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There are games where you sit there planning five turns ahead and trying to optimise every little move. Shug really doesn’t care much about that. This is a game where people argue with monsters, block roads out of spite, and settle rule discussions through something called “Shug Court”. That already tells you what kind of evening you’re signing up for.
The game takes place in “Ol’ Engoland”, a strange fantasy version of England where eels are currency, everybody smells faintly of cabbage, and King Charles the Cursed is somehow more worried about his hairstyle than the kingdom collapsing around him. Naturally, monsters end up becoming public enemy number one, and somewhere in all this chaos there’s an old prophecy involving a mysterious creature called Shug.
Your goal is either to kill the King or bring Shug safely to the pub. Which feels like the most British fantasy objective imaginable.
At first glance, Shug looks like a classic adventure game. You move around the board, collect items, fight monsters, uncover runestones, and get stronger over time. But after about twenty minutes, the game turns into something much stranger. People start making deals, blocking paths, stealing cards, interrupting each other, and desperately trying to convince the table that they completed a monster task correctly.
That’s where the game became really enjoyable for our group. It’s not trying to be a polished strategy game. It feels more like a social fantasy sandbox where the rules exist mainly to create stories. Sometimes things become complete nonsense, but those were also some of our favourite moments. The game launches on Kickstarter soon, and after trying the prototype, I can already tell this is going to be one of those games people either completely love or absolutely bounce off.
👥 1-6 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30-90 minutes
📝 Design & Artwork: Rufus Dye-Montefiore, Luke Dye-Montefiore & Dillon Morris
🏢 Publisher: Wandering Games (preview copy provided)
Gameplay overview
A turn in Shug is simple on paper. You draw a treasure card, roll dice to move around the map, and then deal with whatever disaster you’ve walked into.
Movement happens along roads connecting villages, forests, rivers, tunnels, bridges, marshes, and cities. Some spaces give rewards, some trigger chaos effects, and inns let you reroll your movement. Which sounds helpful until you reroll into an even worse situation. The important thing is that monsters appear whenever you leave the main path and move into dangerous areas like forests, marshes, whirlpools, or parts of the city. Once that happens, your movement stops immediately and you have to deal with the monster. You can either fight it or try to recruit it.
Combat itself is pretty straightforward. You compare attack values built from items, companions, and card effects. The more interesting part is the monster “desire” system. Instead of fighting, many monsters can join you if you complete some weird task written on the card.
And these tasks are properly weird.
Treasure cards are constantly flying around the table too. Some stay in play as equipment, while others are one-time effects that interrupt battles, sabotage plans, or save people from disaster. Because cards can also be played during other players’ turns, the game rarely stays predictable for long. Someone always has something annoying prepared, and plans can disappear very quickly.
Runestones hidden around the map reveal legends with special powers. One of them also triggers the King himself, which usually becomes a memorable moment at the table because fighting him is incredibly risky. The game also becomes much more interactive after the first round, because players can physically block each other’s movement unless permission is given to pass. Which means people immediately start acting like tiny fantasy border police.
“I’ll let you through if you give me your boots” became a completely normal sentence halfway through our session.
Duels are harsh too. Winning lets you steal cards, companions, legends, or sometimes completely wreck another player’s progress. Some groups will absolutely love that level of direct conflict. Others probably won’t enjoy losing half an hour of progress because somebody rolled well and decided violence was the answer. Which, to be fair, is often the answer in Shug.
The cooperative and solo modes change the atmosphere quite a bit. Instead of fighting each other constantly, players race against the King as he slowly moves toward the pub. Co-op felt more focused and a little easier to manage, while still keeping the weird humour and monster encounters intact.
Artwork, components, and presentation
We played a prototype copy, so some things might still change before release.
The first thing that stood out to me was the board itself. It looks less like a modern board game map and more like an old fantasy painting somebody found in a damp attic behind cursed furniture. I mean that positively.
The whole game has this rough, handmade style that gives it personality immediately. Nothing feels sterile or overly polished. The roads twist awkwardly across the board, forests look slightly threatening, and the city of Lunden almost looks painted directly into an old storybook. The artwork in general leans heavily into strange folk-horror mixed with absurd humour. Some monsters are creepy, others look like they escaped from somebody’s fever dream after eating expired mushrooms, and somehow it all still feels consistent.
The wooden meeples are great too. Instead of generic fantasy heroes, you get characters like Sandwich Boy, Toadman, and Tiddy. Which sounds less like adventurers and more like people banned from a local pub. The King is larger than the others and looks wonderfully ridiculous standing on the map in full royal fashion. He genuinely looks like somebody who would ignore a national crisis because his hair needs attention.
Even the items are ridiculous. Things like Sexy Armour, Slug Boots, and Toad Legs immediately tell you the game understands exactly how silly it wants to be. The game never really tries to look cool in the traditional fantasy sense, and I think it’s much stronger because of that. It commits fully to its own strange identity.
