AoS Shadespire 3+ players

According to the rules it could be played with 3+ players, but it requires 3 boards. The Original set gives only 2. Anyone have any idea if theres an expension pack with more boards and such? Also, does anyone know if it's any good with 3+ people?

 

Meh expected as much.. especially seeing as for exampel the SCE warband consists of 3 guys. If the opponents decide to gang up on you you barely have enough soldiers to send at each warband, let alone each soldier.. that alone might be a "small" problem. Shame that starting box is so expensive, bit much to buy it just to try 1 multiplayer game and risk coming to the consclusion it's awefull.

 

Just played my first game against my dad (got it for Christmas, hence my sudden interest ) and got my ass royally handed to me. SCE seem to be horrificly OP as usual, bastards oneshot nearly all of the bloodborne guys. Something tells me 3+ isn't the only thing that's not entirely balanced

Had this issue as well, which is one of the reasons I got slaughtered so badly. Only pulled "go to objective x" cards, causing me to run all over the place with no focus, while he pulled stuff like "kill the leader" and could just gang up on him. That one card already negated most of the points I actually managed to score..

 

It's probably a matter of getting used to it, I'm bound to not have flanked properly, and a bit of luck. I mean, every single one of his attacks was succesfull whereas I had several failed attacks (as in, I don't even have a single succesfull diceroll, let alone pass his defensive rolls), on, and he had a lot more luck with his objectives (scored like 6 points in a single round with 1 kill cuz it also triggered 2 objectives... while I only got "get artifact #x type of objectives, which made me spread my troops out far too much in an attempt to actually get an objective done on top of only rewarding 1 point every time..).

Though what really annoyed me was that basicly every attack from him was a oneshot. They have a 50%+ chance of landing a succesfull attack against the bloodborne given their attrocious defense (without any moddifiers), which for a oneshot is a tad high. And 5v3 is not exactly a numerical superiourty that allows for cannonfodder to die left and rigt. The orruks at least won't start doing with all units until inspired or otherwise modified, they actually have attacks that deal 1 damage and they're less reliable as they aren't all hammer attacks.

Also the SCE's inspire abilties seem far better & easier to trigger, especially in a 2 player match, knocking out 3 warriors with SCE vs bloodborne means either bloodborne has won or suffered heavy losses, either way the inspire is a tad late.

On a sidenote, we're confused by the "potion"card. The bloodborne basic deck has some in them and they heal a wound. But since they're not a "reaction" it seems like they're virtually unuseable by most of the bloodborne seeing as they get oneshot when facing SCE. So we were wondering if heals like that should be playable to save a dying warrior, cuz otherwise the card seemed basicly useless for this warband with 1 guy that can actually survive a single hit.

 

meh, figured as much, still feels weird to treat em as cannonfodder when you only have 5 of em. Ah well let'\s try again.

 

I have yet to lose too against SCE and I played a bunch of games as Khorne in the begining, and now I have an Ironjaws Warband and won my first match vs SCE. They aren't OP, you just gotta make em play your game. With only 3 heroes, they're much easier to crowd control.

 

Two things to consider. First, play best of three. That mitigates the luck aspect of It a little. Second, build your own decks as opposed to using the ones that come with it. If you are only going to be playing against your Dad's SCE, then pull the healing potion out of the deck for another artifact or ability. I also dropped all the objective cards out of my deck. It allowed me to focus on doing what the Khorne deck is designed to do, generate blood for the blood God.

But, yeah, the luck aspect of the game can be annoying. I had one game I was playing against my nephew where I was playing khorne and had a letter perfect set up to one shot his leader. I had a four dice attack with a supporting character and rolled three double supports on four dice. It happens.

 

It was literally the first game, so using the prepackaged decks seemed like a smart idea. But yea, possibly the decks aren't particularly optimised Pulling all 5 "capture the objective" cards for khorne was a tad dissapointing. In between luck, only vaguely knowing what to do, and literally just getting oneshot left and right it should get better as we play a bit more.

 

You can't get the shadespire set anymore, at least not on GW's website. The only set you can get is the nightvault one. Admittadly the nightvault one will have updated rules for magic so I guess that's better anyways.

As for the game itself, it's fun enough. Though the instructions are a tad unclear (I'm fairly certain I'm still doing bits wrong). And it feels a tad too luck dependent, with units sometimes being nigh immortal throughout a game, or getting unceremoniously killed at the first oppertunity… If you happen to have, or are planning to get, a bunch of those sets anyway to use in AoS proper it's probably worthwhile, worst case you play the occasional game of shadespire & have some extra models for your AoS armies.

 

At discount online shops, $25 for a faction set of 3+ heroes/a weird unit isn’t that bad. It’s a $51 base game with great mini sculpts. Good luck finding the same component quality for that price. (D&D board games are $80+.) The Nighthaunt team is 150 points & the briar queen is a leader. I haven’t looked at the SCE team.

For the armies I collect & paint, I have no issues dropping $25 on a faction expansion. One day, I hope, a Seraphon set drops.

Do people run them in competitive lists? No idea but my gut says no.

Do you want to be a competitive MtG player? The CHEAPEST budget standard deck is $45. Most are over $100. https://www.mtggoldfish.com/decks/budget/standard#paper

Warhammer AoS/40k/KillTeam/Shadespire are WAY cheaper.

I’m just glad there’s an okay CHEAP other game where we get more AoS minis for my plastic crack addiction.

 

I guess my friends and I are a bit "out of the norm", b/c this was our gateway game into AoS (a few of us played Warhammer many years ago, but just fell out of it). All things considered, we rather enjoy Shadespire. Unfortunately, I actually haven't played Nightvault yet, so I can't really comment on the new rules, but my friends who have played Nightvault like it. There are positives and negatives about Shadespire/Nightvault.

To me, the positives are that the minis all look really great so far (especially the original Shadespire sets). The rules are pretty easy to follow and the cards give you options to "bend/break" the rules occasionally; you could have your entire warband wiped out, and still potentially win, depending on your objective cards. The games are pretty short; my friends and I can play a standard 1v1 in about 30 minutes.

The biggest negative is arguably that, similar to MtG, it's kind of a "pay to win" game; meaning that the more cards options you have, the better your chances. The only way you can get all of the cards is to buy all of the miniature sets, or pirate the cards online somehow. Second is that some of the armies tend to favor certain play-styles, and changing that up can make it a challenge to win. To that point, once you've seen a warband play, it will probably be the same style each game, unless you change your force or your opponent changes theirs.

Multi-player games can stretch the mechanics, but in my opinion, it's no worse than trying to play 3-person AoS or Skirmish. Again, to that point, I agree that the low movement teams can either get left on their board, or ganged up on if in the middle. But, in multi-player games many of the objective cards are changed in order to make it easier (or harder) to achieve them. For example, if an objective card says to hold objective 1, it will say you can score this by claiming objective 1 or 6 (in a 3-player game), or 1, 2, or 6 (in a 4-player game), making it a little easier.

 

The game was fun the couple times I played, but I haven't played since Nightvault dropped. If you're group plays, then pick up the base Nightvault set, otherwise, just get the minis.