Shadows: Amsterdam - a game where you guess what the other people are guessing about ambiguous pictures

Shadows: Amsterdam (Libellud, 2-8 players, ages 10 and up) is the newest entry in the micro-genre (that includes Dixit and Mysterium) of guess what the other people are guessing about ambiguous pictures games.

The ambiguous pictures, in the case of Shadows, are a multitude of charming, somewhat dark paintings of what is best described as a furry-noir Amsterdam-by-way-of-Zootopia. Anthropomorphic animals tend tulip fields, enjoy clog dancing, and take romantic selfies, but also lurk in doorways, bribe officials, discover bodies, and brood menacingly in the 150 or so images that make up the games board and deck of cards.

Thematically, the game is a race between teams of private eyes (or as one team against the clock) to solve an unspecified mystery by navigating your teams pawn to the locations of clues while avoiding locations with police. These locations are marked on a map visible only to each teams dispatcher, whose job it is to give the clues to their teammates.

The dispatcher guides their team by silently handing them cards from a face-up pool of 10, and the teams job is to figure out from the picture where it is the dispatcher wants them to move. The meat of the game lies in the fact that most of the pictures arent really that similar, or alternatively might be equally good/terrible matches to multiple spaces for different reasons. Does the baby raccoon in the stroller match the panicking scientist behind the biohazard door because they both have big eyes? Or does it match the chicken fingers and fries in the cafe because thats what hes going to want to eat? Read the rest “Shadows: Amsterdam - a game where you guess what the other people are guessing about ambiguous pictures”