidays and had a lot of the same issues. Part of the confusion seemed to be melding the HeroCard duel system with the Rise of the Shogun board game - they're in fact entirely separate.
With respect to the HeroCard duels, it was my understanding that a successful "hit" - by either side - ends the duel immediately. It seems that the limitations in the duel system force the attacker to either launch a devastating attack and hope the defender cannot block, or launch a small enough attack to drain some of the defender's cards, but still leave enough room to defend. I think the idea is interesting, but I'm not sure how well it works in practice.
I agree that some of the rules are either not explained consistently or in some cases not explained at all. My board was VERY warped after opening the box, but it's since calmed down a bit.
My only other complaint was that the different decks have little or no differentiation between them (the backs are identical), so it's easy to mix cards from the Ninja deck with the Samurai deck, at least until you become familiar enough to tell them apart. I wish the HeroCard decks were marked differently on the back, but I suppose this is to allow easier customization and deck building.
-
TableStar Games
California
-
We definitely had problems with the rulebooks in our 2006 releases. Since then we've been more cognizant about editing mistakes and rules omissions, as well as a more vigorous testing procedure.
Hopefully this means that our 2007 releases, HeroCard Orc Wars and HeroCard Nightmare will be more robust rules and editing-wise.
As for the warped board, it has been answered in other threads but it was a manufacturing error. We aren't using that manufacturer anymore.
Lastly, only the attacker can score a successful hit. Not only is this important for scoring in duels, but also when resolving conflicts in the various board games.
If there are any questions, you can email me at play@tablestargames.com.
Monte Lin
Volunteer Coordinator
TableStar Games
-
|
|