That said, readability could become an issue for some players. During our prototype games, certain cards occasionally took a second to process because there’s a lot happening visually. It wasn’t a huge problem, but I could see some players struggling with that during longer sessions. Still, the game definitely has identity. You could probably recognise Shug from across a convention hall without even seeing the title.
Our experience
The game worked best once everybody stopped trying to play “properly” and leaned into the nonsense instead. The moment people started negotiating constantly, interrupting each other, arguing over monster tasks, and making temporary alliances, the whole thing suddenly clicked. Before that, the game actually felt a bit stiff. That was probably the biggest surprise during our plays. On paper, the systems are fairly simple. Roll dice, move around, compare attack values, collect cards. But once players start interfering with each other constantly, the game changes completely.
The monster system was easily the highlight for us. Being able to either fight monsters or recruit them already gives encounters more personality than a normal combat check, but the desire tasks are what really define the experience. They turn the table itself into part of the game. Some tasks were genuinely funny, others completely failed, and a few became ongoing jokes for the rest of the session. One player spent several minutes trying to convince the table that their completely ridiculous interpretation of a monster task should count. Nobody agreed immediately, which somehow made it even funnier.
What also surprised us was how important movement became. At first everybody focused almost entirely on attack values, but after a while positioning mattered much more than we expected. Blocking paths, using tunnels well, reaching runestones first, escaping danger, or simply standing in the right place at the right time often mattered more than becoming stronger. There were moments where somebody with far fewer cards still controlled the entire table because they happened to be standing in exactly the wrong place for everyone else.
The duels can also be much harsher than they first appear. A single bad fight can completely undo someone’s progress, especially if other players decide to target the person in the lead. We had turns where players lost companions, cards, and legends almost immediately after building up a strong position. I can imagine some groups finding that frustrating, especially if they prefer games where progress feels safer or more consistent.
The chaos cards created mixed reactions during our sessions too. Sometimes they caused hilarious situations that completely changed the direction of the game. Other times they interrupted things so heavily that it became difficult to build any kind of longer plan. Shug clearly isn’t interested in rewarding perfect optimisation. It rewards timing, opportunism, negotiation, and occasionally surviving complete nonsense.
One thing I really appreciated is how fully everything commits to the same tone. The artwork, monster names, tasks, card effects, player pieces, and even the rulebook language all support the same strange world. Even when parts of the game become messy, it rarely feels accidental. The rough edges almost feel built into the personality of the game itself.
That said, Shug absolutely depends on having the right group. If players are willing to improvise, joke around, betray each other a little, and embrace the chaos, the game can create genuinely memorable sessions. If the table wants something very structured or highly competitive in a traditional sense, Shug could become frustrating quite quickly.
Our thoughts
After finishing our plays, I kept thinking about how few adventure games would willingly let the table descend into this level of nonsense. Shug feels like a fantasy game that would rather make you argue over goblin poetry than impress you with perfectly polished systems. That’s probably why it sticks in your head afterwards.
What I also found interesting is that the game slowly reveals more structure the more you play it. During our first session, everything mostly felt chaotic. But later on, we started noticing how important board position and timing actually are underneath all the nonsense. Knowing when to reveal a runestone, when to challenge another player, when to save reaction cards, or when to avoid looking too powerful becomes surprisingly important.
I already know people in our group who would happily play this every month, and others who looked slightly exhausted after one session. Shug constantly asks players to participate socially. You’re negotiating, reacting, interrupting, judging monster tasks, making deals, and occasionally arguing over rules. If somebody at the table mostly wants to focus on their own strategy quietly, this could become tiring fairly quickly.
What I’m most curious about long term is whether the monster tasks and humour still feel fresh after ten or fifteen plays. The first sessions are entertaining because players constantly discover strange cards and ridiculous situations for the first time. After that, I think the game will probably depend more on the people at the table than surprise alone. If your group enjoys temporary alliances, betrayal, and messing with each other’s plans, I can see Shug lasting for a very long time.
Co-op felt less exhausting because we spent less time sabotaging each other and more time dealing with the game itself. I still think the competitive mode is probably the “real” Shug experience, but it’s also the version most likely to divide groups. Some people are going to absolutely love how aggressive and unfair it can become. Others definitely won’t.
What I appreciate most is that even when parts of Shug don’t fully work, it still feels memorable. There are loads of fantasy board games out there, but very few where players end up arguing over bridge access while carrying items called ‘Sexy Armour’.
That sentence alone probably explains whether this game is for you.
And I do mean this positively… I can already imagine somebody pulling this game off the shelf late at night with the sentence: “come on, one more round.” For the right group, Shug really does feel like the kind of game where the stories become more important than who actually wins.
The game launches on Kickstarter soon.
📝 We received a prototype copy from Wandering Games.
