The Hungry Gamer's Shifters Mini Preview
Transcript
Oo, that looks tasty. Welcome folks. The Hungry Gamer is back with another mini preview and today we're talking about Shifters. And this is a game that was sent to me by Michael Kelly from Onetop Co-op Shop after I checked out his video and thought it looked like a pretty cool game. And so, thank you to him and the publisher for sending that on to me to check out. And so what this game is is this is a sci-fi I'm gonna call it deck building but not really tableau building game in which you're going to find yourself on various different worlds. And each world has its own scenario that you're dealing with and its own boss that you're dealing with and some custom characters that you're dealing with. And you're going to move through the map and each different spot on the map is either going to have you fighting some kind of enemy or doing an upgrade or perhaps just taking some damage and moving on. whatever it might be. And you're going to try to make your way through the map so you have some choice of where you want to go, what path you want to follow as you make your way to the end where you will then fight a boss. Beat the boss, move on, advance to the next world. And that's kind of the core of the game. But the but the bulk of the game is going to be when you're fighting bad guys. And that's where the whole idea of shifters comes in. Because what's going to happen is the bad guys are going to go out onto kind of this little timeline area. And depending what bad guy it is, it'll put it at a different spot on the timeline.
And that's how many turns you have to beat these bad guys. And each round, they're going to do some amount of damage to you. It might be energy damage, might be health damage, and they have various abilities that might do more things. For example, one of them when it gets all the way to the end of the track, it brings in another bad guy, whatever, things like that. But what you're going to do is you're going to be playing down up to three different cards out of your hand. and whatever and however big your hand is, you have access to all of them. And you'll put them down. And then once you've placed down your cards, they're all going to shift one space to the right. And then you're going to look above the cards. There's different icons that you're slotting into your board. And you're going to be able to upgrade these as you go through the game through various card powers, through various rewards, whatever. But anytime there's an icon that matches, you're going to get to do whatever that is. It might give you a shield to protect yourself. It might do some damage. It might heal you. It might give you energy, whatever, and you'll move all of them over and they'll do whatever is that they're going to do.
But once it gets to the end, these cards are going to fall off. And then for all the cards that fell off the end, you're going to get to take an action on the bottom of the card. And these are usually going to be more powerful. This is also how you get all the cards back into your hand because you have your leader to start with and you can get more characters as you go through the game that will allow you to pick up all your cards as well, which will pick up all your cards again, and then they're back into your hand as you kind of keep moving through. And as you move through each of the fights, when you win the fight, or at least when the bad guys run away, you're going to leave your cards on the board. So, they're always kind of staying out where they are as you're kind of setting up these combos as they move over and activate with all the icons you have above the cards. And that's pretty much how it's going to work. Now, with that said, you get to the end, you have a boss fight. And the boss fights are a little bit different because you're going to put out three cards, and those cards are going to activate from their deck. and you'll kind of be kind of and you'll kind of be cycling through their deck until either you get killed or you beat them. And so that's how the game works. You're going to play through the worlds. And I've gotten to play through two of the different worlds. I've seen a map for two more. I don't know how many there's going to be in the final game, but as you go through different worlds, they start adding on different things, different they start adding on different things you have to deal with. For example, when you go to the rat world, which is not the one that I had on the screen there, there is this kind of plague that you're dealing with, and you have to consistently use healing to kind of push that card back all the way to the left, so you don't have to suffer whatever the effect that it's going to do when it falls off the board. So, with that said, what do I like about this
