Community Opinions / Reviews on Shadespire

I'm about 10 games in with Nightvault. We're not doing deckbuilding outside of the cards that come with the warband. So far it's been fun and I plan on playing it more. I could totally see though that if we allowed free deck building, whoever bought the most warbands would have a huge, huge advantage. I recommend the game as long as you and your opponent are on the same page when it comes to deckbuilding.

A great way to play to start is that you play with all 20 faction specific cards as your power deck and 9 faction objective cards and then any 3 neutral objectives to make your 12 card objective deck. It's a great starter game where everything you are doing feels like it fits with your faction.

It's definitely a more board game feel than a wargame.
 
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Thought I'd post a follow up as it's been about half a year. I've found that as soon as you add deckbuilding the game falls apart unless both players have access to about the same number of cards. I have three warbands now and if I deckbuild just from those three I will crush someone who just has the cards that came with their warbands (unless they are playing one of the more powerful warbands like the stormcast guys with ranged weapons or the magic ones). And every warband worth of cards might add just one more improvement in terms of either goals to score ore abilities to use but it makes a huge difference during the actual game. I've also played against someone who has the complete colletion and plays in competitive events and my 3 warband deck has no chance.

Without deck building and restricting oneself to the cards that come with the miniatures, the experience gets pretty samey. It sadly needs the variety of both the increased number of objectives to score and abilities to use that come with having more cards to choose from. So if you can deckbuild from a larger card pool for variety rather than power, it's probably the way to go. But people can't seem to help themselves and go with the obviously better options. Perhaps there's a way to do partially random deck building where you seperate out your faction cards and then deal your two decks at random and then drop anything you don't like for a random faction card. That would probably work.

The end result has been that this game has been sitting on the shelf. The miniatures have ended up in my fantasy armies for other gaming.
 
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I'm still enjoying it, playing against people with 'gotta catch em all' decks is a bit hard, but i still find it fun. I've got a decent card collection but by no means exhaustive, so i construct thematic decks to suit the character of my warbands. This works well for me and makes it fun even when i lose miserably
 
It's a fun game. There's probably a sweet spot in terms of the card pool.

Another thing that happened locally is hat Warcry just vacuumed up all the interest for a small model count warhammer fantasy game. When Kill Team came out N17 vanished from the local stre and club nights and I expect the same thing will happen here. Some people might really be into the board, miniature, card game hybrid but I wonder if lots of people who play it do so because what they really are interested in is a super low model count warhammer fantasy game.
 
GW has introduced a solution to needing an equal card pool problem (i.e. the deck building problem). Since Dreadfane and including all Beastgrave warbands, each faction comes with enough faction-specific cards that no deck building is needed (i.e. 12 obj., 10 upgrades & 10 gambits). And these factions have been fairly balanced with respect to these faction-specific cards (Grymwatch might be a bit stronger). I suggest giving that a go.

PS - One could do similarly with Nightvault warbands by just adding 2 universal objectives to each faction and it wouldn't be too bad (Eyes will suck though).