The Sheep is a cooperative 2–4 player, comedy-horror game in which you play as shepherds attempting to lead a caravan train across a landscape populated by malevolent, supernatural sheep—just a typical weekend trek across the moors…. (Although the minimum player count is specified as 2, you can easily play it solo, taking control of multiple shepherds.)
There isn’t a turn structure as such, with players’ actions taking place over a series of days (relatively calm) and nights (when things get scary), until either you get all the caravans to their destination, or merely one of a list of catastrophes occurs. The death of a shepherd is not one of those catastrophes, though losing a person isn’t going to make the journey any easier for the remainder; expired shepherds still count towards the number of sheep spawned during the night, though they can’t take part in defending against those sheep.
The game is actually fairly easy to play despite the apparent fiddlyness of some of the rules, but hard to win. The rulebook is short and includes enough examples to take players through a day/night cycle fairly painlessly. However, it is a bit short on details, and it’s worth checking out the BoardGameGeek forum threads, in particular this one for stuff that tends to trip people up—a couple of things to be aware of are that unless stated otherwise, abilities such as healing can be used remotely, and not just on shepherds in the same space as the one using the ability; and where a penalty is applied to someone with the most/least of something or other, players choose who gets it when there’s a tie.
Concepts
There’s a lot of jargon in this game: Essence, Corruption, Curses, Pollution… A glossary is included in the rulebook (pages 14 and 15), but I’ll outline the most important ones here.
During the game, you’ll play various cards from your hand. One type is the Equipment card, such as Hoof Clippers (bottom middle of the picture above): the card costs 2 Essence as indicated top right, has an ability which the player can invoke (the text bar), and can be used as a weapon (the two icons at the bottom).
Similar to Equipment cards are Curses (such as Sombre Step, bottom left above). You pick these up as a result of accumulating Corruption, and aren’t allowed to discard them. If you ever acquire more Curse cards than your hand limit, your shepherd immediately expires.
When used, whether via its ability or in an attack, the card is exhausted (turned face down), and can’t be used again until the beginning of the next day.
Essence is the currency of the game, and can be traded in for Experience as well as for Equipment cards. It’s also used to activate Curse cards (unlike Equipment cards, which cost nothing to use). When converted to Experience, in a process referred to as purification, you also need to spend a Lantern.
Your 3 Lanterns are crucial pieces of kit, and like cards, they can be used only once per day/night cycle. During the day phase, you can exhaust one to add an extra hit point to your attack, or along with an Essence token, gain an Experience point; and at night, you can use them to avert Pollution, move a single step or ‘distract’ sheep (more on that later).
(I hope you’re keeping up!) Pollution accumulates during the night, adding to your woes by causing Pollution tiles to come into play (unless you use Lanterns to avoid this), invariably causing nasty things to happen, as I’ll explain later.
Experience is tracked on your player board, and gaining points will allow your shepherd to level up, gaining additional Traits. Traits slot into your player board and are similar to Equipment cards, but specific to each shepherd. Like Equipment and Curses, can be used only once per day/night cycle. As you gain Traits, your hand limit increases to 4 and finally to 5.
When shepherds or caravans are attacked, they gain Corruption, marked on a tracker on both boards. When you hit the limit on a shepherd card, you gain a Curse card, and the tracker resets. However, if you hit the limit on any caravan, it’s game over—and you lost.
That’s enough jargon to be getting on with, so now let’s look at playing the game.
Setup
The board is double-sided, so the first thing to do is pick a side; the Downs is a little easier than the River.
There’s a Pollution meter near the bottom left of the board; the one printed on the board is for 2 players, and there’s a mildly annoying and easy to jog bit of card to place on top for 3 or 4 players (displaying correspondingly larger amounts of Pollution to disperse). Place the Pollution Tracker on the purple spot alongside the bottom of the scale.
Separately shuffle the 3 waves of the Flock deck (black back with a pair of sheep) and stack the 8 wave 3 cards face down, with 4 wave 2 on top then 4 wave 1, and put the rest aside. If you want an easier game, use more wave 1 and 2 cards; for harder, use fewer of them.
Remove the 14 starting Equipment cards (crossed crooks on the back) from the rest—these are the zero cost ones, which don’t have an Essence count in the corner. Separately shuffle the remaining Equipment, Curse (purple back), Day Event (sun on the back) and Night Event (moon on the back) cards, placing the decks face down within reach. Shuffle the larger Mutation deck and place it on its spot on the board. (Why does this deck have its own place on the board for a face down stack? I reckon it’d be more helpful to have spots for the face up Flock, Event and Mutation cards in play and leave the rest out of the way.)
Place the Sheeple bags (why are they in bags anyway?) and Pollution tile bag nearby. The rulebook notes that if you want a particularly tough game, you can draw one or more Pollution Tiles to place on the board (minor side up) before play begins.
Choose a random set of caravan boards to the tune of the number of players and an extra. Set them alongside the board with 3 randomly selected Equipment cards face up. Put the corresponding standee on the caravan board, and place a purple Corruption cube at the start of the caravan’s track.
Each player selects a shepherd board along with the matching Trait cards and the 3 starting Equipment cards indicated on the board: each shepherd has different abilities, similar to games like Pandemic. (Like Pandemic, crises occur regularly in this game, with disease outbreaks—er, sheep—springing up all over the place, but I digress). Choose one of the level 1 Traits and slot it into the board. Place the Corruption cube (purple) and Experience cube (yellow) at the start of their tracks. Add 3 Lanterns lit side up and 2 Essence tokens. Finally, put the corresponding standee in the starting space at the top left of the main board.
Now, you’re ready to play.
Day
First, reset any of your Lanterns, Equipment, Curses and Traits used in the previous day/night cycle by turning them all face up—lit side up, in the case of Lanterns. (Obviously, not necessary on the first day.)
On all but the first cycle, reveal a Day Event card. These indicate a condition that applies during this phase (in the case of the card shown in the middle of the top row in the earlier picture, purchases are discounted by 1 Essence token), as well as the direction caravans should turn when they reach a fork.
Next, deal with caravans. For any caravan with an action printed on its board, perform that action. If there are any caravans not yet on the board, pick one to move onto the starting space. Then, move each caravan now on the board along the hexes containing paths, up to 2 spaces towards the finish (unless an event card indicates otherwise), taking the direction at forks indicated on the Day Event card—the event cards nicely, or perhaps not so nicely, disrupt any plans you might have had to keep all your caravans on the same track. Sheep on your path can cause caravans to slow, costing a movement point (e.g., leaving a space containing sheep means the caravan can move only 1 step rather than 2). In addition, caravans cannot enter spaces already containing other caravans, queuing up behind them instead. Obviously, the order in which you choose to move caravans can help avoid that as a problem. If a caravan enters the finish space, take it off the board—it no longer participates in the game, in particular meaning its action can no longer be used.
Finally, shepherds have their go. Apart from movement which can happen only once, each shepherd can perform as many of the following actions as players want and have resources for, in any order: move up to 3 spaces (they can stray from paths, just not into the dark shaded spaces), but be aware that movement can’t be interrupted by other actions); purchase equipment from caravans; use abilities on cards or Traits (remembering to turn the card over to indicate that the action has been performed); spend a Lantern to convert one Essence token into one Experience point; give Essance to another player on your space; or attack sheep (see later).
If you purchase equipment (or gain a Curse—see later), you may have to discard some other Equipment cards to keep within your hand limit. You can only discard Equipment; Curse cards have to stay in your hand. It doesn’t matter if the card you toss is exhausted; the new card enters your hand face up, available to use.
Night
One of the trickiest parts of the rules is taking care how daytime and nighttime actions differ, so pay attention! Lanterns have (some) different uses, movement changes, and combat is different.
The first thing that happens is revealing a Night Event card, which sets conditions for the night phase: giving sheep extra movement in the example shown top right in the earlier picture.
Move the Pollution marker up its track by the amount shown on the bottom of the Night Event card. The marker will align with different amounts of Pollution on the scale beside that track (e.g., the third position on the track corresponds to 2 units of Pollution with 2 players, and 4 with 4 players). If all players between them can spend Lanterns to cancel out that total, nothing happens, otherwise you get a Pollution tile. If fewer than 3 are out, draw one from the bag and place it, minor side up, on one of the spaces at the bottom of the board; if all 3 spaces are already full, flip one of the minor tiles to its major side, unless they’re all major already, in which case the game’s over and you lose. Regardless of how Pollution has been dealt with, you now perform all the steps on the Pollution tiles on the board (which could be, e.g., adding sheep to the board, or giving caravans additional Corruption).
Next come a sequence of sheep actions. Draw a card from the Mutation deck to determine the strength and health of the different types of sheep (e.g., Magma Ram, shown bottom right in the cards picture indicates that the smallest sheep has 2 health points and deals 1 point of Corruption when it attacks, etc.). These cards also have additional effects; in the case of Magma Ram, caravans take an extra Corruption point when attacked. Finally, at the left and right of the card are damage types the sheep are particularly sensitive to or immune against (more on that in a bit). Because of that last part, there’s the possibility of a slightly easier game by including a house rule to reveal this card at the start of the day rather than night, to give players advance notice of which weapons are worth not exhausting during the day or which will be useless in combat.
Now, draw a Flock card (top left in the picture), which shows how many of each type of sheep to add to the indicated spaces on the board, dependent on the number of players; if you run out of sheep meeples—er, I mean, sheeples—of the correct size, use the next higher tiers instead, or if there are none of the largest, move down a tier. If the Flock deck is empty after this, create a new deck from just the wave 3 cards.
Next, the sheep move, each taking up to 3 steps towards the nearest caravan; as with shepherds, they don’t have to stick to the path spaces. They will stop short of the full movement if they reach a caravan first. If two caravans are equidistant, they’ll head in the direction of the one closest to the finish; if that doesn’t reduce the choice to one, they’ll pick a caravan with no shepherd on the same space; if there’s still a tie, players choose.
Shepherds can now perform actions, in any number and any order: use abilities on cards or Traits; spend Lanterns to move (just a single step per Lantern) or distract sheep (so that they attack shepherds on the same space instead of caravans); or give Essence to another shepherd on the same space.
The final part of the night is what we’ve all been waiting for: combat! First, shepherds attack sheep, then any remaining sheep attack caravans and shepherds, as described in the next section.
And after that, assuming you’ve survived, another day starts.
Battling Sheep
There are three types of sheep: lesser (the small cream-coloured sheeples), standard (medium-sized brown ones) or greater (large purple). During the day, they have health of 1, 2 and 3, respectively; during the night, their health appears on the revealed Mutation card.
Your Equipment and Curse cards have icons on the bottom indicating how many of what type of damage they can inflict—the types are irrelevant during the day, just the number of icons. (Do remember that any cards you’ve already exhausted by using for their abilities won’t be available for battle, and that you’ll exhaust the cards by playing them in battle.)
In daytime, you spend the appropriate number of icons to attack sheep in the same space as your shepherd any time during the action phase, and those hits can be distributed across multiple sheep—e.g., you could spend 3 damage points to remove both a lesser and a standard sheep from the board. You can’t weaken a sheep: the battle is all or nothing.
At nighttime, the types of damage matter: metal, fire, shock, runic and lantern (the names aren’t important—just match the icons to those shown on the Mutation card). As mentioned earlier, the Mutation card indicates what sheep are weak against (nothing in the case of the Magma Ram card shown earlier) or immune to (fire damage for that card). Any damage from types matching what sheep are weak against is doubled, whereas anything the sheep are immune to counts as nothing. At nighttime, you can’t distribute damage across sheep, but must deal with them one at a time, though multiple shepherds can attack the same sheep simultaneously. If a sheep is killed, its sheeple is removed from the board, and Essence is split up among shepherds in the same space: lesser, standard and greater sheep provide 1, 2 and 3 Essence tokens respectively—but remember, only at night. Shepherds can store a maximum of 5 Essence tokens, and any excess will have to be discarded.
At night, sheep can fight back, too. Sheep on spaces with caravans will attack those, unless a shepherd on the same space spends a Lantern to distract them, so that they’ll attack the shepherd instead. Sheep on a space with a shepherd (and no caravan) don’t need any encouragement to attack the shepherd. Each sheep adds Corruption points shown on the Mutation card to the caravan’s or shepherd’s track as appropriate.
And that’s how to play The Sheep. Good luck, and happy shepherding!
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Dune: Imperium - Uprising and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
