Over five years ago, my best friend was dating a huge board gamer. Every time he drove down from Iowa to visit her, his car would be full of board games. You’ve seen reviews of a few of them he’s shared with us over the years, but I’ve kept mentioning Shadows of Brimstone and never really explained it. That’s because it’s complicated. So, here’s a “quick” rundown of the Shadows of Brimstone game, and more importantly, how we organize Shadows of Brimstone. Quick note for me for organizational purposes, we never really played this for gameschooling, but this is a cooperative game.
(I’ve got lots of affiliate links in here)
The shorthand description of Shadows of Brimstone game
Whenever I’m asked what Shadows of Brimstone is, I say, “It’s Call of Cthulhu meets the Old West as a light role-playing board game.”
Each person playing picks a character, and then your characters go on an adventure where you are fighting monsters and trying to solve a problem.
At the end of the adventure, you head into town to sell your hard-gained loot, which helps improve your character.
As your character gains more experience, you gain levels and equipment to make you better able to handle harder adventures.
Shadows of Brimstone: picking characters
Each character will have different strengths and play styles. Some are magic users, others are good with guns, some are good with explosives, and all sorts of different playing styles.
Adding in some of the new core sets, and some of the expansion characters, there are about 2 dozen characters to choose from, and if you don’t like one character, then try another one and you might like that character more. Each new core set and many expansion characters add in a totally new component, and many of the newer characters have some seriously cool abilities.
Currently, my two favorite characters are the Orphan (expansion character) and the Kitsune (Forbidden Fortress character). I am enjoying my assassin character from Forbidden Fortress, but that’s partially because of the family lore we’ve created around those character types. Future Ticia 2026 likes my Greek Champion, but that is partially because of the particular build I chose since I have bad luck rolling dice.
As you play your character, you get experience from a wide variety of sources, and the experience is used to level your character. This is where you get to choose what your character will look like. Each class has a skill tree, and you get to choose where you will go with your character. There is also a random roll when you level up, which can give you fun benefits like the ability to carry more, a skill stat bonus, or maybe more health.
The other fun way to customize your character is with equipment. As you play, you get loot cards that can give you equipment, or when you go to town, you can buy cool equipment. Equipment can do a wide variety of things, increase damage, or maybe a stat bonus.
Organization tip for characters
The first tip for how to organize Shadows of Brimstone: I scanned and printed out each character’s skill chart, and put that along with their starting gear cards inside a 6×9 manilla envelope. We put any character sheets for that class inside the envelope.
Future Ticia 2026 now also scans every card that comes with each character after we misplaced a starting card for the Prospector. Now, I scan the cards that come for every character and have a printed version. My friends got baseball card sleeves for each character class and made mini-binders for each character class. I showed Jeff those pictures and he was super jealous of that concept.
You can find printable character sheets on BoardGameGeek.
What an adventure looks like
Each core game comes with a dozen adventures. Currently, there are 4 core sets you can buy, and I think about 6 expansions (2026 Ticia is not going to update with a new number because there are some new core sets and new missions, and a whole slew of minor things, so there are a lot of missions). Each expansion comes with 6 more adventures, and after that, you can buy some enemy packs that will come with specific adventures.
All told, with all of the material currently out, there are probably about 100 adventures. BUT, you can play the same adventure multiple times and get different results each time. Here’s how.
You set up for the adventure, however it says, and as you go into the mine, or wherever you’re exploring, you draw map cards as you explore.
Many map cards have a special encounter that goes with it, and as you explore, you can run into encounters. Sometimes the encounters have positive things like finding something fun, sometimes they test you, and suddenly you are in a fight. This is how you can have different results depending on the adventure.
At the end of most adventures, you fight an epic threat, a more difficult monster with lots of special abilities.
If you are successful, you get a reward; if you fail, bad things happen. Usually, the bad things don’t kill your character… Usually.
How to organize Shadows of Brimstone tip: Adventures
Again, I scanned all of the adventures and printed them off into individual books. This lets each player have their own copy of the adventure to refer to. I printed it all off and bound it up into a book using my binding machine.
The official way to pick an adventure is to draw a world card, we number off the different worlds and roll a D8, and once a world has been decided on, we roll a D6 because most worlds have 6 adventures.
2026 update: I did not share what else I have in there.
Currently, we have three different versions of this notebook. We have one for the Mines, another for Forbidden Fortress, and a third for the Brimstone Adventures. That’s essentially one for each Kickstarter they’ve run. In each book, I put (more or less in order of how I put it):
- Missions: Any and all missions that are in that world or related to the expansions- I put tabs for each type of mission so you can easily find them. Example for the Mines book, which is the biggest. It has as tabs: Mines, Cynder, Swamps, Trederra, Targa, Missions, etc…
- Bad Stuff: This was my shorthand for things like the various charts like Mutation, Madness, Injury, and travel hazards. I also scanned and put together the various Depth event charts for the different worlds for that “expansion”
- Town: all of the cards for each location, which again I scanned and put in each notebook
- Reference: there are a lot of specialized terms, so I found various different reference sheets people had put together on Board Game Geek that I liked, and printed them out and put them in the back of the notebook.
