Rise of the Kage (and Docks of Ryu) Review

Today we're going to look at Rise of the Kage and it's first expansion, Docks of Ryu. I received this game and expansion together a year after backing the kickstarter. Overall the kickstarter was a success, delivering only a month after the expected delivery date. Considering I received them together I wanted to review both the core game and expansion with the same review. The expansion does not change the game, it simply adds two new boards, 3 new ninja's, 1 new boss, and 3 new guards. All that said, let's get onto the review!

What is Rise of the Kage, Who makes it?

Rise of the Kage (RotK) is a stealth themed miniature board game for 2 - 4 players. One player controls a Boss and guards while the other 1 - 3 players control 3 Ninja's infiltrating the area to accomplish a hidden mission.

• Game: Rise of the Kage (and Docks of Ryu expansion)
• Company: GCT Studios
• Website: http://www.riseofthekage.com/
• Players: 2 - 4
• Play time: 45 minutes 

The combination of the base game plus expansion delivers a load of models to the owner, with the kickstarter delivering double models for each guard and ninja (alert/unalert & detected/stealth).  Players will choose 1 boss and 3 ninja's for the opposing sides, with each of the 3 game bosses bringing a specific set of guards to the game. These guards are assigned to each boss from a set of 9 different guards, split evenly between 3 levels of expertise.

How's it play?

RotK is a stealth game that also uses a fair bit of combat between the Ninja's and the Guard players. Each turn will begin with the Ninja's charting their movement on the board by placing footstep markers starting with each Ninja. The Ninja's do not need to complete their movement, but they can only move along the path as specified, including needing to double up on steps in a square if they wish to retrace their steps. Once this is complete the Ninja's will activate in initiative order and attempt to complete a number of actions along their defined path. These actions include searching objective markers, opening doors, sneaking past guards, and even fighting those same guards. Each Ninja has a variable number of force and stealth dice, defined by their specific characteristics. Force dice must be used for force actions (i.e. kicking down a door, attacking a guard) and Stealth dice must be used for stealthy actions (i.e. picking a lock, searching an objective, sneaking around). Ninja's can always add extra dice to their tests, but if a Stealth dice is not included then the test makes noise. Additoinally, any time a Ninja fails a test they make noise.

Noise is important for the guard and the Ninja's want to strive to be as quiet as possible. Each instance of noise will generate a noise token which the guard player will subsequently be able to use as additional actions for the guards. Furthermore, the first time each Ninja generates noise will advance the guards alarm meter and the time until morning track will advance if any Ninja makes noise. If, at points during the game, the alarm or morning tracks ever reach the end the Ninja's lose the game.

Every mission requires the Ninja's to sneak through the board searching to gather objective tokens on the board. Once a number of these tokens are collected, specified by the Ninja's random mission, the Ninja's will roll a dice and hopefully trigger the escape condition for the mission. The dice will be rolled upon collection of subsequent objectives until the escape condition is met. At that point the Ninja's will determine the specific exit (one of the 3 Ninja deployment points) and need to move to that exit point. A secret selection of the objectives will be traps, triggering when the Ninja's successfully searches the objective token. The traps cause noise and can damage the Ninja's. Regardless of being a trap or an objective, the Ninja searching an objective (successful or not) will draw a card from the Ninja equipment deck.

Once the Ninja's have completed their turn the guard player will draw a hand of cards from the guard deck and proceed. During the guard turn action tokens (number determined by the threat level) will be allocated to guards to perform actions. Guards can move around the board, attempt to detect hidden Ninja's, call for help, and attack detected Ninja's. There are a large array of choices provided by the guard deck as well, ranging from extra movement or attacks for the guards to limiting the movement of the ninja's to recruiting extra guards to the board. Before ending the guard turn there is also the opportunity to recruit new guards to the barracks locations.

Play proceeds back and forth until the Ninja's have succeeded or failed their mission.

What's innovative or different? What's fun?

RotK uses a couple of fairly innovative mechanics in the game. The first and most innovative of these is the Ninja's path used at the start of the Ninja turn. Placing these footsteps on the board and then proceeding along them is a pretty interesting part of the game. It requires the Ninja player to really plan out what they are doing and determines so many portions of the game. Overall it's one of the mechanics in the game I really enjoy.

Other mechanics this game uses are action points and action cards for the Guards, and hidden missions for the Ninja's. The combination of the hidden mission plus the random & hidden exit spot really combine to raise the challenge level for both the Ninja and the Guard players.

Overall the game has a high level of challenge and works as a puzzle to figure out.

Overall quality of the game

I'll start by discussing the quality of the models and components in the game. The game boards for both the core game and the expansion are very nice. They are a woven linen type material, suitable thick without being unwieldy, and fold up in quarters. They fit nicely in the box even after I had to cut the plastic for better box control. The cards for the variety of decks initially seemed good but over ~10 games I'm finding they are just a bit too thin. The cards are starting to wear a bit through shuffling, and a small number of beginning to peel at the corners.

The models included in the game are very nice. GCT has discussed their choice to use a softer "rubbery" plastic for the models so that they stand up to rough use in a board game. Specifically they wanted to assure the models could be "swept" off the table into a box without the danger of pieces breaking. Considering that they were able to achieve an impressive level of detail on the models. The models need a bit of a hot-water dip to straighten out staves and such, but overall the detail is very good, nearly reaching the level of a war-gaming model.

Box control is a bit lacking in this game. GCT made an attempt to provide molded plastic inside the box to hold all the components, but unfortunately was unsuccessful. Once the models are taken from their bags they will not fit into the space provided. I ended up needing to cut the molded plastic then store the different models in separate bags, using the enlarged space.

