Shadow Ninjas – Phantoms for Fishes

Shadows, decoys, feints, and ambushes. These are the tools of the Shinobi. The tools of the Ronin. The tools of the Ninja. Traps, razor-sharp strikes, and… zoomies? These are the tools of the Cat! These obligate carnivores are the top of the domestic food chain, the pinnacle of Egyptian worship, and, of course, the sneakiest of all fish stealers! Mix them together and you have the most epic feline phantasms. Indeed, you have… Shadow Ninjas!

Shadow Ninjas is a “devious game of decoy and detection” by Kedric Winks. A game of Shadow Ninjas takes 2-5 players about about 20 minutes to play. Nearly any age can play, but the memory components make it best for ages 8 and up.

Setup

Shadow Ninjas is an asymmetric game, which means players play different roles. In this case, one player controls two Samurai Guard Dogs while every other player controls the Ninja Cats, fixated on stealing the Shogun’s delicious koi carp from the dojo. This is a hidden movement game, where the players controlling the Cats are attempting to mask their movements so the Dogs cannot find and catch them.

Assign one player to be the Guard Dogs and give them the two Guard Dog counters. Then, share the 12 Shadow counters with the other players. Finally, each Cat player takes Cat Ninjas – one each for three or four Cat players, two each for two Cat players, or all four if there is only one Cat player. Each player takes the two matching dice for their colored Cat counter.

Flip all of the Shadow and Cat counters face down and take turns placing them in the two grey columns. Remember which ones are actual Ninja Cats! Checking is not free once the game has begun.

Gameplay

Starting with the Guard Dogs, each player takes turns rolling their two dice and moving their player counters orthogonally. They cannot move through walls and can’t share spaces. If a player wants to move a Shadow counter past another, they swap spaces as a single movement, which moves them both.

The Guard Dog player can only move Guard Dogs, but the Ninja players can move any Shadow counter, even if they didn’t place it! Players must assign the values of their dice to different counters, but they don’t have to take the full movement for each counter.

If a Guard Dog counter ever has line-of-sight to a Shadow counter with no walls or bushes between them (even in the middle of a move) the player must immediately flip that Shadow counter over. If it is a Ninja, that counter is removed from the game! A player with no remaining Ninja counters is out of the game.

I Forget!

It can be hard to remember which counters are which, especially in a four-player game! Instead of taking a move, a Ninja player can look at the underside of four Shadow counters.

I Win!

The Guard Dogs win if they find and eliminate all four Ninja Cats.

A Shadow Ninja wins if it makes it to a koi carp tank! When a Shadow counter moves onto the koi carp tank, flip it over. If it is revealed to be a Shadow, the player moves it back to the grey starting squares to begin again. But if it’s a Cat… We have a winner!

Impressions

Shadow Ninjas is a silly, cute game on its face. Cats and Dogs, sneaking through a hedge maze, trying to steal fish or find each other out. And in a lot of ways, that’s exactly what it was on the table. There isn’t anything serious or deep happening in Shadow Ninjas. But what it does have is light, humorous gameplay that is accessible for most ages that can handle playing games. I would say Shadow Ninjas can flex down to about six years old.

We aren’t a particularly nasty family when we play games with each other, but there’s room for Shadow Ninjas to get downright malicious. Since the Cat players can move any counter, there’s no rule stopping you from moving the Shadow counters for other cats into the Guard Dog’s way. And frankly, the Guard Dogs don’t care the order they get the cats out of the game.

That said, Shadow Ninjas is definitely better at higher player counts – and much harder for the Guard Dogs, too. When there is only one Cat player, the Guard Dogs move just as many times as the Cats do. With three, they move one third as many times as the Cats. It’s never overwhelming for the Dogs, but it’s definitely a lot harder to keep track of what’s going on.

Shadow Ninjas shines as a silly, tongue-in-cheek game of back-and-forth decoys and deduction. Kids will have fun sneaking their Cat counters around the map, tricking their parents’ Guard Dog counters into chasing shadows. The quick speed of the game prevents any given play from feeling like the stakes are too high. And the light memory component keeps the focus on the game instead of kids wandering off out of boredom.

Shadow Ninjas really plays best with kids between the ages of 6-12, which our family has nearly aged out of. But there’s a certain charm in cats-against-dogs at play here, and László Riba’s art captures it well. We’ll enjoy Shadow Ninjas a few more times before passing it off to a younger family.

You can get your own copy of Shadow Ninjas on Amazon or ask for it at your friendly local game store.

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Outset Media provided The Family Gamers with a complimentary copy of Shadow Ninjas for this review

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