In the Shadows Review
Transcript
Hey everybody, welcome to Drive-Through Review 85. Today we're going to take a look at In the Shadows. This is a game that come out recently from GMT Games. Let's see. Designers, it's a dual design. Dan Bullock and Joe Schmidt. And what this is, interestingly enough, a little bit of the history. It's actually in the rule book there. This kind of came out of a game jam, a game design jam where they said, "Hey, take this coin game and use all the complaint components from the game and then make a game out of it." And that's this is what we have here for us. So what the game actually is is a one and or two player game uh where one side taking on the resistance in France during occupied France during World War II. So one side plays the German occupiers, the other side plays the French resistance and uh you're trying to sort of um kind of swing the tide in a certain way. Now, the game plays slightly different solo versus two-player game, and I will talk about both, and I will when I do my walkthrough kind of give you how to play, not exhaustive. I never do exhaustive, but how to play both single player and uh and two-player. Uh, and then we'll come back here and talk about it. But just so kind of know it going into it, if you've interested in one or the other, they are kind of like two different games in a sense. I mean, they're very much the same obviously
across the board, but there is kind of a different uh one key difference to it. So, um when I get to the back end of it, when I'm talking about the review of it, uh if you're not familiar with the game, then you know, maybe watching some of the walkthrough piece of it will be a little bit helpful there. So, anyway, let's go down to the table and we'll take a look. Okay, so I've got everything kind of laid out on the table here. Here's close to what the board will look like at setup. depending on either if you're playing solo or two-player, you just set up a slightly bit differently. Uh, a couple things to note here. So, you can see on the board, we've got some different pieces. And we've got the German pieces, which are in these cube forms here. We've got the Germans and the milis. And then we have some of the resistance pieces here. These are the large discs. Um, and then the red ones may or may not actually be an informant for the German player. So they effectively uh will be a German piece but neither player will know that these you can see are double-sided here.
So we have um this resistance marker on that side and the yellow ones are the Machi. These are kind of your more enforcement kind of more active German pieces the yellow ones. And then see you can see here um if it's an informant it'll have the German symbol on the bottom there. And there's three of these uh that are in there. And so they're shuffled up and then you place those out there uh to start the game if you're the the resistance player, the French player. And in the solo game, you always play the French player. You never play the occupation forces. So there's a couple of things. So the first thing we should know is how to win the game. There's some decks of cards and stuff which we'll get to here in a minute. But there's a couple of tracks here. We can see here's the resistance operations and that's this track here. And then there's the authority track there. And this authority track is kind of dictating the win conditions for both sides or just for uh the French side in the single player game. And then over here on this side we have kind of two tracks. We've got the occupation resources here which is marked here. And then we have this confiscated resources inside of here.
And so what happens is every time this marker moves up to the top here into German territory, it'll reset and then this will move down. So, in a two-player game, you can see you got there on the right hand side. See the yellow, red, yellow, red, yellow, red. So, this will add new pieces to the French players pool, which they can then deploy and recruit out here onto the map. This track here, the occupation resources, and then this confiscation track here does not exist in the solo game. and instead you will place um different uh red resistance pieces here on I think the seven, the six, and the four. And so as the authority piece moves down, then these will then get added to your pool to recruit. And again, you won't know if those are resistance forces or they could be uh informants actually working for the Germans. But anyway, those will come into the pool in different ways depending on if it's solo or if it's um a two-player game. And there will be no in the solo game no consideration for these occupation resources. So now how do you win the game? So as the authority thing moves down and the way that this moves down is the French player, the resistance player can take the sabotage action. Every time they do that successfully, this will move around and this will also give them benefits for some of the different actions like little buffs and bonuses. But every time this makes a full lap around that, this will drop down. And so what that does is
it makes it easier for the French player to win at the end of nine rounds. Here's the round tracker here. And will make it a little bit more difficult for the uh occupation forces to to win the game. Now, there are some auto wins in the two-player game. In the single player game, there's no auto win. You just play all the way till nine rounds there. In the single player game, if the German player ever maxes out their occupation resources to seven and there are less resistance pieces on the board, and again, if you reveal it as an informant, this no longer counts as a resistance piece. Otherwise, you total up the pieces. If they have seven resources at any point, and there are less resistance pieces than where they should be here. So, in this case, if we got authority down here, it's five. So if they have less than five, then that's going to be an automatic win for for Germany. The other automatic win for the occupation is if they remove all of the resistance pieces. There's no more resistance left at any point, then it's an instant win.
