Dave's CCG Rant: Shadowfist Player's Guide

     I've got a short piece in the guide ("Iron and Silk") so take my
overall recommendation with a grain of salt.  }->

CAPSULE

     Very good appearance and production values, with the exception of
occasional typos/grammar problems and one section with a bad choice of
font.  Very good index, but not all pages are numbered and sections can be
hard to find.  Content is excellent, especially for those who haven't had
the luxury of keeping up on all the net.rulings over the past year or so.
Strongly recommended for those who haven't kept up with the net stuff,
Recommended even for those who have, for the new background information
and ease of use.

RANT

     While I'm told Middle Earth did it first, this is the first CCG
players' guide I've seen that was a full 8.5 by 11 inches as opposed to
the smaller digest size which seems to be more common.  Makes it easy to
store with your Feng Shui stuff (you DO buy Feng Shui stuff, right?).  The
cover is the Ting-Ting on yellow background art from the "Equal
Opportunity Butt-Kicking" poster, and the cover clearly marks this as
Volume 1.  There will be a new volume for each expansion, covering both
material from that expansion and general background stuff.  This volume is
94 pages, and it's not padded out with huge fonts and lots of blank space...
you get a load of stuff in it, making the somewhat higher than normal
shelf price ($16.95 where I got it) justified.  And heck, you get a free
White Ninja out of the deal too.
     There's three chapters which give background for the Dragons, Ascended
and Architects factions, in the form of a script, a transcript and a
progress report respectively.  While they don't really give too much
information beyond what's in Feng Shui, they're entertaining to read and do
contain a few nuggets (like the animal form of the Unspoken Name).  The
Ascended piece is really hard to read thanks to a "handwriting" font.  And
since this is supposed to be the text of a tape, not a note, there's no
really compelling reason to use such a font.  The other four factions will
be given similar coverage in the next volume or two.  Unfortunately, there's
no page numbers on these sections, which can get mildly confusing when you
first start to try and find your way around the book.  It would also be nice
if every page had a chapter header to aid in quick reference.
     While the revised rulebook is NOT in the Player's Guide, all the current
changes, additions and clarifications are collected in chapter 2, with
pointers to the FAQ chapter for more complicated things.  Chapter 2 can be
kinda hard to read for experienced players, since so much of it is stuff you
already know, but it's worthwhile to go through it to make sure you didn't
miss a ruling.  Also in Chapter 2 is my "extremely basic strategy" piece
in a "bottombar."
     The FAQ is the FAQ v5.0, but much more readable in this form, and
easier to flip through.  It's accompanied by a bottombar article on the
"personalities" of most of the factions.
     The rest of the book is card-by-card analyses.  One chapter has the
thornier cards from Limited and Netherworld (but not quite all of the
problem spots, like Thunder Knight), and another has all of the Flashpoint
cards.  These chapters are especially nice for having pictures (albeit
smaller and black&white) of all the cards mentioned, so if you've been
having trouble finding some of those Flashpoint Rares you can at least see
what you're missing.  Additionally, many entries include excised flavor
text (from cards that had the rules text run long) or additional commentary
fleshing things out.
     Between chapters are bits of artist sketchbooks from the development
of Flashpoint along with short story pieces.  Once you read this book, you
should have most of your questions about the Arcanotowers and the Purists
answered.
     Oh, and regarding the typos mentioned in the capsule...I don't think
any of them get in the way of understanding what's going on, but a few are
annoying, and there's more of them than I'd like.  Usually they're just
obvious "missed a key" type errors, but there's some that involve grammar
or suggest spellchecker mistakes.  Still, it's not as bad as, say, your
average Hero product.
     Finally, since it IS the end of the book, the back cover has its good
points and bad points.  The main bad point is the color scheme (beige type
on light brown pattern is a little hard to read).  The main good point is
that there's full color pictures of both the old and the new White Ninja.
New art on the new card, yay!

     Dave Van Domelen, "Let the Wookie win." - sage advice for any game....