Shadowfist
Medium: Card Game
Publisher: Daedalus Entertainment Inc.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear, I am not a card game fan. When I play card games, I tend to play a conservative game, building my own power base and not attacking much. The rest of my gaming group is the same. This approach, however, is simply inappropriate for Shadowfist, the card-based companion game to Feng Shui. Shadowfist was fun, even in our rather low-key playtest, but I can sense that it would be a lot more fun in the butt-kicking style it was written for.
As card games go, Shadowfist is pretty good. The artwork is attractive and well-rendered, and many of the characters found on the cards also appear in the Feng Shui rulebook. The rules were fairly easy to learn -- unless we were doing something drastically wrong -- and there is a nice range of groups and abilities to work with.
The backstory of Shadowfist is identical to that of Feng Shui: players must compete with various other powers from a variety of time periods who are trying to gain control of the world's mystical power sites. Each player's goal is to accumulate a certain number of feng shui sites (very important -- stack your deck with them), and whoever gets enough first wins.
Each site under your control nets you a certain amount of power each round (make sure you have tokens available to represent this power) which is spent to bring new characters into play, to activate certain events and powers, and to bring more feng shui sites into play. Each feng shui site costs one more point than the last one you brought in. There are also normal sites, which are useful for protecting your feng shui sites, since (as you accumulate them) other people will be trying to destroy them or take them away from you.
In play, the game is fast and fun. Play consists mainly of trying to kick ass on your opponents' characters and feng shui sites while defending your own.
One feature of the cards which definitely deserves imitation is the use of a distinctive mark (a golden imprint of the flying kick logo) on all the expansion-set cards, making it possible to tell them apart from the original cards without having to squint at tiny numbers on the bottom of the card.
First printed in Serendipity's Circle. This work cannot by reprinted without the Author's permission.