Otherwise, you're going to look here and then this is the amount of pieces that the French player needs and then this is the minimum occupation resources that the German player needs to win. And if they both meet the condition, then it will go to the resistance uh to win in that case. Now for the single player game, you just check this track. You ignore the occupation resource part of this altogether. And by the end of round nine, you just need to have that many resistance pieces on the board. But in addition to that, you will have a special persona here. And so there's four of these. You can shuffle these up or choose them. What these will do is they will give the single player, resistance player, a special ability. and then a little bit of an extra win condition here. So in this case, you can see, let's just talk about the victory condition. You must push the authority marker again, that's the marker there, all the way down to the bottom basically is what it says. And again, there's four different one of those. So it's kind of like having four different scenarios in the game. And again, they give you a special ability that you can also use. So how does the game work generally? So you've got a couple of different decks here. So, the main thing to note here is we have an event deck for the two-player game and then we have an event deck for the solitire game. And you're always going to have in the two-player game, both players will have, but a hand of two cards. So, it's going to draw up to two cards uh at the start of your turn. And the decks are largely the same. So, there's a couple things to
note about the cards. This is the two-player deck. You've got abandoned event here. So you've got kind of a resistance event, an occupation event, and then you always have a suit and the suit will match different regions or on the board and you kind of kind of get action points. So what players will do and then in the single player game, it's basically the same, but you are the only one with the hand of cards and then you'll flip a card off the top of the deck and that'll be kind of like the card that the um the occupation bot will play. So, the general gist of it is is that each player will reveal an event card from their hand. You're going to look at the action points. Whoever has the highest is going to go first, although if there's a tie, the resistance will choose. And then in single player, it's pretty much the same thing. But that's generally the rule is the highest will go first and then they'll play their card. And so then the event will trigger. So the if I'm the resistance player and I play this, the event is for the Germans. So the German player will execute whatever the event says. They'll do what it says and vice versa. It doesn't matter who the playing card or the active player is. The event will happen for whatever side the card is on because you can get dealt any number of cards out of here. So after you resolve the event, then you're going to resolve your actions and you're going to make a note of the suit here. So there are three suits in the game. This one is a wild suit. So if you play that, that's a wild suit. And then you can see down here on the board, you've got this kind of blue suit there, the white suit, and the red suit. And then if we take a
look here, you can see either you got wild, the blue, the white, find a red one here. So if you take actions in a region that does not match the suit that you played, you will pay a penalty. So you can see here, this gives you seven action points. But if I had really wanted to do, which is a lot, that's most you can have, and that's great if I'm doing actions in the red area, which is up here. But if I really need to be doing actions down here in the blue one, most of those actions are going to cost me an extra action point. So it's going to cost at least two action points each. And so you have this kind of general AP tracker. So when it's your turn, you'll reset this to the number of action points and then you'll spend it. And again, if you're doing it in a nonsuited region, then you got to spend extra. So you'll spend all your action points and then the next player will go. You do a little bit of cleanup at the end of the round. the French player can put in uh the yellow mares. They can recruit those and then you'll keep going. And again, you're trying as the French player to get this rotating to get this to drop because it makes it easier for you to win. And then in the single player game, you're able to actually recruit new um resistance units there.
