Samurai Spirit Review

Co-op games have saturated the board gaming market as of late, and many of these games build upon the “slowly growing threat” narrative. Players are running around a board, putting fires out, fending off monsters, curing diseases--generally just trying to survive as the threat gets worse and worse each round. If the group can hold out long enough, they succeed and call it a day. Acclaimed designer Antoine Bauza’s most recent title, Samurai Spirit, builds upon these ideas but adds a neat little twist to make facing the growing darkness more addicting than ever.

Usually in cooperative games, a deck of nasty event cards or a set of “bad stuff” dice drives the action. Players take good actions pushing the world or the village or the city toward redemption, and the game responds in kind, trying to knock back players’ progress as best it can. And to be sure, Bauza’s design is similar enough: a central town to defend, a deck of threatening enemies, a growing danger as the rounds progress. But the real brilliance of Samurai Spirit is that with each draw of the raider deck, the player may have a chance to use the raider’s combat value to strike back in a big way. There is no longer a clear good stuff/bad stuff dichotomy; instead, players have the best opportunity to beat back the looming threat when they smartly support one another--and play the odds--to activate their powerful abilities.

It’s basically blackjack: draw a bad guy card and see if your samurai has enough fight left in him to keep the raider occupied. If he does, it’s the next player’s turn. If he doesn’t, he goes bust and is out of the round. But if he hits his maximum combat value exactly, hold onto your hat, because the samurai will unleash wild, game-breaking abilities. It has echoes of some of the very best game designs out there, where a slow, quiet build can suddenly explode into a mega-turn. What seemed like a dull exercise in card-counting is instantly a thrilling ping-pong match as players bounce raiders back and forth to exploit as many superpowers as possible.

If you think it sounds luck-driven, you’d be right, to an extent. Early turns have players blindly and slowly moving up to the point where they can start cutting loose with their powers, supporting their fellow defenders, and working out an overall strategy for the round. New players or groups will almost certainly feel that something is lacking for the first round or two--until it clicks. But if and when it clicks, it’s a rush. The game transforms from a group of people quietly playing blackjack at the same table to a band of samurai brothers frantically looking around the table, each one of them certain that there is some way to activate their ability, to stop the last farm from burning, to save a fellow samurai from certain death.

And while all players will lose if a fellow warrior is downed, there is some benefit to taking wounds in moderation: each samurai has a powerful final form. After a second strike, a samurai’s board will flip to its anthropomorphic animal side, which offers benefits like fighting more raiders at once and a stronger ability. These enhanced abilites come in handy since each round sees stronger enemies coming your way. All of this lends the game a nice sense of progression, where a scene of a few scattered raiders battling here and there evolves into chaos, as a giant badger teams up with an angry man-boar to take down a fierce raiding lieutenant, or a lone samurai challenges the boss only to fail, causing a farm to burn.

The desperate battle against the invading forces really shines due to the game’s fantastic visual design. Smooth, curved lines on all the cards and player boards recall flowing robes, samurai swords, and graceful martial arts work. And it’s all extremely functional, with icons placed in just the right spots to line up, stack, and overlap perfectly when needed. The publisher also deserves our heartfelt thanks for not overselling the game in a giant box ten times the size of the component, as is so common. It’s just a very nice production, even at a relatively cheap MSRP.

It’s not all perfect, of course. I wouldn’t recommend the game for lower player counts, or just for solo play. It works in a sense, but the real heart of the game is when you and six other people take on the roles of seven powerful samurai, determined to save this precarious farming town together. While the game is easy enough to play and learn, the balancing of various loss conditions, large set of icons, and somewhat unique core mechanisms can throw new gamers for a loop. And gamers may write the game off after just a play or two, especially if the group did not figure out the way supporting, fighting, and defending interact with one another.

If you find yourself going through the motions--just taking a penalty, drawing a card, and passing the player token silently--you’re missing the game. But if you’re willing to give the game at least a few plays to reveal its subtleties, it’s a fantastic thing to experience. Even in an age when there’s a co-op game around every corner, Samurai Spirit earns its seat at the table as a light, quick challenge that’s not just another Pandemic clone.