Side note, I have come to the conclusion that, having bought other brands, the Post-it note tabs are the best ones to buy, even if you can get another brand cheaper.
Now head to town and get cool stuff
As you head into town, sometimes crazy things can happen. You could run into a ghost train, or maybe some bandits (it is the Old West after all), or maybe you’ll ride into town with nothing happening. Then you spend time in town visiting different locations and buying what you need to continue adventuring.
As you can tell there is a lot to the Shadows of Brimstone game
We usually block out a day to play a round of Shadows of Brimstone and it slowly but surely takes over our dining room table. It’s a lot of fun, but this is not going to be a game for the average run of the mill gamer. The Shadows of Brimstone game is a serious occupier of your home real estate. You’ll find dozens of figures in each core set, hundreds of cards, SO MANY tokens. Once all of this is put together, it will not fit in your box. Not to mention, just leaving the figures loose in the box guarantees the figures will break. From here on out, I am solely talking about how to organize Shadows of Brimstone.
Future Ticia 2026 will point out that I’m partially updating this because we’ve been playing Shadows once a week after Jeff gets off work. So, we’ve been playing a game in about 3 hours or so.
How to organize Shadows of Brimstone game
I put all of the Manila envelopes for the characters inside a file folder box. There are hanging file folders that I’ve labeled according to what’s in there. I also broke the map organization down by worlds (since there are currently like 6 different worlds you can visit in Shadows of Brimstone).
Also in that file folder box are the books I’ve put together, any various rule books, and then the monsters are all in another hanging file folder, and the town cards are in another file folder.
We keep some small pads of paper in that box for keeping track of experience, money, and dark stone gained in a session. At the end of the session, we can transfer final tallies to our character sheet, and put that sheet into the recycling bin.
How to organize all of those random tokens
The big question for how to organize Shadows of Brimstone for us was how to deal with all of those random tokens. For most games with little tokens we use jewelry bags to help keep them organized, but with all of those expansions, that got quickly impractical.
Enter tackle boxes.
I think that’s what they were originally for, but now they’re sold in all the craft stores for your various crafting supplies.
I picked up a few of these boxes and the printable address labels, and I started labeling things. I’ll be honest, and say all of the little tokens drive me nuts and are my least favorite part of the game, but I know for a lot of people that is their favorite part of the game.
When actually playing the game I picked up some Christmas mini pie tins on clearance to hold them for easy access during the game. These mini storage containers also work well.
Organizing the map tiles
This is a little overboard, but it makes my life so much easier to store and keep the game usable.
First I matched up all of the map tiles to the same map card. I did this for all of the expansions. There are some tiles that are in common for all of the different expansions (about six of them). Then on the cards I wrote a number and the same number on each map tile.
When writing it on the map tile (in silver pen because it shows up better), I write it on the side that should be attached to the previous room. It’s a small thing, but it really helps keep everything running smoothly.
These are then put into another file folder box. Since I bought colored hanging file folders, I actually color-coded the worlds. So Magma caverns is red, Jarango Swamps are green, and so on and so forth. Each is put away in numerical order.
That’s nice Ticia, but what about all those figures?
The figures take up all of the space. We’ve tried a couple of different ideas for this one. Shadow of Brimstone figure storage is the most difficult part of this to my mind.
You can, of course, buy a figure storage box. But just buying the core set for Shadows of Brimstone will get you around 100 figures. That can get very expensive very fast. First, I tried storing them in ornament storage boxes. This worked okay, but they tended to rattle around in there, and a few of the figures lost hands.
This is our current storage solution. I think Jeff saw one somewhere, and I picked up the rolling storage drawer from Amazon.
Next, I picked up a bunch of sheets of foam core board, and slowly but surely, Jeff has been cutting around the bases to set up individual places for each figure.
Future Ticia 2026, we have since figured out the best solution FOR US, I made felt boxes with squares. I’ve figured out this size is the perfect amount to hold one set of enemies or figures. I’m trying to remember how my friend has all of their figures stored, but they have an entire attic set up to store all of their Shadows and board game stuff.
Of course, most of the figures are just loose in the drawer, but because there are significantly fewer figures per drawer, it is easier to find them.
Okay, I think that’s all I have to say on how to organize Shadows of Brimstone.
Some much more light-hearted games
After that big heavy posting of the most insanely over the top complicated game, means I want something lighthearted, so here you go.
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