Then it's a German player. You're trying to stop this, of course, and then also try to confiscate resources. there are actions you can take to confiscate those. And it's worth noting in case you hadn't noticed, there's a little icon on here. So this you have to basically match that suit um of where that uh marker will enter or else you take the action point penalty. So it cost you an extra action point. So you're trying to get those into there and then get this down uh to help you win uh towards the end of the game. So there we talked about the event deck. So these are going to be driving your play in the one and in the two-player game. Now, there's two other decks in the game. So, here we have one that is related to solitary, which is the location deck. You don't use this too often, but this will help you kind of break ties. You can see you have the different districts suited there. So, if you're trying to break ties um that the occupation bot has this very simple chart, which I'll show you. If it comes down to a tie, you just flip one of these and then go there. And then you've got zones. So, each of these zones 1 2 3 four in each of these regions. So there's three regions each with four zones. And so this location deck will help you break those ties. Now the resolution deck is is the key to this game in some ways. So when you take an action, so you can see we've got all the actions depicted here. So we've got ambush, we've got sabotage, these are both um resistance actions. We've got arrest, we've got uncover, and these are both um uh occupation actions. And then we've
also got another recruit action for the resistance here. So, whenever you do one of these actions here, and then you've got uh that one got mixed in there. Uh there's a reshuffle card in here somewhere that tells you to reshuffle the deck somewhere in here. There we go. And so then you'll reshuffle this back up. So, you can't really like count cards, although there's a lot of cards to count. Um so, you're going to take that action. This will tell you if you succeed or fail. Now, there's a lot of different icons here, okay? But it's not bad because on the back of the two player rule is this little chart here. And this is pretty intuitive. Um, you know, it'll usually tell you success or fail and then some kind of penalty and so on. So, the reason this is interesting and the kind of the key to the game is if we take a look here at the bottom of the player aid. So, there's two double-sided player aids and they both have resistance actions and occupation actions. So you can look at what your friend across the table is doing. And here is the interesting thing about the resolution deck.
So this will tell you kind of the percentage of the probability of why some of these actions will work. So you can see there um the chance that when you sabotage you're going to alert, which we'll talk about in a minute, 64%. But more than likely um the chance that you would get a double um basically spin here on this thing is very very low. You see it's 3%. Right? And then the chances are slightly higher if you have a marquee versus if you have just a regular resistance unit in that zone where you're trying to do the sabotage. Right? So the ambush here, you're more likely to be able to ambush a milis unit versus just a regular German unit. and then even lower to do that. So this is all stuff you want to keep in mind. So basically how the board state is will correspond to the chances um that this resolution deck will have of going off for those particular actions that you know require kind of a randomization to it. So the other thing to note here is the French player, the resistance player can never repeat the same action in the same zone more than once unless they have an undercover unit that they flip up than to activate it again. So let's say I was trying to do like I don't know a recruit or something in here then it fails. Let's say I flip it over and I got a failure. Well, I wanted
to try it again or maybe I didn't like the outcome for some other reason. So then I can uncover here that one and then I can flip a new card and then okay maybe this that means now I can recruit one of those units like so. Now some actions like the sabotage or the arrest um can be uh there's a little bit of mitigation. So if you have two uh of your two or more of your units in there if you don't like what you see in the first resolution card you can do the second one. Uh but you can only do two that way. And it's worth noting a couple things. there's an interesting sort of positional sort of spatial almost kind of thing going on um because you can't have more than one milis and one German uh in a particular spot and of course once you have uncovered one of your resistance units then they are then possible to arrest.
So a couple of the actions you can do you can move around usually that's only one action point sometimes that might cost zero sometimes it may cost uh more. um there's these alert markers that are going to come out um based on the different uh sabotage actions and other actions like that. So those are going to kind of affect the probability of some of the actions here based on what happens there. So every time you sabotage you're going to do an alert which hopefully you know you were able to uh move this around and so the chances are that you are going to do an alert but it doesn't always have an alert and that's going to make things easier to uncover. So the German player could move in here, do an uncover action, and then once you have an uncovered piece, if it's not an informant, which basically becomes a dead piece for the resistance, then you can make an arrest. And arrested pieces will go down into here into the disappeared box. These don't get out of here unless it's through some event text. So there's no action to to get those out of there.
