A thank you to Bernhard of Gamebreakers for providing two Skirmish Packs to be able to review the game. An aptly named company, too, as this is a competitively-focused skirmish game; the creators are self-labelled tournament players that admit to enjoy breaking games. Something deep within my gamer's soul resonates with that and having played a few games I fully see that coming through in this rules set.

It's solid. In the way that a rules set for a skirmish game can just be solid. Every single question we've raised across to Bernhard he has very kindly simply pointed back to a rule in the rulebook that we could/should have found for ourselves that answered it. I've been playing a lot of skirmish games and it's really easy to come across niche scenarios mid-game that can be hard to know exactly what was intended by the designers and these guys seem to have just done a really solid job covering them to the point where I'd actually really love to come across or find something that they haven't covered or missed. I love finding that stuff and clearly so does this team having designed a rules set that my fellow indie-games-enjoyer Snafu has described as "tight enough bounce a quarter off".

Shroudfall

You can read all about the lore and the world of Shroudfall on their website where you can also browse the four current factions available in the game; they've developed their own fantasy setting here drawing on some familiar themes to create distinct factions that have unique playstyles from each other.

The basics are that a human sacrificed his essence to become an arcane shield to protect humanity called the Shroud, becoming a god. One day the Shroud vanished, his lack of constant wisdom frightening the priests and the barrier started pulsing, wavering, with a tear appearing in the sky letting in horrors from the Beyond, at first just in very small portions altering the people forever. Essence is strong energy that forms over very, very, long periods of time in crystals that are consumable by few individuals but are dwindling in availability.

Shroud cracking during Rapture - credit Gamebreakers

The Silver Line are humanity's defenders of the Shroud, tasked with peacekeeping by any means necessary in the kingdom. Chosen of the Spirit Tree are on a mission to restore both their god and balance in the world as a whole. The Umbral Veil see the weakening of the Shroud as a divine sign that it's time to topple the worldly elite, the cracks a consequence from the imbalance they have caused. Bloodthorn are the most mysterious being born only after the first cracks appeared in the Shroud and they have the most simple goal of all: to consume all of the essence.

Skirmish Packs

The minis are very nicely printed resin (Ameralab's TGM-7), the kind that has some give to it and isn't so brittle that you're unable to drill into it. My models arrived in the Skirmish Pack with a few supports still attached but otherwise ready to simply glue to bases, very few of them are multi part. I didn't have any issues with the models themselves, they fit together well where they're multiple parts and then they're ready to be primed and painted.

Shroudfall Chosen of the Spirit Tree starter warband - Credit Bair

I had a choice to have two of their new Skirmish Packs and went for Chosen of the Spirit Tree because they're a warband of pandas which seems pretty self explanatory and then the Umbral Veil for something that was at least aesthetically very different and the whole flesh horror alchemist thing they have going on is pretty cool.

Each Skirmish Pack also comes with an incredibly hefty amount (seven sheets) of thick card for all of the necessary tokens, terrain, proprietary two-part movement tools and dice, measuring sticks, cards for each unit and terrain, and a softback rulebook. These packs are great value giving you enough models to start playing the game with literally everything else you'll ever need, the only thing to pick up after this will be more miniatures to flesh out your warband. Everything, other than the models, fits right back into the box it comes in too making it extremely easy to tote around to each game; I magnetised all of my bases and use a metal lunchbox meaning I can throw both into a backpack with extreme ease. I do love a skirmish game that fits into a backpack. You can get 3D terrain from them but I actually really like the flat 2D cardstock terrain pieces, this is a competitive game at the end of the day and these make it very easy to move through, on, and around.

Shroudfall Umbral Veil starter warband - Credit Bair

We've been playing just with the skirmish packs so far and it's very important to note that the Chosen of the Spirit Tree warband works quite well straight out of the box while both Umbral Veil and Bloodthorne just cannot generate red essence for their leaders to use. This might be a balancing thing though by design but can feel kinda bad not getting to use all the fun stuff immediately. Also I need to say that these boxes come with around 80 points +/- a few and the full game is intended to be played at 200 points. For a game as involved as this I wouldn't want to jump up to 200 points immediately but can see that many of the synergies out of the starter boxes will make more sense getting more units on the board.

