Shadowbrook is a village of secrets, and each Elder has some. Some secrets are harmless and merely add a bit of flavour and story to the game, but others are more serious, including the possibility that one or more of the Elders is secretly in league with the Villain.
Overall: All in all, this is one of the favorite games at our game night alongside Eldritch Horror and Betrayal at House on the Hill. If you like classic horror along the lines of Dracula, Sleepy Hollow, etc. So grab your sabre or your musket, start your investigation, and watch your back.
When it comes to horror scenarios, I think that Flying Frog Productions really has their finger on what makes powerful scenarios. By the same token, we have A Touch of Evil, a horror game set in colonial times, where all the benefits of modern civilization do not exist and the mysterious evil pervades all of the surrounding town of Shadowbrook, marring the difference between friend and foe.
Every horror story needs to have a villain, and A Touch of Evil provides four distinct villains to choose from, each with their own abilities and strengths; The Werewolf, the Scarecrow, The Vampire, and the Spectral Horseman.
Each villain has a minion event chart that is unique to each of them, and can present some interesting challenges for the heroes when a result is rolled on that event chart. For instance, the Spectral Horseman could have ghost soldiers appear on the board on certain locations, or he just might decide to fight a hero on their space, and ride back to the center of town, fighting anyone he encounters along the way. To combat the villains are the heroes, a select number of 8 specific characters that have their own individual statistics, health, and special abilities.
All heroes have a starting value of Honor, Spirit, Cunning, and Combat for their statistics. Honor reflects the amount of respect or notoriety a certain character has, and is most often used in training up Spirit and Cunning in town. Spirit reflects the amount of grit and willpower an individual has, and is mostly used in combatting certain ghostly figures and gaining investigation from eerie encounters. Cunning is a reflection of how savvy and smart an individual is, and is most often used in investigating mundane events or thwarting plots.
Combat is a measure of how much damage an individual can deal out in a fight, and is usually augmented by weapons and items that are either found or purchased around town.
Each hero can also take a certain number of wounds before being KOed no one actually dies in A Touch of Evil, with the exception of Town Elders , but they can also increase their overall health value with certain items and event cards.
Special abilities change the way each hero encounters certain conditions; for example, Inspector Cooke will gain one extra investigation token from encounters where he gains investigation, and Katarina the Outlaw inflicts wounds on a roll of 4, 5, or 6 in combat, where any other hero will only deal out wounds on a roll of 5 or 6.
The heroes begin the game knowing that something is seriously wrong in the down of Shadowbrook, and their duty is to investigate and deal with the looming problem.
To that end, heroes will explore around the town and its outskirts, looking for items and investigation tokens that can be used for currency to get the items and training that they need.
Heroes may go to those locations and draw encounter cards from specialized decks to search for items or to have events that can lead to making attribute tests to gather investigation.
In addition, there are some other locations around down that can offer opportunities to draw event cards which are beneficial to the heroes or on a bad roll, can force a hero to draw a Mystery card which are almost always universally bad. At the end of every action phase, the first player draws a Mystery card automatically to reflect the goings on around town, as strange events happen and sinister minions appear. The goal of the game is to defeat the Villain of the game once and for all in a final showdown that results from confronting the Villain in its hidden lair.
If the Villain manages to KO the hero es , however, it does not mean they get off scot free; every time a hero gets KOed, the player must roll a D6 and lose that many points of investigation, items, or allies, in any combination they wish.
To end it once and for all, heroes need to spend investigation tokens to purchase Lair cards that are the possible sight of a final showdown. In the beginning, purchasing Lair cards requires an extreme amount of investigation points, but as the darkness track fills up a sort of timer that shows the Villain gaining in strength as time goes on , Lair cards become cheaper and more available.
However, the longer the heroes wait to begin the showdown, the more powerful the Villain becomes, and if the darkness track ever maxes out, the heroes lose the game automatically. In town, there are six Town Elders that are pledged to protect the town, but each of these elders has a secret. These secrets can range from being beneficial a town elder is secretly heroic and adds extra combat dice , to being a potential handicap a town elder could be cowardly and has the potential to run away during a final showdown , to being inconsequential a town elder is secretly a voyeur, but is otherwise normal , to finally being that the town elder is actually in league with the Villain.
If the Town Elder is ever revealed to be allied with the Villain, during the final combat they actively join the Villain and act against the heroes in battle. During the showdown, heroes can take up to two town elders with them into the final conflict. But how do the heroes know which elders are trustworthy and which ones seek to put a knife in their back?