And so that's one less piece for the resistance to uh you know have possibly meet uh the victory conditions there. And then of course like I said there's sabotage action here. There's the reprisal action I think it's called to start to uh uncover confiscated resources. And then uh this gets to the end. I think I said this resets. This doesn't reset till the end of the round but this will drop down uh when you get it there. Um, but yeah, that's basically what you're doing. So, you're kind of playing a little bit of cat and mouse there, uncovering uh pieces, trying to hide them because you can rehide pieces, uh, playing around with kind of the chances of the resolution desk deck based on, you know, kind of like what's in these different spots. All the while trying to sort of, you know, work it out where you match up suits so you can do stuff cheaper in different different regions. But really, that's the gist of the game. you're most of the time going to play through the nine rounds and then again if you're playing solo in addition to this victory condition here you've got your own special extra victory condition you have to meet uh as the solo resistance player. Okay, that was in shadows. Um brief overview of how the single player and the two player works.
Uh let's just jump into my pillars of review. What does the box say the time is on this? 30 to 45 minutes. I would say that's about right. I don't think it's going to go much longer than 45 minutes. I I do think it's probably going to be over half an hour, though. Not by much, but cuz typically the games I've seen, they tend to go the full uh nine rounds, whether it's solo or two-player. Um, so anyway, yeah, for I'd say about 45 minutes seems right. The player count, this is a tough one. I actually split. I don't know if I liked solo more or two player more. It is nice to have the other player there, you know, a little bit of table talk and, you know, cat and mouse. It really reminds me of my game of the year from last year, which was uh just of Robin Hood. This is it's a lot like that in a lot of ways.
Um, it's different enough though. I think I'm going to have keep both on my shelf at least for the time being. But because you have the um uh confiscation of resources where in the Robin Hood you have the sheriff going and taxing uh you know the countryside and trying to get that back and then Robin Hood sort of trying to intercept that. Now there's no like intercepting of the confiscated resources here. There is like the sabotage aspect which is sort of a almost like a influence shift in a certain zone. Um, but it there is if you play both, you definitely will see there's some tenuous, you know, relationships between the two. So, my point with that whole Robin Hood tangent was that the two players really cool because of that similar aspect to Robin Hood with a little bit of cat-and- mouse bluffing part of it.
Like, you can't underell that part of the game. It's a lot of fun. Really cool. And the single player is interesting because I find that the the German player is a little bit more fun in the two-player game because you kind of are sort of fighting two fronts because you've got to get the resources out, confiscate the resources, spend some time doing that. You've got to do that and then you've also got to tamp down the resistance. So you've got to extract, pillage all the resources of France that you can and then also make sure that they don't you don't do it enough, you know, in in a thematic sense that you've pissed everybody off and now the resistance is all fired up. So you can't ignore the resistance side of it.
So that's an interesting sort of tugof-war internally with what that player's trying to do. Whereas when you're playing as the French player in the two-player game, you are really just trying to focus on the sabotage and that. So, it's a little bit more of a basic kind of thing. Whereas, when you're playing the French player in the solo game, again, remember, you don't play German in the solo game, you have that same game. It's almost like you're playing the same game in a solo versus two-player, but you does this really cool thing, a very smart thing, I think, with those four personas, which gives you a special ability, which is fun. And then you have this other sort of victory condition you other condition you have to fulfill to meet uh in addition to the normal one. So that gives you that similar vibe to playing the Germans in the in the two-player game because you've got like your normal sort of you know extract the resource kind of thing and then you got your playing dealing with the other player. Um, so there's a little bit more for the German player to do on the in the two-player game. And it feels like though, um, that's for good reason because they have like the advantage, right? Because once you start to kind of, uh, you know, lose forces and get arrested, then it's tricky for you know, you to get them back as the, uh, as I think trickier, I should say, as the resistance player. So you have a kind of like a lot of more things against you, but you're a little bit more straightforward. So your game becomes the cat and mouse of it and uh as the
