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2.0 AVERAGE
2.0 AVERAGE
Cold Shadows is a tabletop RPG about Cold War espionage as it was portrayed in espionage fiction. It’s centered around the more psychological works by John le Carre and Robert Ludlum, but also covers more action oriented stories like those by Ian Flemming.
It’s based on the rules from John Wick’s Blood & Honor RPG as well as Ben Woerner’s adaptation of those rules in World of Dew. Like those games, the main focus isn’t necessarily on the individual characters. Where Blood & Honor focused on the Clan, and World of Dew focused somewhat on the City, Cold Shadows focuses on the Agency.
While based on those two previous games, I found Cold Shadows to still be difficult to understand at times. Like some other games I’ve read recently, the lack of examples really hurts the ability to understand what is meant. It also doesn’t help that in at least one case of transliteration from the previous games, a word was left out, utterly reversing the meaning of the rule and making the rest of it incredibly confusing. The rule in question is “mass murder,” the name given to combat involving more than two people.
In the previous games it states “the player who rolls highest has initiative and not privilege.” Cold shadows leaves out the “not” which not only reverses the meaning of the rule, but makes the following rules not make any sense (as they determine who actually gets privilege). Privilege is the term used to refer to the ability to say what happens in the fiction of the game.
Fortunately, referring to the other games, and re-reading new rules that appeared confusing at first has me to the point of mostly understanding this game. Hopefully that understanding will last long enough to get it to the table.
Edit: lowered my rating on this because I realized that my initial rating was biased by my love of the system this game is based on. The game itself is broken (for the reasons I related already), and while I think I understand what the rules are meant to be, that understanding is based on other games, and may still be in error for this game. As the problem was never addressed in the errata, this game remains a broken mess. If the creator ever returns to address these errors then I might re-evaluate my review.
It’s based on the rules from John Wick’s Blood & Honor RPG as well as Ben Woerner’s adaptation of those rules in World of Dew. Like those games, the main focus isn’t necessarily on the individual characters. Where Blood & Honor focused on the Clan, and World of Dew focused somewhat on the City, Cold Shadows focuses on the Agency.
While based on those two previous games, I found Cold Shadows to still be difficult to understand at times. Like some other games I’ve read recently, the lack of examples really hurts the ability to understand what is meant. It also doesn’t help that in at least one case of transliteration from the previous games, a word was left out, utterly reversing the meaning of the rule and making the rest of it incredibly confusing. The rule in question is “mass murder,” the name given to combat involving more than two people.
In the previous games it states “the player who rolls highest has initiative and not privilege.” Cold shadows leaves out the “not” which not only reverses the meaning of the rule, but makes the following rules not make any sense (as they determine who actually gets privilege). Privilege is the term used to refer to the ability to say what happens in the fiction of the game.
Fortunately, referring to the other games, and re-reading new rules that appeared confusing at first has me to the point of mostly understanding this game. Hopefully that understanding will last long enough to get it to the table.
Edit: lowered my rating on this because I realized that my initial rating was biased by my love of the system this game is based on. The game itself is broken (for the reasons I related already), and while I think I understand what the rules are meant to be, that understanding is based on other games, and may still be in error for this game. As the problem was never addressed in the errata, this game remains a broken mess. If the creator ever returns to address these errors then I might re-evaluate my review.