Advert: We were loaned this prototype in exchange for a review. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest. Components and gameplay may change.

There’s something baaaaaaad, in the neighbourhood. Who ya gonna call? Flockbusters! It’s time to review the eeriest of the ungulates: The Sheep.

👥 2-4 players
⌛ 120 minutes
🧠 14+ years

Game overview:

The Sheep is set in a corrupted land, where sheep are cute and fluffy by day but transform into woolly eldritch horrors by night! Luckily you and your fellow players are The Shepherds, a baaadass mercenary group founded to help caravans travel safely through the wilderness and kick some woolly butt.

During the day, the caravans push forward. The Shepherds (that’s you!) can move more freely and prepare for nightfall by levelling up, buying better equipment and culling sheep (they are much easier to kill when they’re all fluffy and innocent!). At night, more sheep spawn, move towards the caravans, and mutate into true terrors (determined by the drawn mutation card). Each mutation has its own ability, immunity and weaknesses, so you never know what you’ll be facing until it’s upon you. And it’s your job to slaughter these spooky sheep before they get to the caravans, because otherwise they’ll attack and corrupt the caravans (or you!).

If a Shepherd gets too corrupted, they draw a curse card which takes up a precious equipment slot. If your slots get full of curses, ya die!

As well as your equipment, each Shepherd owns 3 trusty lanterns. These can be spent on specific actions: levelling up in the day, moving at night, boosting attacks and distracting sheep from caravans. There’s also a Pollution Meter that grows each night, and if you can’t (or don’t want to) spend lanterns to keep the pollution at bay…well let’s just say, more baaad things happen. Who would’ve guessed.

The Shepherds win the game when all the caravans make it into the village, safe(ish) and sound. But if any one of the caravans is destroyed because it gets fully corrupted, the Shepherds lose.

Our first impressions:

• The Sheep is a balancing act that forces you to make tight choices with your actions. Especially with your 3 lanterns, which you need for SO MANY different, essential, actions. Adding to this, the carts start as a convoy but can often split up and follow different paths through the woods, so you can’t always protect them all at once (especially at lower player counts). Do you kill the sheep now it’s daytime and it’s easier, or wait until night when they’re tougher but give you the essence needed to level up? A lot of the game is accepting that baaad things are going to happen, but deciding which baaad things would you prefer to deal with that round. For example, sometimes we would let sheep attack carts, knowing the carts have enough health, so that we could spend lanterns to level up.

• I love the artwork and sheep mutation designs, I’m glad the designers went with a more ‘realistic’ aesthetic. And the puns/play on words used throughout the different cards are fun without it veering into being too goofy.

• Like with many disaster management games, there are various cool characters for players to choose from, each with their own starting equipment and abilities. And there are two abilities for the player to choose from at each level. Each caravan also has its own abilities that the shepherds can exploit. With the multiple characters and caravans to choose from, there’s added variability and challenge. I do think I would like to see more Sheep Mutations added in the future so there’s more variability there as well – there’s currently 18 and you see most of them in a game (assuming you survive long enough!). 

• I am a sucker for event cards! I think there’s something about the anticipation of added shenanigans. This game has both a day event (usually…ok) & night event (usually baaad!) each round, so there’s always something happening.

• We only had a chance to play it 2-player, and I do wonder if the game is easier at higher player counts because although more sheep will spawn, you can spread yourselves across more areas, which can be handy if the carts split up.

• Our biggest criticisms for The Sheep are that the current rules need a good edit, and a lot of the iconography needs improving, because at the moment they can be very difficult to read (e.g. distinguishing between the 3 different sheep icons, seeing the numbers in the small essence icons). This is a prototype though so hopefully these issues will get resolved for the final version.

• The timing on the box is 120 minutes, but I’d say it can vastly range depending on player count or if you die early. Our 2-player games were more like 90 minutes each time.

Final thoughts:

I was sold on The Sheep by the unique concept alone, and I’m pleased to report it’s not all fluff! Because the game itself is actually so fun to play – even though it’s really hard to win! Which I think says a lot because I don’t usually enjoy games where you’re expecting to lose. With improvements to the rules and icons, it’s perfect for people who are looking for their next co-operative disaster management game with a challenge.

The Sheep recently had a successful campaign on Kickstarter, but you can still late pledge here.