Base price: $XX.
3 – 5 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter!
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Pride of Ninja was provided by Ninja Star Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
More Kickstarter! This one’s coming from Ninja Star Games, a longtime friend of the site, so excited to see how this goes. I mean, I’m writing this after I mostly have the review kind-of finalized in my brain, so I already know how it’s going to go, personally, but that’s neither here nor there. I have to build up a certain level of narrative suspense to keep the whole process going. I was never good at that. So let’s just get to the review!
In Pride of Ninja, your goal is mostly to survive. Each round, you’ll have ninja-style face-offs where some players might even die (don’t worry; they get better). As you do, you’ll accumulate Temporary Points and, should you survive, you can convert those into Pride Points. That’s the goal, after all: can you end up with the most?
Contents
Setup
Easy enough to start. Give each player a scoreboard for their Temporary Points (TP) and set the Pride Points (PP) scoreboard nearby:
Each player picks a weapon and places it on the 0 of the PP board and a token placing it red-side down on the 0 on their individual TP board:
Choose a deck:
Regardless, you’ll be removing cards based on player count, so remove cards that have a “remove at this player count” icon or have an icon that specifies a player count you’re not using. Once you’ve done that, deal three face-up and deal the rest out to the players. If there are any extra, set them aside. At five players, each player also places a Black Card (depending on your deck) in the Back Row of your play area.
You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
The game itself is pretty simple! You draft, you resolve, and then you score!
To draft, each player chooses a card in their hand and keeps it face-down. When all players are ready, reveal them and place them in your Front Row or place them face-down in your Back Row. You can only have three cards in the Back Row and four in the Front Row, so any more than that and you’ll have to place exclusively in the other row. Pass your cards left.
Then, resolve! This part’s pretty easy too. Starting at the lowest number (1 in Blue, 0 in Red), resolve all card effects of that value for all players, depending on where their cards are placed. This may cause players to gain or lose Temporary Points (you can go negative), so keep recording that.
In the off chance a player is Slain, they gain a Slain token (unless they already have one), set their TP to zero, and continue participating for the next number. The Red Deck also uses Secrecy, which is the total value of your Back Row minus the total value of your Front Row.
After all that, you score! Collect the cards, and convert your TP into PP (Pride Points). Note that you can lose PP but you can’t go below 0. If a player has more than 20 Pride Points (15 with five players), the player with the most PP wins! Otherwise, start a new round.
Player Count Differences
Most of it comes down to predictability, to some degree. With fewer players, there’s fewer of each card in play and less overall variance, so you can say with certainty that if X cards are unavailable for a certain card type, it can’t kill you. With more players, there are more cards, so that security is gone. Someone could even just hoard all the cards of one type for some reason. I will say that I find that the Red Deck’s intensity is better leveraged with more players. It has a lot more engagement and interaction, and a lot of it can be challenging to make things even more complicated. I do like the modular nature of it, though, and while I prefer the Blue Deck, I’ll be interested to see how the Red Deck works with larger player counts.
Strategy
- Getting Slain early in the round isn’t terrible. You may not have even scored that many points! Usually with the Blue Deck, this means you overindexed on Ninjas or Miko, but what can you do? With the Red Deck, the Fallen has usually taken out one player per round. But since you come back for the next number and can continue scoring points, it’s not a huge problem.
- Watch out for what’s in other players’ Front rows. You might be able to avoid getting Slain if you prep accordingly.
- Try to pass your opponents cards that kill them. If your opponent only has their Back Row open, passing them two Mikos means that they have to put one there (which might end up getting them Slain). Similarly, you can pass them a bunch of Ninja so that not only are they not scoring more points, but they’re also going to lose them all in one fell swoop. This applies mostly to the Blue Deck, but you can do similar things with Red to mess with their Secrecy score.
- Try to keep your options open! If you only leave one row open, you might get stuck playing things you don’t want to. See above for more specific notes, but yes, different cards have different effects based on the row they’re in (sometimes), so you’d at least like to have the ability to decide where your cards go.
