Shadow Hunters

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Revision as of 13:05, 13 August 2014 by 1d4chan>TheWiseDane
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Have fun spending the entire game pretending to be on everybody's side at once.

Shadow Hunters is a Japanese tabletop strategy game published by Z-man games and is notable for not sucking as much as other Japanese tabletop games. In terms of game play it's kind of like Munchkin meets Clue meets Hellsing with more paranoia and broken friendships.

The Rules

Each player is given a secret identity card which is either a hunter, a shadow, or a neutral. Hunters want to kill shadows, shadows want to kill everybody but themselves, and neutrals all have completely lolrandom goals like dying first, collecting loot, or making the person to their right win (Its possible for multiple people to win).

So players take turns rolling dice and drawing cards, forcing other players to give vague clues to their identities, collecting items, and attacking each other. At any time players may reveal themselves to unlock their hidden special ability, or just to stop their dumbass teammates from attacking them. At this point the game moves towards a conclusion pretty quickly as shadows and hunters race to slaughter one another and the neutrals try to fuck everybody over before they can fuck each other.

The Strategy

Its an incredibly simple game backed up by an incredibly complicated meta-game. Winning requires knowing your enemies, knowing what they know, and knowing what they know about what you know about other people. When that fails it requires randomly killing people and hoping you didn't just screw yourself. Needless to say the game can be outstandingly fun if you have some good roleplayers, and a single canny fa/tg/uy can have the entire table working for him.