Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past

EvEvanstar4.6

I really wanted to love this game. A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dungeon crawler board game, by the designer of the original descent. Part of the problem with this game is that I've found myself growing tired of 1 vs many dungeon crawlers, so i'd be lying if that wasn't part of it. However, I'm not going to pretend this game doesn't have issues. The nice thing about the game is that there are mechanisms that really encourage teamwork amongst the players. In typical crawlers, so long as you have a tank, dps and healer, and everyone does their job, you can plan your tactics without having to check in with other people aside from activation order. In Turtles, players can share dice with their neighbors, so the player interaction is more involved, and that's nice. Campaign wise there are problems. The first few levels are incredibly difficult for the players to win which is surprising for what I had imagined to be a game geared towards a somewhat younger audience. It doesn't even feel good to lose, because the first few maps are treated as tutorial stages, where the heroes are unreasonably limited in what they can do. It winds up that the heroes can't take full turns until several maps into the game. Now imagine trying to get a group excited about playing this. You get through all the rules, setup a map, then obliterate them for two maps as they "learn how to play" by not being allowed to use their full movement range or attacks printed on their character sheets. Add to this the rules are foolish. The game focuses on simplicity over clarity. The rule that we ran into that exemplified this is that there are rules for tracing line of sight from the ground to a building roof, and rules to climb things to get up and down, but no rules against tracing line of sight from the ground, through a building, to the ground on the other side. You simply shoot through the building. Again, I'm frustrated, because I wanted to like this, but the disconnect and initial experience was too unpleasant for my group to be willing to continue with, which is sad, because I think there's probably a strong game in there somewhere. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment