Shadows of Brimstone: City of the Ancients

EvEvanstar3.5

This is a fun dungeon crawl game with Cthulhu style monsters and a wild west setting. In general the game is all about making your die rolls. There are some luck mitigation tokens which helps a little, and as you level your character more options are available to you. The game is fully co-op, which I love, and the board is built randomly from a deck of tile cards which is an interesting if messy concept. Player turns are quick, and player abilities are different and interesting. I love how the dungeon populates through random card draws as you explore, so you really never know what lurks behind the next corner. In terms of components this game leaves something to be desired. The minis are creepy looking, but don't hold up in comparison to similar games. This game also doesn't come with alternate gender hero minis even though you can pick the gender of your character. It also doesn't come with tokens for gold or experience, asking you to write that stuff down on a sheet. There aren't many monster types, and in a single scenario, you will likely see all of them. In terms of playing a campaign, players only get exp when they hit something, which means by the end of a level, different characters will level at different rates depending on how effective they are. The game also asks you to write down your new, leveled up abilities rather than give you cards representing those abilities. While the campaign scenarios themselves flow nicely, the book-keeping step at the end of going to town to spend your stuff is a bit over-complicated. It might not sound like it, but I actually like this game a lot. Getting some expansions helps a lot in terms of getting the game the replayability it's clearly built for. An odd shortcoming of the game appears to be player turn order. Players who go earlier in the turn have a big advantage in terms of getting more exp points and being able to kill monsters with fun moves. Since it's fully co-op this is perhaps forgivable, but it seems a pity to have players with slow characters watch the fast characters pull off incredible feats and then just do a movement action. The bookkeeping phase when getting back to town is where I wound up losing my enthusiasm for the game. The town has lots of steps and places to go with things to do, which is cute, but it takes a long time, and works out being less fun than a map that would take maybe part of that time. It's also a bad feeling way to start or wind down the night of crawling. ☆ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

Benjamín Amorínstar6.0

Cooperative Dungeon Crawler with a Weird West theme. It almost seems an RPG, with all the charts, the character sheets and that stuff. That's cool, but for me is boring spending the most of the time throwing dices and trying to hit ancient creatures. I was disappointed with this one and I sold it.

Mario López Menésstar10.0

Amazing sandbox game mixing Old West and supernatural horror PROS - Incredibly cinematic. It's dripping theme in every single card. With a tiny bit of imagination, playing SoB is like watching a movie in which you can take decisions. - The possibilities are literally endless. Hundreds of different missions, enemies, items, chart results... you will never see everything this game has to offer. - Magnificent for solo play. The game never stops surprising you, and almost any situation you can think of can happen in it. CONS - Its footprint is HUGE. Literally impossible to play on normal tables, apart from storing all the boxes, etc. - It is a dice festival. If you don't like rolling dice, avoid this game at all costs. - The first miniatures are bad. Really bad.