Striking From the Dark – In the Shadows Review

Seldom has a game become so relevant to modern times between conception and final production as In the Shadows – Resistance in France 1943-44 has become (I’m assuming it’s been in the planning stages for numerous years, anyway).

This game is a 2-player, 45-60 minute (BGG says 30-45 minutes, and maybe that’s true once you’re familiar with it) game about the French Resistance in World War II fighting against the occupying German forces.

It was designed by Dan Bullock and Joe Schmidt and published by GMT Games in 2025.

In the game, the Occupation side is trying to remove Resistance units from the map as well as transferring French resources into Germany.

The Resistance is trying to undermine German authority with acts of sabotage that make things harder for the Occupation to win.

Only one side will be able to accomplish their objective.

The board has Occupied France divided into three districts, all of which are then divided into four zones.

One player is the Occupation forces (a combination of German units and French Milice units) and the Resistance (both red Resistance cells and yellow Maquis cells, the main difference between them being that only Maquis units can actually fight).

The game is run by a series of Event cards as well as a Resolution deck of cards that will give you a set range of results to all of your actions.

Much like many of these card-driven games, the events on each card favour one side or the other, and the event must occur if the card is played.

The game goes over 9 rounds and, unless an automatic victory happens sooner, all but two cards will be played (each player will have one card in hand at the end of the game).

So the timing of when you play a card could really matter, because you know it’s going to be played at some point.

What makes the gameplay really interesting is how the event cards work and what they give you each round.

Each player will have two cards in hand at the beginning of the turn and will secretly choose one to play.

The number at the bottom of the card is both the number of action points you will get on your turn as well as it helps determine who chooses the starting player in the round.

The higher number gets to choose, and it may be beneficial to go last!

If you’re the Occupation player and play Escape above, that event won’t matter if the Resistance player goes first.

But at 3 AP, it’s very unlikely your opponent won’t choose to let you go first.

Unless their Event card makes it more important for them to go first anyway.

Some events last until the end of the next round, so the order of who goes first might make it so the event lasts for two rounds or just the one (if your opponent goes first, it won’t matter this round).

This is the kind of intricacy in card play that I really enjoy in a game.

The atmosphere of the game really puts you in the middle of a covert war between occupier and occupied, at least as much as something where you are basically playing cards and moving wooden cylinders around a board can do.

The Resistance has the Maquis and the red regular Resistance cells, but two of their starting six cells on the board are really Informants.

They start with three on the board and three available to recruit. The two Informants could be any of those six.

While covered, they act the same as any other cells, doing the actions you want them to do.

However, once they’ve been revealed (either voluntarily or through Occupation actions), it’s dangerous to use them.

You can, but some actions will fail if an Informant is in the zone.

What are the players trying to do?

The Occupation is trying to remove as many French resources as possible to Germany, as noted on a track on the right side of the board.

Each time resources are completely moved, however, the Resistance gets another new unit ready to be recruited.

Which makes it hard to get under the required number of Resistance units on the board in order to win.

That means that the Occupation also has to be ruthless in revealing and then arresting the Resistance units that are on the map.

Which is where the game is beginning to become more familiar every day.

Because those arrested units are placed in the “Disappeared” box.

Are they being taken to Germany in order to work in labour camps?

Or something else?

Who knows?

They’re just gone.

While the Occupation is trying to do all of this, the Resistance is trying to undermine German authority, mainly with acts of Sabotage.

These acts will move the marker on the Resistance Operations rondel. Each time the marker hits “Lower Authority,” the Authority marker is moved downward one step.

This will determine the Occupation victory conditions, as the less authority they have, the more resources they must have collected and the fewer Resistance pieces can be on the board.

Those disparate victory conditions for the two sides are what makes the game really shine.

The Occupation forces are the only ones who can get an automatic victory during the game.

If all Resistance pieces are removed from the board and the appropriate number of resources have been moved to Germany, or vice versa (all of the appropriate resources have been moved and there are fewer than the required number of Resistance units left on the board), then the Occupation wins immediately.

Otherwise, at the end of the 9 rounds, you look at the Authority track and see what’s required of the Occupation in regards to resources and Resistance units.

If they meet those requirements, they win!

If they don’t, they lose.

What makes things a bit more difficult for both players is that the Event cards played each round have a suit.

If it’s a German suit, that’s fine. That’s wild and it doesn’t matter where your operations are (the German suit is not only on Occupation events, either).

But if it’s one of the district symbols, then most actions taken outside of that district cost an extra AP.

The results of many of those actions are then dictated, not by dice, but by the Resolution deck of cards.

This is ostensibly to let “players focus more on strategy and less on luck” (meaning that you’re not dependent on dice rolls).

Does that actually work?

Just ask me about the successful arrest rate of my Keystone Nazis, who couldn’t arrest somebody who was right in front of Gestapo headquarters waving a red flag and yelling “I want to kill you!”

Or about my Resistance fighters who couldn’t sabotage an ammunition dump that didn’t have any guards or other employees in it all night.

Part of me would have preferred dice rolls, you know?

The Resolution deck does have a Reshuffle card that forces you to reshuffle the deck after resolving that action, which means it’s not that deterministic. You can’t count how many of certain result types are still in it.

Even with all that, though, what the game does get across is the overwhelming presence of the Occupation forces (both German and French police) and how the Resistance has to choose its battles and locations wisely when carrying out actions.

While Resistance units can be arrested and disappeared, the Resistance can’t harm the bad guys at all.

The most they can do (if they use a yellow Maquis unit, of which there are only 5 and many may not be in play at that particular time) is force a Milice unit to an adjacent zone, or a German unit back to one of two German spaces.

Both are free to move in again, but that small breath of time where maybe the cells are unmolested will give them the chance to do their thing and start bringing that Authority down.

The Resistance cannot win this game.

They can just force the Occupation to lose it by keeping their head (barely) above water.

They can be down to just 3 units on the board, but if they’ve sabotaged enough, that may be all they need.

It all comes down to balancing your actions and your action points, making sure you make the painstaking progress each turn on your objective.

It takes the Germans at least 3 AP to move resources to Germany each round (it doesn’t have to complete every round, of course, but it’s good to make headway at least) and it takes at least 3 AP to move the Resistance Operations marker all around the rondel in order to bring the Authority Level down one space, assuming your Sabotage attempts are even successful.

The remainder is a matter of uncovering and arresting cells, recruiting more cells, or maneuvering into position to do the things you need to do.

One other difficulty for the Resistance player is that if you carry out the same action twice in the same zone, you must uncover one of your covert units.

Concentrating your actions in one place can be deadly, as now the Occupation doesn’t have to waste an action to uncover them before arresting them.

All of this in just under an hour (our plays were both around 55-60 minutes, with one training game that we didn’t finish after the teach), making it a pretty good lunchtime game, as long as players are familiar with it.

In the Shadows is a compelling game, illustrating the difficulty in facing a seemingly implacable enemy and just trying to survive.

You actually feel that tension as the Resistance player, seeing your pieces systematically removed from the board.

Hopefully the game won’t become any more relevant in the near future than it already is.

In the meantime, enjoy what is a standout game.

(This review was written after 3 plays)