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Council of Shadows is a 1-4 player game set in the year 2200. Four civilisations are vying for a seat on the Council of Shadows by securing the strongest actions, taking control of important areas, and being the first to make three quantum leaps. The theme is barely there; it’s a Euro game where you’re harvesting resources, buying new cards, and controlling areas. But it does have an exciting hook up its sleeve…
As with most space-based games, I can strongly recommend playing it with Slam’s Athenaeum 101 in the background for some quality space atmosphere.
How Does It Play
Council of Shadows is played over an indeterminate number of rounds. Each round has three phases: Buying, Planning, and Actions. Buying is your chance to buy new cards, which are upgraded versions of the basic cards you start with, or to upgrade your player board. Planning is where you play out three cards to your player board that will allow you to harvest resources, put out colonies (cubes), and discover new solar systems. In the Actions phase, you will go through your cards from left to right, performing the actions. Tacked on to this phase is a chance to assess your presence in the world by taking colonies off worlds to score points. If you have the area majority in that galaxy you get the larger number of points. If you haven’t, it’s the lower number for you.
The hook is similar to the crossing tracks of Rajas of the Ganges and Ark Nova. The cards you play all have a cost; better (or cheaper cards to initially purchase) have a higher price to play. When you reveal your cards, you move your consumption marker the total cost of your cards around the outside track. The track starts at 20 and progresses parallel to the energy (score) track. If your energy (score) ever reaches or surpasses your consumption marker then
you achieve the next level of Dark Tech. These are very impressive powers that you can either use for the rest of the game or are one-time use. Your energy then resets to the start of the energy track, and you start again, but your consumption keeps increasing. Hit your consumption marker three times and that triggers the end of the game. Add on some points from extra resources, cards, and objective cards; the highest score is the winner.
What’s Good About It
Initially, the hook is a mixed bag. If you go for a strategy where you play high-value cards, pushing your consumption up quickly but getting loads of stuff and points, it’s a lot of fun. You have some massive turns. However, if you go for low-value cards, you don’t get to do a lot, and it can feel like you’re really lagging behind with no chance of winning. But by the end of the game, the scores can be extremely close. My tip for your first game is to go big: it’s a lot more fun at the start.
I’m not a big fan of area majority games, but this is less of a feature here. You can generally go somewhere else if someone has a majority in one area. If players are playing the game where they place a cube and then pull it off straight away to get points, it can be a non-issue altogether.
Council of Shadows is fun. The main challenge is gaining access to the higher-scoring solar systems by upgrading your board or buying cards. Doing this as quickly as possible is a good move. The Dark Tech cards are generally pretty exciting powers: every time you put out a colony, put out an extra colony, get three points for every galaxy where you have a majority, or from now on, the consumption value of your cards is 0.
Any Problems?
I enjoy the base game and would probably give it 80%. But there are two expansions within the base box. The Space Station expansion is fine to add a little bit of extra stuff, but nothing amazing.
Then there are player powers. Excellent! Everyone loves variable player powers. Our first game at two players with these powers was great. The powers added variety and forced us to play a new way. The scores were still close. Then, we tried two different powers. Until this point, my wife and I had scores within 15 points. I had a power that let me put out a colony every buying phase. Admittedly, this added 14 to the initial consumption value, but I lapped my wife and then a bit more. It was a blood bath. Then we tried another two powers. My wife had a power where if she had three colonies in a galaxy, she didn’t need to remove one to score points. She lapped me. Again, more blood bath.
The powers are widely unbalanced at two players. This is a real shame because they add a lot of fun to the game. At four players, the imbalance is less, but even so, it’s still noticeable. Very disappointing.
Components
Ten years ago, this would have been an excellent production. Now, it’s got a few issues. Stacking tiny cubes into towers three cubes high has the potential to result in spilt cubes and confusion. The screens that cover your player boards slope so much that the information on the inside is pretty much unreadable. The iconography on the Dark Tech cards can be undecipherable. We needed the rule book every time it came to choosing one.
There is also a completely pointless cardboard throne.
The board is nice and colourful, especially with four players and jigsaws together. There’s nothing terrible about the components, but I kept imagining the game with dual-layer boards, elegant iconography by Ian O’Toole, and stackable colony tokens. If the player power expansion had been better, the game would have been worth deluxifying and the extra cost that would entail.
Conclusion
After playing the player power expansion, my rating of this game plummeted. I was so disappointed by it that it affected my view of the base game. After playing the vanilla version a few more times, I warmed to it again. My score would have been higher if the player powers had been balanced at two players. Even with four players, this expansion is problematic.
The base game is enjoyable, and there are multiple paths to victory. Council of Shadows is almost a great game. In 10 or 15 years, when a second edition comes out, I would be very interested in giving it another look.
