Board Game Review: Street Masters Kickstarter Exclusives: Legend of Oni and Stretch Goals

Today we’re looking at the two Kickstarter Exclusive Boxes from Street Masters, Legend of Oni and the Stretch Goals. Both should be available in the upcoming Aftershock expansion if the rumors are true.

Legend of Oni

Legend of Oni takes place around a central story, the summoning of a powerful Oni, taking place over a four stages. This set has no new Fighters, but instead four new stages and a new villain deck with miniatures.

One Step Ahead takes place on a series of cliffsides. The three cliffs are each divided by danger spaces. Characters begin the game with Climbing Gear, allowing them to ignore the danger spaces which normally stop your movement. Minions will attempt attack fighters on their steppe, but if there are none, they will instead move toward the highest peak and into the cave there. If three minions ever enter the cave, the players lose. Events such as Strong Winds and Avalanches can also be a major hazard, causing fighters to fall.

The Ashes of the Eternal stage is on fire. Literally. There are 10 special fire tokens to correspond with it. Each fighter begins the game carrying an Urn of the Unclean. If all fire tokens are on the map, the players lose. Players can put out the fires, while enemies attempt to activate the Urns of the Unclean to cause more fire to be created. The Urns, when carried, cause the space a fighter is in to burst into flames. If a player can make contact with the objective location that matches the color of their urn, the urn is removed from the game. Most of the other cards in the stage also cause more fire to break out, so it’s just one big fiery mess.

Running Wild looks the same as the Ashes of the Eternal map, but is demolished, with a massive crater and the temple in ruins. The players are attempting to search for the idols, and are able to do so in spaces with a magnifying glass on them. If the villains ever find 3 objectives, the players lose, so the hunt is on. Once players acquire the idols, they now need to keep it out of the enemies’ hands. If a fighter is unable to discard a defense token when attacked, they immediately drop the idol, giving villains the ability to pick them up.

The Ceremony stage features a Shinto temple as The Oni is summoned and possesses its earthly host. You start with the Alignment card on the table, which says that the boss in unable to be defeated, along with the Oni’s Vessel – Summoning card. Once five objective tokens are on the Oni’s Vessel card, the Alignment card is removed, allowing you to now damage the possessed host. However, every turn the possessed will cause 3 damage to each player. There are a lot of card effects which do a lot beyond that, but it’s a brutal, brutal stage.

The Oni enemy deck is a lot more involved than other decks. The game begins with the boss’s Yokai side up. If he’s defeated, all damage is discarded and the Shin Yokai side is flipped up, along with the Shin Yokai figure. This is the more dangerous Oni. Two of the minions are Yurei Ninja and Kitsune. Kitsune is a fairly standard minion, but there is a special Shadow Pile on the side of the board with the Yurei Shadow cards set there. Any time a fighter is told to draw a Yurei Shadow card, they pull from this side deck. Yurei Shadows are clear plastic versions of the Yurei Shadows. If a Yurei Ninja is defeated, it instead teleports to a Yurei Shadow space and discards the shadow. The shadows are unable to be defeated by any sort of ranged attack as well, so you’ve got to get in nice and close. Plenty of other cards in the deck make Yokai incredibly difficult to deal with. The miniatures are top notch. The clear ninjas look really awesome, especially next to the solid plastic ones.

This expansion is much more story driven. Whereas the other expansions and the core set felt like the story mode was entirely optional, it really feels like you’ll want to play the Legend of Oni storyline here to experience the expansion as it was intended, which is fine by me. It’s very cool.

Stretch Goals

The Stretch Goals box doesn’t match the others. Instead, it’s solid black with the logo on all sides and the front. These were the stretch goals steadily unlocked over the course of the Kickstarter. The box features a bunch more minis, three new fighter decks, one enemy deck, and two stage decks, along with lots of tokens.

The Ally/Rival cards in the box include Mr. Apple, the trainer of many of the Street Masters, along with Chan Chan the panda. Mr. Apple allows fighters to use the defense tokens from Mr. Apple for themselves, and removes defense tokens from enemies and places them on himself. As a rival, he strips defense tokens from the heroes. Chan Chan as an Ally attacks enemies while providing nearby allies with defense tokens, and does the exact opposite as a rival, attacking heroes then giving nearby villains defense tokens.

The box also contains Ally/Rival miniatures for each of the cards found in the core box.

Rude Awakening is one of the two new stages, which features Necromancers summoning Remnant zombies onto the battlefield as well as forcing the fighters to deal with spike pits. The box features a bunch of zombie tokens, so they just continue to spawn turn after turn. The necromancer tokens are flipped inactive any time they take damage, so players will want to continue keeping the Necromancers at bay while also dealing with the villain deck.

Out of Time takes place on a Mayan temple, again featuring the Remnant zombies. In this stage, the players attempt to destroy the evil altars which keep summoning zombies. The players lose if all of the zombies have been deployed to the battlefield.

The enemy deck is The Nahualli, with Tlazolteotl, a powerful sorcerer as its boss. She is able to summon The Faithful, some zombies who are a more powerful than the Remnant zombies in the other stages. The deck is full of spells Tlazolteotl casts, as well as Pale Callers, big beast zombies who summon Faithful zombies around them. If you combine this enemy deck with either of the two stages (highly recommended, as that’s how it’s designed), you’re going to have a ton of zombies everywhere, and have a hard time taking down Tlazolteotl.

Tiger Azules is one of the three fighter decks. Tiger is a beefy dude in a tank top who put on a tiger mask which turned his head into an actual tiger’s head. Tiger is a luchadore, so his moves are all pro-wrestling inspired, along with new abilities enhanced by his new catlike reflexes.

Clint is a gunslinger, complete with wide-brimmed hat. He’s also a bar-room brawler, so he can toss enemies around, while blasting away with his six-shooters. One card, Laying Down the Law, allows him to hit up to 6 different enemies at once. His big charged power is to deal either 6 damage to any enemy in play (anywhere on the board), or deal 3 red dice in damage up to 5 spaces.

Max is a super tough cyborg who has large robot arms. He can pick up people and throw them across the battlefield (including allies, allowing for a Fastball Special-type attack). Max doesn’t automatically flip to his charged side, but instead does lots of things to give him charge tokens, then chooses when to flip to lock himself out of drawing cards and instead use the powers he has in his hand while discarding the charge tokens. If you’ve gotten yourself charged up enough, you can end up unleashing a huge amount of damage.

These are all really great expansions, providing a massive amount of content. With all of the expansions and the core set together, you have a near-unlimited amount of content to play with. I’m seriously looking forward to the new Kickstarter to see what else the Sadlers and Black List Games comes up with.