Shadowhand Critic Reviews

ShadowHand takes an old game with a reputation for dullness, and dresses it up in an elegant Victorian English RPG coat. Somehow miraculously, it works really well. It isn’t a reinvention of the wheel, but the sense of personality the game pack in addition to being simply fun definitely makes it worth the time and money.

The original combination of never-aging card classic with innovative RPG mechanics, hidden in a bit of trashy scarf of the British countryside with a touch of buccaneers. Ideal for long winter evenings and a quarter-hour breaks when you just need to relax.

The developers did what they could to avoid the word “solitaire”, but that’s what Shadow Hand is at its core. It’s not just a solitaire though, it’s a hell of a solitaire.

An ambitious game but one which exposes and compounds the weaknesses of solitaire.

Shadowhand is an enjoyable strategic card game with RPG elements. The core of the game is not other but the traditional solitaire. Al tough the additions are interesting, lucky factor is too important and ruins, in some way, the general experience.

Blending solitaire with role-playing, combat and a racy, buccaneering plot, Shadowhand is a delight - and a true British eccentric.

Shadowhand, by contrast, is not for me. I’ll put Pip and Adam’s love of the previous game, which looks to be the same mix of cogs and odds, down to a monumental clash of tastes. Where they found that blend of petticoats and card-plucking soothing and thoughtful, I found this one boring in the extreme and stylistically overblown, floating through a brief few hours with it in a somnambulic state (I couldn’t bear to finish it) occasionally roused enough to tut at an uncooperative deck or the hackneyed dialogue.