game? First thing is it's a very fast and easy setup. You shuffle a couple of decks, you put them out, you make a couple choices, and you are off to the races. So, I really, really like that. But really the core of what I like about this game is the core shift mechanic. I really like how you're building up the icons on top to coincide with the deck that you're building because as you're going through the map, you're also getting more cards. And so as you're building this deck or this hand, it's a huge hand really. You're trying to plan out the ways to combo the shifting over and trying to figure out, okay, well, I think I want to put this one card all the way to the left and I'm just going to let go shift shift shift shift shift because I can set it up to where it's going to proc off all of these icons that are above me. Or maybe you have a card that you got, or maybe you want to kind of stack the last couple of slots so you can say, okay, I'm going to put this guy down. He's going to shift to a thing, shift, fall off. So, it's going to be very quick that I'm going to be going through it. And so it's a fun balance of trying to decide how you want to build that up, how you're going to approach each different scenario. And I also really like that you can stack up a bunch of stuff on any of the slots, but when they fall off, only one thing's going to happen. And that is a really hard challenge that you're facing a lot of the time. A lot of the time, it's really hard to decide what do I want to do in this situation. Do I want to use the one that's going to give me an upgrade? Do I [snorts] want to use the one that's going to do some extra damage? Or whatever it may be. I really like the way that that works. It's very, very clever. Next thing I'll say is I like how the worlds differ. In particular, I mentioned the rat world
has that plague card that you're dealing with. It just offers up a lot of different ways that these worlds can be varied without a huge overhead of rules and components. And I really do like the way that that works. And the last thing I want to say is I really like the building up of your tableau. And by your tableau, I mean the icons above your cards and building your deck in each different world. It's very, very cool the way that works and you're able to decently react to what's going on. So, with that said, what are my quibbles with the game? The first thing, maybe I haven't played enough. And there's two core decks that came in the prototype. One is a more offensive deck, one is more defensive deck. If you'd like to see how the offensive deck plays, check out Michael Kelly's video on OneTop Co-op Shop. He actually uses the offensive deck. and I spent most of my time playing with the defensive deck and it just seems to me that the offensive strategy is better.
It just Yeah, that's all I can say about it because with the defensive one, you can stop yourself from taking any damage, but you're getting the rewards by defeating these bad guys. So, if you're just defensive, you're losing out on rewards as you go through the game. And so, it just doesn't seem as balanced and as powerful as the offensive strategy is. Though, maybe I'm just not good at games. Next thing I'll say is this game can be played multiplayer, but to me this is a solo game. That's what this is. This is a cool game that you're playing through and you're going to be doing neat stuff, but it doesn't really matter if someone else is at the table because really all that's going to happen is the bad guys are going to double their health if you're playing with two players and you get to split up some of your rewards you're going to get here and there. And I'm just not interested in doing that. This is a cool solo game and I think that's where it's going to shine. So, I'm going to say I think this is really a solo game at least with the two decks and the two worlds that I have seen. Next thing I'll say is there is definitely still some dev work to be done and I know that they are doing it. For example, on the aquatic world, the final boss has multiple cards that just say you can't attack this turn. And that's just not fun. It's just not fun. And so I know that they're actually pulling one of those cards out so it doesn't happen as much, but there's definitely some dev work that still needs to be done. But what I'm saying is this is not a game that's ready to go print right now. This is one of the old school crowdfunding games. It still has a little bit of
development work to be done before it is ready for prime time. Next thing I'm going to say is I said I liked the way the Rat World added this plague card to it. I have no idea what the others are going to do. Are they going to continue with the complexity and building that? Are they going to be able to come with lots of different interesting ways to interact with the shift system without it just feeling like it's the same thing, but instead of using healing, we're going to use damage to deal with. So, I don't know what's going to happen there. Something I'm definitely going to want to look at very closely as this campaign progresses. And the last thing I'll say is it's mostly a restart. You go world to world. It doesn't have a campaign vibe if you're kind of traveling the universe, saving planet to planet to planet. It doesn't really have that. I mean, there are some things that are going on, but for the most part, you're it's basically a restart every single world. But there you have it, folks. That is shifters. This is one that I think has a lot of promise with a very, very cool core mechanic of the way the shift system works. And there's so much promise there. I'm excited to see what they do with it. So, there you have it, folks. As always, if you found this video useful, please like, subscribe, share, maybe become a channel member. As always, thank you so much for watching.
Have a wonderful, wonderful day.