French resistance player, whereas when you play the solo game, you're again dealing with um this bot, which is very straightforward. I didn't really get into the bot, but basically cuz it's way more difficult to explain to actually implement. And I talked to some of my friends that also have this game and we were like, why is this confusing? And so this is my kind of my sort of last point I want to make. I think it's funny because all the rules are in the rule book and they do an interesting thing where they have a two-player rule book and a single player rule book, which is sort of frustrating. It's kind of cool, but it's also like if you just wanted to play this solo, you could buy this and throw out the two-player rule book and just only use the one single player rule book or vice versa. That's kind of neat, but it's also like a little bit I don't know. I found it confusing because I was trying to do both games and then um find things. And so there's one thing where like the um reference chart for the resolution deck is on the back of the two-player rules. But more importantly, which is fine, you can just flip that over and you guys have it as a reference or you have it as a reference as a two-player or as a single player game. There's a little note at the bottom that talks about tiebreers on like the arrest action and I think the ambush action or something and it's like oh that's where that is. It's like that notes buried at the bottom and it kind of feels like the rules are a little bit like that. It's like where is that rule? And then I know I read it and it's like very hard to reference. Um so I would say the rules are too efficient. They they they've they crammed in too much. And especially
as we're trying to learn the game from a standpoint of like, okay, so this action does this, this action does that. But I'm like, why would you why are you doing this? Like they could have just used like a little bit of extra color cuz then when you get down to it and you sit and play the game, it's like, oh wow, okay, I kind of this is really cool how these all these things kind of interact and how really the um how really cool and awesome the resolution deck is. Because I was first I was like, I don't know, this feels very like dry and it's just like, oh, you flip a card, did I succeed? Did I not? But then after you get through like halfway through the game and halfway through the deck, you're like, oh, the stuff I'm doing on the board is changing the probabilities of the deck like in real organic time. That's a phrase. And um so yeah, so that's pretty cool. But the rules don't really like help you get there. you got to really like dive in and play the game to get there. Um, and then that also goes for the bot part of it. So, basically the way the bot works, just so you know going into it, is you do this really quick little chart.
You're like, okay, here, here, are there two of these or one of these? And then this, okay, so it's going the bot's going to attack this zone. It figures out and then it just does all its actions there and then it goes and then that's what it does. So you can play with that as the single player game that you know player to see like oh it's going to try to do that. So there is it's almost weird cuz it's kind of like introduces this little like layer of bluffing but you're sort of doing a a faint. It feels like you're fainting against this AI bot thing and it's really cool how that works. Um, and again, you're playing with a different uh event deck as well. So, the events are a little bit more tailored and that kind of stuff. And you have the personas, but um, but yeah, basically what it is is you walk down this thing. The bot says target that zone. And then it gives you just a quick order like how many action points does the bot have left. Okay, then work work to do this. Okay, doesn't matter. Do this, do this, do this. Okay, now you're down some action points. You got a different little row to go through. It's very very quick and simple and snappy and it feels very thematically like just the like the full-on like brute force of the German occupation, the German troops, it still does really mirror in some ways the two-player game now just with that little layer of cat and mouse missing. So anyway, so the point with this, I made this at the beginning of the review, is you have a lot of like these similarities here, but it's like things are being replaced, and I've never seen a game quite do this where the single player and the two-player work so well
together, but they're very different games where the cat and mouse side of it, it gets replaced with this other like blunt force trauma bot, but then since you don't have the cat and mouse to play with so much, you do have that fainting, but then you've also got the special ability and the extra wind condition and that kind of thing. So, it really shifts things around in a am I doing a dance from somebody? I think I there's a guy that dances like I just made a move. Not a fan, but it's funny that he dances like that. Um anyway, I'm going to leave that in the video. Hopefully, I don't get in trouble. Um but yeah, there's a back and forth between the two games. I'm going to leave it in. Uh, I really like I really recommend it. The rule book's a little bit of uh like it's good. All the rules are there. The all the rules are there. It's just like uh it's a lot to kind of parse and at first I was like I am not going to like this game and but once we got into and played it a bit I was like oh no this is fantastic. I really really like this and it really reminded me a lot of Robin Hood um from last year which I really loved. Um, it'd be interesting to see if uh they could uh take some of the solo ideas and apply that to Robin Hood as well. Anyway, kind of a tangent there, but um anyway, I definitely recommend In the Shadows, single player or two-player. They like they both have their benefits. So, take a look. Thanks.