Board Game: Heart Under Blade
I’ve been playing around with a new Board Game idea.
Heart Under Blade is an asymmetric strategy card game with deckbuilding elements.
Players are samurai warlords bound to protect their Shogun as he visits their expanding domains. Even as competition for growing wealth and prestige amongst themselves may lead them to forget their mission.
Additionally one player is secretly the Lord of the Ninjas who seeks to assassinate the Shogun and will be trying to create the opportunity to strike.
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At the start of the game, players randomly and secretly determine which one of them shall play as the Ninja Lord. The rest of the players take the role of a Samurai warlord. All players attempt to build up their stock of Estates and Wealth in order to better gain resources and power.
The goal of the Lord of the Ninjas is to discover (or guess) who is holding the Shogun card and to force them to Burn that card.
The Samurai players are nominally working cooperatively to discover the Ninja Lord and to protect the Shogun. They must Burn at least three ninja character cards but this in itself is not sufficient as they must periodically Search through the deck of burned cards to reveal those three dead ninjas (the Ninja player may also search this deck to retrieve dead ninjas to frustrate this goal).
The complication for the Samurai players is that only the player who controls the most Land cards at the end of the game will win if the Shogun is successfully protected so cooperation may well feel the tension of inter-clan warfare as players Raid and even outright Invade other players to take control of wealth and estates.
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Play Heart Under Blade on Tabletop Simulator* here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3453155562
Or, for a limited time, on Tabletopia^ here: https://tabletopia.com/games/heart-under-blade-tma7qy/play-now
Please feel free to send me comments etc here or via: https://ko-fi.com/craigdalzell
* Requires purchase of Tabletop Simulator but if you already have it, the game is free to play.
^ Completely free to play in the app or in the browser, but I’ll have to take it down when I start testing the next game, probably in a few months.