Gameplay

Rules for the game and each unit are free to download so you can check them out yourself, meaning I'm also not going to go into too much depth here either. If you like games that focus on exact movement and tight playing then you're going to love this. You play on a 3'x3' table and terrain is part of your list building, meaning that factions that favour certain types are going to be leaning into those and you start by setting these up; I really like that each terrain card gives you two pieces of terrain and often your opponent will be setting up the larger piece near the small piece that you play. Terrain slows movement in many cases or fully blocks it in others while giving very strong defensive bonuses, placing these is going to be a skill all its own.

There are a number of different scenarios to play and the Skirmish Packs come with one that's great to start with chasing down boars to get them in your opponent's side of the board while harvesting essence crystals from mines. Simple but sets the scene immediately that scoring points is far more important than killing enemy units, unless you get a beat on your opponent's Essence Leader who will score you victory points for removing! One rule I really love here is that you score points if your opponent's Essence Leader is to close to their home board edge, penalising cowardice. That's just good stuff.

Shroudfall is an alternating activation game with each unit activating once each turn. The first player determined during terrain set up starts the game by activating one unit and play flips between players unit all units are activated and given a token showing that they've already activated that turn; the last unit to be activated by the player that did not go first is instead given a exhausted token stopping it from being the first unit activated in the next turn. I like that a lot, it's a simple implementation that stops someone from activating the same unit twice in a row across two turns. When a unit activates it gets to do two actions and use any essence that you have to activate abilities, some abilities require both an action to be used as well as spending essence while others use one or the other. These can all be done in any order and you can do the same one twice so if you're already in combat and really need to kill something go ahead and simply attack twice! Rarely, however, is there going to be a situation where you "only" attack twice and instead activate abilities giving advantage or small bouts of movement to get into a better position.

Shroudfall game - credit PVT_Snafu

Movement is wonderful and for anyone that's played Star Wars Legion will be a bit familiar, but is a bit more permissive here. You place the movement tool flat down on the table touching the model's base that's about to move, you pick up that model keeping the movement tool down, and then place that model back down touching any part of the movement tool. That means you can stop mid-tool and means that larger bases are given extra movement due to the size of their base! Other than simply moving normally many units have movement abilities that they can activate by either using one of their two actions or by spending essence tokens of varying colour which will let you pick up and set back down models in a variety of ways, usually just an inch or two at a time, but that makes all the difference! I do really like that you can fit through gaps in terrain and bases so long as the movement tool fits, even if the base of the model wouldn't fit between the gap, so long as they can be placed back down somewhere on the movement tool; your units won't get in the way of your bigger models so long as you leave a bit of a gap for that tool to fit between. If a model needs to move from a certain rule it's used and isn't able to be placed it's just destroyed, adding to how important careful placement is!

Weapon ranges are short, too, with ranged weapons being around 6-8" normally and in the games we have played so far only going up to 10" at most meaning your ranged units can't just cower in the back! Melee weapon ranges are typically 1-2" and models count as being in melee while within range with either their own weapon or an enemy's weapon so keep in mind how long of a reach they have while you move! You can shoot and use magic weapons in/out of combat but will suffer a penalty depending on the specific situation making it difficult to do anything making melee a relatively safe place to be for units to not get shot at.

Attacking follows a pretty simple process and uses their unique six sided dice from lowest to highest value being grey, yellow, or red depending on the attack. Each unit's card will show you which combination of dice to use to hit and then to deal damage with. Grey dice have a few blank sides and only 1's and 2's on them while yellow dice have blanks but go up to 3's and red dice will never roll a blank and go up to 4's but are, of course, more rare to roll. What's different here is that you don't target units but instead target individual models when making your attacks, you can only hit and kill what you're in range of! With relatively spacious coherency you may easily only get into range, and only be able to take out, a single model in an enemy unit if your opponent has spaced them out carefully enough. Roll to hit rolling the appropriate dice for the model you're attacking with need to equal or beat the opposing model's Defence (DEF) characteristic; a hit roll that doesn't have any blanks is a crit which doesn't do anything on its own but might activate extra abilities. If you've hit then you roll the corresponding dice for damage adding up the value and dividing the result by the target's Armour (ARM) characteristic. There's no save rolls to be made, just simple hit and damage, keeping it moving quickly. Some models will have a very high DEF making them very difficult to hit but then typically have a low ARM so that when they are hit they take damage pretty quickly whereas others will instead be very easy to hit but difficult to damage! For example, the Chosen of the Spirit Tree units can have a DEF as high as 8 (which can be increased with terrain!) making them very difficult to hit but then have ARM values as low as 3 making any successful hits quite deadly; in contrast are Silverline units which might have DEF of 4 which is very easy to hit, almost impossible to miss, but an ARM of 7 making it almost impossible to do more than a single point of damage to per attack, if any!