I'll discuss the rules and rule book last. Overall this is the worst rule book of any game I've played to date. Furthermore, the rules are incredibly convoluted and confusing, requiring an inordinate amount of work to figure out and learn. This game is much easier if one person puts in the work to learn to play then teaches everyone else. At certain points the language is so obscure that its effectively no help at all. As an example of this, I'll share:

"If during a ninja's search action, the search token is revealed to be a trap then the guard player performs a force test against the ninja, modified by the reaction value. If successful, the ninja sustains a wound. The token is still added to the ninja player's mission pool. When a trap is revealed it always generates a noise token."

This is particularly obscure when you look at a Ninja's reaction value and realize this is typically a positive number. So what's being modified here? I and my locals are guessing this means the Ninja's armor is increased by the reaction value since a "better reaction" should protect the Ninja from traps. That's certainly not clear from the wording. 

Recommendation and thoughts

I like this game, but I am really like challenging games. I feel like the game is more difficult for the Ninja's than necessary, being very slanted toward the guards winning. Furthermore, I feel the guard action deck is excessively large and could have been reduced by half and still viable.

Although I enjoy it, I will have a very hard time getting it onto the table in my gaming group. Overall my group feels that the bias against the Ninja's and unclear rules are too much of a barrier to cross to play the game. This becomes especially evident where there are other games on our shelves with cleaner rules. Unfortunately, I suspect even an errata or FAQ from GCT will come to late to save this for my gaming group.

As much as I wanted to give this a positive review, I cannot. Rise of the Kage appears destined for a solid layer of dust at the bottom of my gaming library.

Rise of the Kage - Initial thoughts

This past weekend I received a game which I had backed on Kickstarter nearly a year ago on October 5, 2014. The game I'm referring to is Rise of the Kage by GCT Studios. I've unpacked the game, sorted the boxes, and played through one initial game with my wife at this point. This article is simply my initial thoughts, not a full review of the game. At this point I want to play more games to get a solid feel for the game before writing an official review.

Unboxing

I knew that there were 2 game boxes plus an unknown number of kickstarter bonus boxes coming my way. I was surprised with the size of the box that showed up on my step, initially believing that it was not the game I was waiting for. GCT did a fantastic job of fitting the shipping box very closely to the game boxes. I received 2 game boxes, one for the main game and one for the Docs of Ryu expansion, plus 1 large and 3 small boxes for the Kickstarter expansion models.

Each of the game boxes included a double sided game board, a set of character cards for both the Ninja's and the Bosses, and a series of smaller cards for other parts of the game. The boxes (both game box and kickstarter boxes) were also full of models for all the guards (9 different guards), Bosses (3 different bosses), Ninjas (7 Ninjas), and a single dog and single princess objective. Overall I felt very satisfied with quantity of contents in the game.

Quality

The double sided game boards are beautiful and of excellent quality. The boards are set up as four quadrants which fold up nicely to fit within the box. The art on the boards is nice, although it tends to be a little dark. There are some really nice details in the art that can be hard to pick out, but the darker style fits with the stealth/ninja theme of the game.

There are a lot of cards in this game. The stack of non-sleaved cards for the guard deck alone sits 2 inches tall once you add in the extra boss cards. Overall there is 4 decks:

• Guard deck - includes cards for the guards and boss to use
• Ninja Deck - includes 3 different types of cards to help the Ninja's out
• Mission deck - includes 2 board specific missions plus 8 other missions
• Escape Deck - includes cards that tell the ninja's where they need to go to escape the board

There are also enough tokens to punch out that I needed a Plano box to sort them all. These tokens include a range of necessary markers including Ninja Movement, Guard order tokens, Noise tokens, Doors, Objectives, wounds, and other assorted items. These are printed on a good quality and thick cardboard.

Lastly are the models, which are very much board game quality models. They are a softer plastic than wargaming models, which will make them more resilient for scooping back into a game box. There was a fair amount of bending on the weapons and general models, which should be able to be fixed with a hot/cold water dip. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of detail each of the models has on them, which should really come out with painting. The models come in two different colors (red and orange / Grey and Green) to indicate guards who are alert and ninjas who are detected. There was some mismatch on some of the guard models with an uneven amount of red/orange models being shipped. This is limited to 6 models total, which means that once painted it will be easy to fix with a matching set of alert and non-alert models.

Initial Overall Thoughts

Starting with the game components, I am overall fairly pleased. I received a lot of models with this game, spending approximately $150 for what I got. I do not feel like I "got a deal", but that overall I spent the appropriate amount for what I received. The second most disappointing part of the contents was the choice GCT made to print the 7th Ninja character on the back of the core box cards. Considering this is printed on 3 different cards and the game is built to use 3 ninjas, it should not be an issue for game play.

The most disappointing part of the game was the rule book. The rule book simply sucks. It's extremely difficult for figuring out how to play the game the first time, with a confusing layout and inadequate references. Determining specific rules and answering questions is very difficult, despite the rules index on the back of the rule book. The majority of the rules assume a basic level of knowledge with the rules, and rarely provide page references for finding that "pre-knowledge" the player is assumed to have. This made the first play through a very difficult thing for my wife and I. That disappoints me, as an experienced gamer I should not have such a difficult time learning a game.

Considering the game play I was able to figure out, I think there is a solid game here. I continue to have high hopes for this game, as I see some really intriguing mechanics. There are some key questions I have, which I'll need to get answered or assume house rules to keep the game play smooth. One such question occurs when a unalert guard moves to place a detected Ninja in his Sphere of Influence. Does the unalert guard automatically become alert or do they have to try and detect the Ninja? Further, if a detected Ninja is in the unalert guards sphere of influence, attacks the guard and fails, do they become detected or not? It's questions like these which are very difficult to answer in the rule book, but are key's to game play.

I'm looking forward to playing more games with the hope that once I learn the game I can piece together the game play and things will become smoother.