Bushido Passing the Night Review

When a Daimyo dies, his closest protectors must escort their remains to a sacred lake, with the citizens of the Isles making their forgiveness or blame known to the retainers along the route. As 4 veteran Prefecture of Ryu samurai make this journey, we check out this shamed procession from the Passing the Night themed warband box for Bushido.

We've been covering Bushido for years, so if you'd like to learn more about the game, check out our guide to Bushido Risen Sun, our review of the Bushido Risen Sun 2-player starter set, and our "Start Collecting" guide to Bushido, which includes an interview with the game's developer.

Thematically Themed

When selecting a warband in Bushido, you must first choose a faction from the 13 available to select your fighters from. Each faction also has access to theme cards, which offer special abilities but restrict the units that can be included in the warband. The Prefecture of Ryu are a faction for Bushido, and Passing the Night is a theme card, that restricts you to Samurai and Shisai from the Prefecture of Ryu clan, and Ronin Shisai, but allows you to select some powerful fighters that we'll talk about below, who can only be taken with the use of the Passing the Night theme card.

Shame!

When a Daimyo dies, his closest protectors must escort their remains to the Shrine of the Heavenly Gate, which sits in the middle of a sacred lake. Along the route, citizens offer prayer or place a bloodied stone in the bag of the retainer they deem responsible for their Daimyo's death. Once at the lake, they are required to swim to the island wearing their armor and carrying the stones in their bag. If they survive the swim, they remain at the shrine with their lord's remains. If they don't, they are absolved in death.

This march is an old tradition, and rarely enforced, but Hiro, son of the slain lord, has ordered that 4 senior samurai take the march, for which he has accompanied them. Is Hiro simply a loyal and devoted son, or does this march have a political motive behind it? Along with the samurai seeking absolution, other retainers also join. These are Priests, professional mourners, and family members who make up the procession and can join the warband.

Passing the Night is a new themed warband for Bushido, and playing their theme card restricts you to certain fighter types, but allows you to make the most of the shame mechanic. 6 of the 7 models in this box can only be used when playing with the Passing the Night theme, so you won't see them outside this theme card. The theme card allows your opponent to put a shame counter on a number of your models equal to the round number each turn, which can then be removed to power your warriors abilities.

Hida's Last Command

The Passing of the Night theme card has an insanely thematic set of mechanics that make them a joy to play. The theme card means that while a friendly samurai doesn't have a shame counter, their Melee Boost is set to 2 (from 3 for the 4 boxed samurai, which, as they generate 2 ki a turn, means they could boost their melee stat every turn), they also gain +1 to melee weapon strength, they gain +1 to their ki stat for tests and finally they lose slow. These bonus affect any samurai that you take in your warband, but losing slow is of particular note for the 4 samurai that come in the themed box.

The 4 Passing the Night samurai, Yoshimi, Takanibu, Nagisa, and Kasu, all have slow on their stat cards (along with unstable), to represent them being weighed down with the stones they carry (and also the burden of their shame), so losing that when they don't carry shame counters makes them able to engage in combat quicker, which they do extremely well.

Each turn, however, your opponent gets to place a number of shame counters on your samurai depending on the turn number. The 4 Passing the Night samurai have abilities that require a shame counter to be discarded to use, so you actually want them on your samurai at certain points, but other Prefecture samurai don't have those abilities, so gaining them means they lose the theme bonuses, and can't remove the tokens themselves. Helpfully though, the rest of the warband have some support characters that can deal with that.

There are 3 support characters in the Passing the Night box, and another 2 also available. In the box you get Ton, who carries bags of the shame stones that are given to the samurai, and can transfer shame tokens between others and themselves as a ki feat. While Ton has a shame token though, you can't score scenario points or take scenario actions, so you need to manage the transfer of tokens carefully during your turn.

The other 2 support fighters are Bairei, who carries incense to purify the procession, and has the ability to heal nearby models, but the ki spent is hampered by the number of shame tokens your warband currently has. The final support unit in the box is Takashi Hida, carrying the remains and the name of the late daimyo. Hida reduces the cost of ki feats for nearby samurai with no shame counters, so you'll want to keep them close to your samurai, but if Hida takes damage in melee, all friendly models gain a shame counter, and if Hida is removed from play, then shame tokens can't be removed for the rest of the game, which impacts the bonuses from the theme card, and those you get from the abilities that remove shame tokens.

Sacrifice For Retribution

The Passing the Night samurai are absolute monsters in combat, but that doesn't make them easy to pilot. The sequence you activate your models is integral to their use. Knowing when and whom to remove shame tokens from can be the difference between your fighters taking out enemies in a single hit, or failing to even reach them in combat.

Your opponent also gets a say, being able to place the shame counters each turn on your models, but it's not an easy decision for them. Do they put them on fighters that are close to engaging their warriors in order to slow them down, but also letting them power up their abilities, or do they put them on your support models, or fighters that can't engage, but leave some very powerful fighters able to engage at will?

The balance of support units is also very important, and it might be tempting to just load up your warband with heavy hitting samurai (and you should absolutely try this once), you can add in the 2 Mourners that are releasing alongside this pack, who have, amongst other abilities, the abilities to grant a virtue token to a friendly model at the start of the game, of which their use plays into the other Passing the Night support models. Or you could bring in models from the wider Prefecture of Ryu, like the Dragon Shrine Samurai, Kizoko and Ryuko, who also play into the virtue tokens and boosting mechanics, as well as being powerful and armored samurai in their own right.

What Are Our Final Thoughts On Passing the Night?

As a Shiho player (and more than occasional ninja), it saddens me that the Passing the Night theme (as part of the Prefecture of Ryu, the moral enemies of the Shiho) is probably going to be my chosen faction for a while. They are both fantastically powerful, and frustratingly often blocked by your opponent, with agency of where that power sits split between both of you. The tactical activation sequencing is incredibly rewarding when it pays off, and they are absolute beasts in combat. The awesome thematic mechanics, which are usually what please me most, are just a bonus to a deep and inspired bit of design work by GCT Studios.

The copy of the Bushido Passing the Night-themed warband used to produce this guide was provided by GCT Studios.