Shroudfall game - credit PVT_Snafu

While moving and attacking is important, essence is the key to the game. Every single unit has abilities that use grey, yellow, or red essence tokens making them deadlier, harder to kill, or letting them leap around the table to name a few effects. You start each and every turn with no essence available to you making your first unit to activate far less effective than they might be if activated later in the turn! After a unit is finished activating you'll get essence tokens per the bottom of its card, leaders often generating multiple tokens with units usually just giving one of varying quality. These match the dice colours with grey being the weakest and red the strongest. Any essence that you don't use across your turn is lost, you don't carry it through to future turns. There's plenty of other ways of generating essence tokens depending on your faction and the scenario you're playing, the starter scenario has you picking up yellow essence from the boar you're kicking across the board and red from the mines. Essence can be used to amplify the effectiveness of attacks, too, by spending a token before rolling to add a dice of corresponding colour to the hit or damage roll or to re-roll the whole result after rolling, but not both. If you're swinging at a unit with high DEF and really, really, need to hit then adding an extra dice to the hit roll is a great use while adding one to the damage roll instead if you're confident about the hit could make the difference between leaving a model alive and contesting an objective or taking them out and getting ahead of victory points. From my games it seems the very best use case for grey essence is for re-rolls, the extra dice will often roll a blank or add very little to the result not making much of a difference.

Finally we come to the catch-up mechanic built into essence generation. At the start of each turn you see which of your units have been completely removed and add the essence tokens to your pool that they'd have generated after activating. So, after losing a unit you'll be starting each turn with some essence to use during your first activation making your units far more powerful during the early parts of the turn instead of needing to activate a few before getting to use the fun abilities. I really like this and it's certainly shone through in our games so far making that first activation far more effective than it normally would be while the player with less dead stuff has to think a few steps ahead.

How do you actually win a game, though? You score more victory points than your opponent! Easy. Each scenario will outline how to do that and killing the enemy leader will always score you points, too. Pull ahead by at least five victory points at the end of any turn and you've won, otherwise it'll come down to the last turn of the game to who scored more followed by a series of tiebreakers after that if neither play was able to score higher. In one of my games this came down to the fourth tie break which we worked out during the last turn to see who could actually win at that point. I like this a lot, it means you can't ignore objectives in the early game and just kill stuff while scoring points later; both players need to be focused on scoring victory points as their main priority with killing stuff being a nice little bonus. Some units are able to shove and push around enemy units which is incredibly powerful to bully things off of objectives and otherwise put them in a bad position!

Shroudfall game - credit PVT_Snafu

Is it Good?

If you've read this far and think the answer is going to be anything other than "yes" then you either skipped right to this part or didn't grasp that I enjoy a game as complex as this. My only concern is the complexity of the game while these starter sets come with less than half of what a full game is meant to be played at. At a full 200 points you're going to have a lot of moving parts to keep track of, at least you could take multiples of the same unit if you wanted to reduce some of that mental load. Most wargames are won in the movement phase with careful placement and this game takes that and amplifies it ten fold. One bade placement early in the game could lead to a domino effect costing you the game! That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but you'll certainly be spending time fixing that mistake while your opponent scores points. I'm certainly interested in expanding out my Chosen of the Spirit Tree with a few more units and trying the game at a larger points size, if not the full size quite yet. These are just the first four factions, too, there seems to be more on the way and I'm excited to see what they come out with and how those factions will play differently from the existing ones!

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Tags: fantasy | skirmish game | shroudfall