By this method, they can identify which town elders are trustworthy. However, during the game, other secrets can be added to town elders or existing secrets can be removed through various events.
I highly enjoy playing A Touch of Evil any chance I get, because there are a lot of thematic elements to the game that really lend a nice atmosphere to things. Flying Frog Productions always has very nice quality to their artwork and card stock, and all of the components that come with the game are durable and easily recognizable.
The instruction booklet does a good job in explaining the core elements of the game, though there are a couple instances that are confusing or that could have been better worded.
There are also a lot of tokens in the game that can and will be used, so it pays to have some sort of organization so that pieces can be picked out quickly; otherwise a good portion of the game will consist of searching through the multitude of tokens for the one you need. This game really shines in a cooperative light, although it can be played competitively among players. Shadowbrook, the game board, is under attack from some supernatural villain.
The game contains several villains, such as a werewolf or a rampaging horseman. Each villain has a unique set of minions and special events that they use to attack the heroes.
There are eight heroes to choose from, and each of them has their own special abilities. Their job is to investigate various areas of the game and collect information. There are several major and minor areas of the board for a hero to investigate. Included in the major areas is the town center, a manor, a windmill, the olde woods, and an abandoned keep. Once your hero arrives at one of the location they will select a card and read it aloud. The card can have something good like an item or an ally or it could be a fight or an event that happens to your character.
While your hero is investigating various areas of the board, a Shadow Track keeps record of how much control the villain has. As the villain take over the town you will find it easier to find lair. Most new players do not see the importance of viewing a townspeople clue, but it can be helpful to know who can be counted on in the final battle. People who play this game for the first time are often confused by what they should do. Where should they go? There is not a right or wrong answer; they are just setting off to investigate.
I usually suggest that they leave town center, pick a spot and pull a card. Combat occurs with six-sided dice being rolled. You can however help you chances of succeeding by collecting items that will allow you to role more dice.
Still some people are not fans of games where luck plays a part in combat success. My personal favorite is undoubtedly the homage to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ; the spectral horseman appears during his scenario from time to time, taking swipes at characters as he gallops past.
Some of the biggest thematic game elements, secrecy and betrayal, are communicated through the inclusion of six town elders who each harbor some mysterious secret. Over the course of the game, players uncover these secrets — which might be the innocuous discovery that one of them is a drunk, or could reveal that they are in fact working for the villain.
Their cards flip, and they take on sinister often amusing alter-ego personas. The mechanic makes for a great endgame, rather than allowing the game to simply run out of steam in the final turns.
Taken together, each playthrough ends up feeling like it has its own story arc. In my experience, most players began to craft their own stories about the good and bad fortunes of their characters, and who got along with whom.
I also love the randomized idiosyncrasies of the town elders and the way each villain adds its own special tone. Individual players quickly discover that the game has an easily understandable flow. Commonly, these short adventures take two or three turns, after which you may very well need to return to town to heal up, buy new items, or improve your skills for more adventures.
This luck-based component can be steered to victory by smart use of items and other abilities, but any way you cut it, it does lend a high element of chance into the equation of how the story unfolds. After each player takes a turn, a mystery phase moves the villain closer to victory. The town falls deeper into darkness as presented on a simple shadow tracking chart that lays out on the table , and new minions of the bad guy show up; these lesser enemies are different for each major villain, further expanding the replay potential.
I also love how even in the competitive mode, the shadow tracker allows the possibility for the villain to win instead of a player.
The final showdown mentioned above was fun for the whole group in every game I played, during which players throw down against the chief villain and try to end the threat to Shadowbrook once and for all.
Plus, details on the expansions]. The game includes lots of pieces and cards, but clear labeling and color usage makes it easy to figure out where everything lays out on the table. Many hobby games demand that every player have a clear and comprehensive understanding of the rules in order to succeed, but A Touch of Evil is more welcoming to new players.
While I love the endgame showdowns, I found that the included option of wound tokens to mark enemy health to be a little cumbersome; my solution was to just keep a scrap of paper handy for that multiple-round fight, which made things easier, especially during the lengthy cooperative showdowns. With that said, two larger expansions Something Wicked and The Coast each add a new board, new villains, and new heroes to play, allowing players to open up Shadowbrook into an expanded map on both sides.
Two other smaller hero pack expansions each add yet more heroes and villains. Gameplay continues until a player has acquired a Lair Card through their investigative prowess, determining the foul origins of the evil besetting the land, and decides to confront the evil directly in its stronghold. In such a case, a player may bring along any items and weapons they may have acquired and also form a Hunting Party that consists of two Town Elders that may help them overtake the Villain in their Lair.
