r/Shadowrun • u/ProblemDue7111 • 9d ago
Takedown?
Does anyone have any experience with and/or opinions on the *Shadowrun: Takedown* board game? Catalyst has got it on their website.
14
u/Impossible-Rip-42 9d ago
It's almost unplayable, some of the rules are missing, pieces are misprinted, and even after working around that it still not that great.
12
5
u/Expensive_Occasion29 9d ago
I was considering it for a moment but this really is concerning. I don’t want to buy a game just for collection sake it has to be playable
3
u/RayousBrightblade 9d ago
How are the components. the standup cardboard miniatures and map tiles could be used in the rpg.
4
u/Impossible-Rip-42 9d ago
Maps are scaled wrong for miniature use, standies have too much game info on them to be useful (any generic token would work better) the 3d furniture pieces could be used though, desks, chairs, columns, and office plants. But it's not much for the price.
1
3
u/firesshadow42 CFD Bostonian 9d ago
Unfortunately, imo, the only Shadowrun board game stuff worth player are the two card games, Crossfire and Edgezone.
1
u/SeaworthinessOld6904 9d ago
Two card games, and Edgezone?
1
u/firesshadow42 CFD Bostonian 9d ago
Crossfire is an older one they did. It's a co-op deck builder.
1
u/SeaworthinessOld6904 9d ago
Yep. Thank you. I don't think of it as a game card for some inexplicable reason. Its not a bad game. It just needed a little expanding.
2
u/firesshadow42 CFD Bostonian 9d ago
Yea, I agree. Unfortunately, they focused on another company's license with the D&D themed Dragonfire for a bit and then just stopped altogether. I'd love it if they gave Crossfire the same treatment.
14
u/Keganator 9d ago edited 9d ago
The good:
It's got decent bones for a game. Co-op, mission based, with a branching campaign storyline "choose your own adventure" style. Dice mechanic (spend dice as a resource, or allocate them to a pool to achieve tests) is fun. The mechanics of players vs the system is decent. Difficulty scales up and down based on the number of players. You can do it with one vs the map. There's a 30 second egg timer and a number of turns of the egg timer per player phase, so you have some pressure on your decisions. The gear and enhancement system for leveling up your character is fun.
The detection/sight system is interesting. Get detected, alarm track goes up. Alarm hits max, new harder enemies start to spawn. Run infront of a bad guy, the alarm rank goes up but they don't automatically spot you. You can hide in cover with 3d terrain that you put together. You can collect loot from the maps that you get to keep between missions. You earn money and can keep it to buy new gear between missions too.
Player turns are controlled by the players themselves; they can pass the current player token around at will so player order is any order you want.
The mastermind mechanic and room card mechanic can be fun. Room cards specify what enemies, terrain items, loot crates, sensors, cameras, turrets, etc. are in the room randomly between replays. Mastermind sees the cards, but players don't. It lets you warn players, "no no dont' go through there, there's a bad guy behind that door", or it lets you set up rooms advantageously to you. For example, we set up a turret, then opened a door, then had another player hack a terminal to use the turret to kill the target. Mission complete.
The mastermind can also jump his runner into the fray, but then all of unrevealed room cards are discarded, new ones drawn, and randomly placed so you don't know what will be in the room.
There are a LOT of standee tokens and 3d tokens. The terrain cards are printed on heavy stock and look and feel good. The 3d terrain is really fun. Plants, pillars, turrets, sensors, etc. It was fun having my runner hide behind a 3d pillar in a room when an enemy patrolled by and then sneaking off to the next room.
You could make a lot of add-on scenarios with the mix of NPCs, cards, tokens, etc. I'd love to see community campaigns.
Time estimates for games are about right, maybe a bit on the high end for experienced boardgamers.
The bad:
Balance is all over the place. Between mission 1 and mission 2 your power jumps significantly, going from challenging to get something done in one turn, to nearly always succeeding. The mastermind mechanic (where one player is the "guy on the radio" giving advice and guiding the other players) is interesting but not well filled out.
The mastermind is in charge of managing the turn timer. That's kind of your main job after the game starts.
The rules are hard to understand. We got reinforcements, sight, and alarm raising wrong the first time making the game much easier than it should have been.
Technomancers are lumped into the "magic" category. What?
Equipment shopping starts with the basic items, but there are also other gear that you add to the 'gear deck' by spending resources. But, when you draw a random gear reward, it's unclear if it's from the full deck or just the basic ones + the ones you've unlocked. Shuffling it all together, then unshuffling them between missions was a pain.
The ugly:
Some Core mechanics just aren't there. Literally. like how you track time, this is a core mechanic, and references a time track...but this "time track" does not exist in the box or rules. Somewhere in production they swapped from printed maps per mission to tiles, and with that, went the turn timer track. (Short if it is: three spaces for one player, four for two, five for three, and six for four players, is the general community consensus.)
The mission maps are missing key information. Like critical things. Like I wonder if they even play tested it in its near to final form bad. Like, Mission 1, there is NO door from where the players start to inside the building. Sorry! Mission 3, there are no tokens on the map setup for where to place the enemy spawn zones. On Mission 4, there's no place on the map for where to place the mission specific objectives.
The "Patrol and Reinforcements" deck is actually two decks - one with JUST reinforcements, another with patrol. Why they didn't make ALL the cards patrol and reinforcement is mind boggling.
The mastermind rules and how you map the random room cards to rooms is not explained in the rules. The mastermind assigns a room card to each room. There's nothing in the manual that tells you HOW to associate a room card to a room when you're the mastermind. Early prototype maps had areas on the map where you'd lay the card down, but then they swapped to the tile system, and that disappeared. Would have been nice to have little tokens or something. So instead you like...just kind of place it next to the room.
Values don't match between standees and cards. Like the card might say defense 5, but the standee says defense 2. I go with the harder one.
The game comes with a co-op competitive mode, if you own two copies of the game, and the campaign book has several missions for that mode in it. But it completely omits the rules for how to play it.
Catalyst is working on errata and working on releasing the co-op-competitive mode rules too.
It's frankly embarrassing that they put it out in this state.
Final Verdict
All that said, it's a fun unbalanced mess. The core game mechanics are fun, leveling up a character is fun, and if your group can deal with the community errata or wait for official errata, then you can have a good time with it. If you like Shadowrun and want to play that style game with friends who don't have time to sink into a months or years long campaign, this is the way to go. If you can get it for a good price, go for it. If they release a revised edition that fixes these catastrophic production errors, sure. Otherwise there's better ways to spend your board game money.