- [Blue Deck] You can earn a lot of points if you pair up Samurai and Ninja. If you’re willing to risk it, that is. A great combo is maybe 3 Ninja and 2 Samurai? That’s an easy 9 points just from those cards, and you still have room for a couple more. Samurai give you 1 point per Ninja depending on placement.
- [Red Deck] Keep an eye on your Secrecy! It can get you killed. There are cards that eliminate or punish players with low Secrecy, so you may want to make an effort to have high Secrecy, instead.
- [Red Deck] There’s a strategy where you use the Monk to lock down a lot of PP and then die, resetting your TP to 0. It’s very hard to pull off. I’ve not been able to do this successfully, but it sounds cool, at least. The Monk lets you flip your TP negative to gain the corresponding number of PP. This means that if you die after using the Monk’s ability, you would consequently go back to 0 TP (rather than negative), letting you keep the increased PP. It could happen, but you’d likely either need a high player count or someone to play the Yakuza in their back row (kills the player with the lowest Secrecy).
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The art on these cards is great! They’re bold and colorful and have a lot of energy to them; I like it a lot! It’s a great-looking game, though it would have made my photography life much easier if the outlines weren’t black. Alas.
- I like that there are out-of-play cards and that they’re publicly shown before the round starts. Makes strategizing easier. It’s a nice way to change up each round by making some strategies weaker or safer. Both can be pretty food!
- This reminds me a bit of a drafting-style game of Lost Legacy; I miss that franchise and I’d love to see if Pride of Ninja could have more decks. I wonder what a Green or Orange deck would look like with this system. Could be cool!
- The core of the game is pretty simple, which I also appreciate. You’re just drafting cards and then fronting or backing them; many cards have different effects based on where they’re placed.
- Getting Slain is also pretty funny. It sucks when it happens sometimes, if you lose a bunch of points, but it’s humorous. I do appreciate that it doesn’t take you out of the round; it just voids your score and it can only happen once per round. It avoids the bad times of Citadels where one player is just getting offed constantly.
- You can play this pretty quickly and casually once everyone’s used to all the cards. It ramps up to a frequent game pretty easily.
Mehs
- It feels like the Red Deck doesn’t show its full teeth until you get to higher player counts. It’s a lesser complaint about the Blue Deck, as well, just because you don’t get to see all of the cards (some are left out for higher player counts), but given that the Red deck is the more aggressive of the two, I’d almost have wanted to see more actual aggression at three, and it was a bit more blunted by player count, there.
Cons
- The amount of text on the cards makes the game feel like it’s going to be much more complicated than it is. It’s worth going through the cards with your group before you start to ease that anxiety. The game isn’t too tough; the cards can just be dense.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I think Pride of Ninja is fun! As a reviewer, I’ll admit that it’s always a bit tricky to figure out how to review modular games where there are multiple different decks in the same box (see things like Unmatched or Millennium Blades), but I tend to think more about the core game system in those cases where I can. Here, you’ve got a quick drafting game with some placement effects and some faux-player elimination, which I really like. Dying isn’t the worst thing you can do in the game, and in one of the decks, it’s actually a pretty legitimate strategy if you can pull it off. The modularity does make me wonder if we’ll be seeing more Pride of Ninja decks, should this crowdfund land successfully, and I’d be interested in that. I’d like to see what kind of mechanics you could come up with for a game like this. I think this type of game appeals most to players who want kind-of cutthroat and dynamic games, as it’s a bit more involved than something like Love Letter but it retains that same sense of fast-paced, knock-your-opponent out gameplay. I like that a lot (in short games). Add in great art and I’m hooked. I think Ninja Star Games has a winner with this nifty little drafting system, and if you’re looking for a quick and interactive game for your friends, you like a game with nice art, or you just want to get killed by a ninja, Pride of Ninja might be right up your alley!
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