Unboxing: Shadows of Brimstone

As promised I will do an unboxing of the Shadows of Brimstone core sets from Flying Frog Productions which I backed on Kickstarter. As stated in an earlier post, the two core sets arrived to my surprise last week. Since I hoped that the results of this project wouldn't be as disappointing as the Sedition Wars rules, I was very exited for the package to arrive. Another big reason was, that I mainly backed this game because it is played cooperatively and therefore Mrs. Para was also in this game. She doesn't like Descent too much (at least in playing it with only 2 players) because you play against each other.

Shadows of Brimstone is a Old West Horror board game. Meaning that you will play heroes placed in a wild west setting  and encountering some horror creatures in different locations.

Warning: I will not show the miniatures in this post, I completely leave them out because some of them are huge(!) and I don't know how they will fit in the boxes after I assembled them. Most likely I will have to do some magnetizing. Therefore I will cover them in a later article.

For this unboxing I will try to show the contents of both boxes in parallel because at some points they are pretty similar to each other. So let's see what is in the boxes (big wall of text incoming)!

The both core boxes are really huge and heavy. They directly reminded me of the big box when I bought me Descent. The artwork is really nice and no big surprises here because they follow the Kickstarter announcements. The box is made of the standard cardboard I think and has a decent quality and I don't fear the box will just rip apart when taking the game to a normal use.

The boxes follow two different topics: The first is named "City of Ancients" and the second one "Swamps of Death"
That also is visible in the different tile sets and missions from the rulebooks.

Contents of the boxes

As said the boxes are really stuffed with cards, miniatures, tiles and markers. So you get all you need for playing your first game as it should be :) And you also get a soundtrack to company your games! Pretty cool because that was one of the things which were enabled because of the success of the Kickstarter,

To get all this content showing, I will try to sort the pictures in a kind of table to get a nice overview over everything.

Custom Dice

Soundtrack

City of Ancients
Rulebooks

Swamps of Death
Rulebooks

City of Ancients
Heroes and Monsters

Swamps of Death
Heroes and Monsters

City of Ancients
Locations

Swamps of Death
Locations

City of Ancients
Playcards

Swamps of Death
Playcards

Now you have everything together to play! That is a whole lot of stuff to set up. I like it very much that you have each monster on one card (you have to turn the sheet to get the brutal version of it) and that you have lots of item, encounter artifacts cards. The rules are so far nicely written, but how good they are I can only judge after my first game.

But there is more. Every Dungeoncrawler needs some tileset and lots and lots of markers. So I will also give you an impression of them. They are printed on a more durable cardboard and again seems like the thickness is pretty standard for that, because Descent, Sedition Wars and all the others I own use pretty much the same thickness of material.

City of Ancients
Tiles

Swamps of Death
Tiles

City of Ancients
Markers

Swamps of Death
Marker

Again I need some more preparation here. My wife will sew some fitting pouches for all the stuff. Hate it when markers and stuff is flying wildly around.

Kickstarter exlusives

And as Backer I also received some nice addons to the normal core boxes. One directly linked to the game is a exclusive hero for the players: The Outlaw. I got all the special sheets and gear cards, only the miniature will be delivered with Wave II.

By the way: My checklist which Flying Frog Productions send me only had three items checked. More than one full DinA4 page is still missing and delivered in Wave II. Sounds awesome ;)

Additionally there was a small "Thank you" item included. A nice artwork signed by the people involved with the Kickstarter. I really like stuff that because it makes backing a project special. You could buy most of the Kickstarter stuff afterwards but these little things will always be a special reminder for you as Backer. That's why I am so happy with my KoW ruleboook because my name is printed in it ;)

Conclusion

Am I happy with the core boxes so far? I would say yes! Plenty of material in a decent quality. Some nice Kickstarter exclusives and a setting and ruleset which seem pretty cool. The miniatures seem to have a great quality, much better than Descent and I would put them in the category of tabletop miniatures not in pure gaming miniatures. Which I really like!

Am I bomb-happy? Nearly. There are two things I don't like so far: First is the general setup of the plastic boxes. The rulebooks are too big to fit into that. Common, really? How difficult could that be to make this stuff fitting and prevent those ugly bending of the rulebooks. Seems someone didn't think the box layout completely through...

Fitting to that is the setup of the second core box "Swamps of Death". I see what they wanted to achieve (better access to the cards), but through this carved out space at the cards you HAVE to use some elastic bands to keep them together and prevent everything from flying around. This is much better done in the "first" box.

And it seems I was a bit unlucky with one of my tilesets. Seems like the machine had a small malfunction and ripped it a bit apart. That is something which quality control should have found and replaced. I am not sure if I will contact Flying Frog Productions and ask if the replace the set or if I just let that be, because its not too bad. The ripping is at the non used part only the minor ripping of the cardboard is in the playable area.

OK that's it for now. Have to listen to the soundtrack, plan my first testgame and order me some neodym magnets so that I can present you the miniatures soon. So I will definitely do a second article about Shadows of Brimstone in the future. 

So long,

Paradox0n

P.S.:
I think this was one of my longest articles so far. Hope you liked it and I would be very happy if you would comment and/or like/share this whole thing :)

P.P.S: Sorry for the republishing. Wanted to change the layout a bit an killed the post...