It is important to have researched the secrets of Elders in your journey prior to arriving at your destination however, as now is the time that Secrets are fully unveiled for all to see.
If you did not do your homework, you may find that the Elder you brought with you is actually a dark servant of the Villain you are fighting, and will take up arms against you at this stage, also granting a series of bonuses to their master as long as they are alive! This also forces you to divide your attacks, making for potentially a much more difficult fight! This makes it all the more likely that the player who is locked in combat with the Villain will fail, hobbling back to town wounded and crippled, and potentially enabling another player to walk away with victory!
Because while the Villain will eventually regenerate their wounds, this process is not immediate, and any damage sustained in the fight will potentially remain long enough for another player to walk in and land the killing blow, thus becoming the victor of the game!
Because regardless of how many Investigation Points or items you accrued, there is only one winner to this game in Competitive Mode, and that is the person who kills the Villain! Now those of you who are not into competitive games, you are in luck. AToE 10th Anniversary Edition also sports a fully Cooperative mode of play that builds upon the basics of the Competitive Mode where everyone either wins or fails together.
The downside? The Villain has a significant bolstering to their health and abilities during the Final Showdown, and makes it so that if the entire party is ever knocked out at the same time, it is Game Over for every one! It should also be noted that there is also a special Epic Villain that comes with this Anniversary Edition, the Spectral Horseman! This is a very uniquely challenging Villain that even has a bulk of its own proprietary cards that cannot be found in the core game experience.
This Villain even has their own miniature that will move around and terrorize the game board, so players had best be careful if they hope to survive, as the difficulty is recommended for experienced players for good reason, as it helps to know the ins and outs of in-game possibilities well before proceeding to undertake this challenge!
Please note that the above gameplay description is at best a quick, thematic synopsis. There are, of course, exceptions and allowances to the game rules described above, but given the size of the rule book, there is not enough space to describe every rule in intimate detail, as many cards will override the general game rules with effects that remain in play upon use, canceling other rules, etc.
With that being said, here is some of the feedback we have to offer in our game play throughs! Critical Observations:. Having come from both Shadows of Brimstone and now Dark Gothic from FFP, I was a bit disappointed that given all the extra attention that was given to other materials in the game, the dice included in AToE are pretty plain. They can easily be substituted with something from any generic old board game.
And this is quite lamentable, because the first initial impression upon opening this game is that seemingly no expense was spared, but one can see that this is one area where it seems they had to cut corners. This is not at all the fault of FFP, and owning their Shadows of Brimstone materials, I can understand why they opted to do this, as it can be a pain tracking down other printed resources when needing to consult a rule, but nevertheless, I did fill a twinge of sadness when realizing that I would not be able to experience some of the things described in the expansion portions of the manual!
Roll a certain number for one person or item and they may get to keep it, while another player may lose it to permanent destruction removal from the game I had that happen to me and immediately lost one of my main advantages, which seemed a bit unfair given that I had saved up a ton of Investigation Points to make sure I had the only Musket Rifle in the game. I subsequently ended up getting my butt kicked for every encounter thereafter. Bad naked.
Another player ended up taking on the big boss and claiming victory, leaving this particular player feeling they had wasted an evening. So our general observation is that the most serious of such aversions came in out while playing competitive games. If one player got hit hard by something random, it could be handled much better with collectivistic thinking and playing. Good naked. Because I love the artistic overlap between the two series of games!
Team Mode runs similarly to competitive mode but gives victory to a team rather than individual, and can allow for 2, 3, or even 4 teams.
A solution to this would be a bigger game board, but given how much space the game ends up taking once you get into it, the smaller board ultimately makes more sense.
Consequently, I might just prefer to use the 4 corners terrains for all sorts of Role Playing games. Yes, they each have something about them makes them unique, but I found their counterparts in Dark Gothic and Colonial Horror to be much more exciting.
Now for the Strong Points:. While I personally did not find AToE to be as polished and engaging in the gameplay department as it was in terms of component quality, the fact remains that other people that I played with enjoyed the game quite a lot. And I must add that the whole point of buying a board game is not necessarily to find a game that can be all things to all people, but rather to find games that bring people together.
And I would put AToE in this category. Because face it, we have probably all had to debate someone on whether or not Die Hard is actually a Christmas Movie. And regardless of your opinion on the subject, the point is that we all know someone who enjoys a certain type of thrill on a particular kind of Holiday.
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