Dave Reviews: Rock 'N' Roll

Shobu

If it's got a Japanese name and it's made for two players, the track record of quality is solid. You've got Onitama, Hanamikoji, and now Shobu, the only one of the three without cards and with polished rocks.

The best way to explain Shobu is this: it looks more complicated than it is, then when you learn how it works, it's more complicated than it looks.

Shobu is played on four, 4x4 wooden boards. Each player (black and white) has four stones lined up on each board. A rope divides the two boards closest to one player from the two boards closest to the other player (horizontally). The four boards are also two different colors, split vertically (ie. one each on either side of the rope). The goal is to knock all of your opponent's pieces off of one of the four boards.

On your turn, you take a passive action and an aggressive action. Your passive action has to take place on one of the boards on your side of the rope. You move one of your stones one or two spaces in any direction (orthogonally or diagonally). You cannot move into a space with one of your opponent's stones, however. Then you replicate the move with a stone on one of the opposite colored boards. It can be any stone, and the board can be on either side of the rope, as long as it's the opposite color. This is the aggressive action, and with this you can shove an opponent's stone. This is how you achieve your win condition—make passive moves that enable aggressive moves which let you shove enemy pieces off the board.

If that explanation was hard to visualize, well, it takes a second to get your head around it when all the boards and pieces are right in front of you. Once you do a couple of legal moves, it's pretty easy to conceptualize how that works, but then you'll make some kind of strategic mistake that you would have never noticed without actually making the mistake (or seeing someone else make it). For example, maybe you decide to make your aggressive moves on your own side of the rope, essentially meaning you focus on moving stones on both boards on your side. It might put your opponent in a difficult position initially, but then most or all of those stones are moved up and now you can't use them to move stones on the other side of the rope forward. There are a decent number of ways for a new player to approach the game that involve shooting themselves in the foot, but it also creates a very obvious learning curve that can be enjoyable to traverse. Likewise, there's so much going on with the possible combinations of passive and aggressive moves that it's very easy for a new player to miss potential critical moves, either advantageous ones for themselves or an opponent's moves they need to avoid.
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So, on the scale of two-player games, how does it rate? The combinations can become complex, but the game itself isn't super-heavy in terms of strategy you need to learn. That's the main benefit to the game, offering both a learning curve and the challenge of your opposition while not requiring that you spend hours mulling over possible tactics in order to maximize your chances of winning. It's also very aesthetically pleasing, On the other hand, its replayability is entirely dependent on how much you enjoy the core game, since the game plays the same way every time. It has no changing factor like Onitama's tactic cards, and there are no variants in the rules.

But the core game is quite good. When you're in the throes of deciding your best move from the two immediately available, then you see three, then six, then eight, you quickly realize you're looking at a game that's done a considerable amount of work with a very limited rule set. Consider this highly recommended for fans of games that rely on the strategy of working against one's opponent rather than the challenge of understanding the game itself, and who enjoy perfecting their play within a single set of rules rather than dealing with small curveballs thrown at them each time they break out the game.

Score: Fourteen shiny rocks out of sixteen.