I am, in all ways, a lover of schlock. I love peppy power metal bands that sing exclusively about Wizards. A movie called ‘Velocipastor’ is my idea of a good time. If the concept makes a certain caliber of consumer say “that sounds f****** stupid”, I’m in. The Sheep, a brand-new board game by Zero Strategy Games, fits that bill to a tee.
I first wrote about The Sheep last year when it hit Kickstarter. It promised a thematic game with a little strategy thrown in, and it also promised killer sheep. You’d play as a shepherd herding precious caravans by day – and slaughtering the attacking supernatural sheep at night.
It’s the movie Black Sheep with more eldritch horror and fewer New Zealand accents. The horror-comedy angle clearly caught people’s attention, because Zero Strategy Games raised more than $500,000 to make the thing. That’s hardly Frosthaven numbers, but it’s mighty fine for a board game about killer sheep.
Now, copies are reaching the hands of backers. I’ve had a chance to take a friend’s copy for a test spin, and it lives up to the schlocky hype. The Sheep isn’t perfect, and it won’t win any best board games awards. It is, however, a seriously silly – and entertaining – time.
In The Sheep, your goal is to ferry five caravans from one end of the farm to the other. If even a single caravan succumbs to the frenzied flock, the game is over.
Play is cooperative, but it’s also slightly asymmetric. Each shepherd starts out with a unique item and a special ability. My Soothsayer, for example, had an umbrella that could electrocute The Sheep or, instead, give one of my buddies an energy boost. I also had the power to move Essence – a resource used for buying items and unlocking new powers – between player boards.
The Sheep is split into day and night phases. When the sun is up, caravans plod forward, and you can afford to do some moving, shopping, and strategizing. You know where The Sheep are likely to spawn, and you know they’ll move towards the nearest caravan. It’s up to you to position yourself carefully, arm yourself with a diverse range of weapons, and level up quickly so you have more ways to block the flock.
With night comes danger. A new sheep mutation is revealed, changing the damage resistances and weaknesses of your woolly enemies. The Sheep appear, with beefier sides of lamb spawning the longer the game goes on. They’ll charge you and attack, but only if they can’t reach a precious caravan first. Destroying the caravans is, for bizarre, unknown reasons, all they really care about.
Fight The Sheep, gain Essence, improve your character. Rinse and repeat until one side overwhelms the other. Juggle curses (which give you eldritch power but kill you if you collect too many) and watch out for the negative effects of ‘pollution’. Enjoy a horde of silly sheep puns and adorable sheeples along the way.
At times, The Sheep almost feels like an area control game. Generally, the more ground we covered, the stronger and more flexible we were, as you always want at least one shepherd within a few spaces of a caravan to fight off The Sheep onslaught.
That meant our most effective strategy was forming a daisy chain across the map. As the chain of caravans pushed forward, there was a shepherd to defend them from every conceivable sheep spawn point.
Events, pollution setbacks, and sheep abilities constantly throw new problems your way. While our core daisy chain strategy stayed firm, we still had interesting choices to make each night. This was largely down to Lanterns, a limited resource that can be spent on nighttime movement, special abilities, or dealing extra damage to The Sheep.
You only get a few of these, and each night, the game would cause just slightly too many problems for you to tackle at once. That creates an interesting decision space – when you can’t fight every fire, which do you prioritize to make the next night less overwhelming?
This is the kind of game that gets your group excitedly colluding over a busy board of angry meeples. There’s chatter, plotting, and laughing (mainly at all those sheep puns I mentioned). There’s groans when a brutal mutation of The Sheep appears, and there’s sights of relief when a particularly volatile spawn point stays empty.
The Sheep nails the emotional rollercoaster I’ve come to expect of thematic-first titles. That comes with the usual genre drawbacks, of course – luck massively determines how much the card draws will hinder your journey.
I found my first game a little too easy, while a friend’s previous playthrough was a brutal bloodfest. Still, fans of games like Betrayal at House on the Hill and Arkham Horror will be more than used to such swing-y conditions.
If The Sheep has one problem, it’s pacing. A game takes around 2 hours, and the relatively simple system starts to outstay its welcome. You’ll finish levelling up your character well before the game ends, which gives you plenty of time to use your sweet new powers, but almost nothing to spend your Essence on. As a hardened sheep killer, that once-precious resource is now in plentiful supply, and it begins to feel like wasted space.
Similarly, once the first few caravans have made it over the finish line, you’ll find yourself doing a lot more thumb-twiddling. The daisy chain, once desperately spread out, can now bunch up so snugly that some characters will struggle to find anything useful to do. It’s just a case of culling The Sheep, blocking their attacks, and waiting for the caravans to inch slowly forward.
That anticlimax doesn’t dismantle the game entirely, and I’d still recommend taking on the flock yourself. But it means this schlockfest stops just short of being a show-stopper.
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Source: Wargamer
