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You expect turn-based games to be tactical, but don't you hope they'll be tactile as well? I find it hard to play Advance Wars without pleasant day-dreamy thoughts of putting those chunky little tanks, soldiers and snub-nosed bombers away in a battered wooden chest afterwards, where their bright paint and die-cast bodies would be safe from the iniquities lavished by pets. Equally, I absolutely know that, as an eight-year-old, I would have stored my XCOM troops in a cereal box base with a door and a handful of windows punched in the front.I can't imagine a safe place to keep Oni from Skulls of the Shogun, however. Like the rest of cast, I suspect he'd be made from sheets of thick, deckle-edged card and stamped with grainy ink in a handful of simple colours. He's too combustibly violent to be contained by mere paper or wood, though, too wilful to lurk inside Tupperware without gnawing a hole through the plastic. Whether you're playing Skulls on the telly or the touchscreen of a Windows Phone, you'll be glad there's an impenetrable barrier between the two of you. Oni's fun, but he's frequently a terrifying kind of fun.
Oni's a special unit that tends to dominate any maps he's placed on. You'll need to level up a salamander monk in order to access him, and then you can cast him onto an enemy player and wait for him to spawn. Once he appears on the scene, he takes the form of a big fat devil with furious eyes and neat little horns. He gets his own turn in between turns for your units and rivals', and he'll attack your foes for pretty significant damage. So far so good, but that's only the half of it. Oni's just as happy to lay into the team that created him: once he's out on the field he's a mad creature of AI-managed id, raging and lashing out and generally causing havoc.
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