Showcase | Herd

These puzzles are very simple because yes, these are the tutorials. These like teach you the game, but believe me, the puzzles become a lot more complicated later on. Hey everyone, this is today I'm very happy to present you um another puzzle game uh by Blas Obangasar. Um, so I received this as a review copy.

So, thank you very much for entrusting me with a copy I can show off on the channel. You may know that I've already shown off deck and lock um by him and also all his bomb. And now I want to show you her um their newest outing um and it's like similar to those uh puzzle puzzle books. It is just um it's a puzzle book again just with like some actual physical pieces and you're not using a pen actually.

So, um, yeah, before we get started, as usual, grab yourself a cup of tea and let's do this. There we go. Oh man, almost drank all of it. Yeah, it's a pretty good temperature today. Um, even maybe a little bit uh cooler than it should be just because like I had to like set up everything here correctly, but I think now it looks and sounds good.

All right, so what is this game about? Well, this is a puzzle board game. Um, so if we open up this box here, you see there is like a book in here that we can take out. Uh, give me just a moment. There we go. Very cool. You can actually already see like how this puzzle works just with the cover here which says Herd, right?

Very very cool. And what we also have is like these uh figures here. So you just take all of these out. Um, will we? Yeah, we will actually need all of them today. Um, so I will not play through the entire thing, of course, right? because I don't want to spoil like uh too many of the puzzles, but I will show you like around like five, six, maybe seven puzzles to kind of give you an idea how this works.

So, um in my copy, there is a little Arata in here, but this is only interesting whenever you reach page 100. And yes, I have played the game quite a bit um in preparation for this um for this video also because I like it. I really enjoy it. Um but I haven't finished the entire game yet. So, I don't know what that Arata is about, but I think that is fine.

All right. Right. So, let me just put these uh here at the top. Uh the black ones are the most important ones and these we will need a little bit later. All right. So, we just open this up here. Um you can't go back. Okay. Uh we again have like a sheet here. Um this is like a trademark in all of um all of their games.

This does not need a pen, but I guess you could use it to kind of like sketch out where you would write it to go. I haven't used it yet because I just use do that with the physical pieces. And here you can already see how the game works with just like the little welcome page here. Hello. Because you always like move your black uh like these black uh figures, the shepherds.

Um you just always move them like to the very edge of the board. I will get to that in just a moment. But if you do that here, you have again L and O. You have the hello, right? So that's very very nice. I like that touch. Okay, so let's just start here. Um, I will just get right get into playing the game and like kind of explain to you how that works.

So, games uh the the puzzles always look like this. You have like a grid with like specific symbols in there. You see like they're like all kinds of grids here, right? And they're all like really greatly designed. So, take a look at this here. Like all of the designs here. This is like black. This has like these little guys here uh watching.

Um everything has eyes. There are like uh like fruit and vegetables and whatever. Like all kinds of objects here. So very very uh very greatly designed. I really like that. Um so we just start with our first puzzle. And here it like tells you tells you like how the game works. But I will just show that to you with the first puzzle.

Right. So let's start with puzzle number one. You can see that number one here. And you can take a pen and cross that out or like mark the white dot in whatever way you please whenever you have solved the puzzle. I will of course not do that because some of you may know I hate drawing in game uh in books um especially games, right?

So, I just like note down um digitally which puzzles I've already solved. Um so, you always place like a shepherd. These are these little black little creatures. I don't know if you can see it, but they have like eyes and a little nose engraved here. Um I don't know if you can see it, but um kind of like here.

So, you just put them always on like where this black dot is, right? So, and now we need to end here on that tile, but that doesn't stop you. So whatever you do, you always move into one direction and always have to move until you are stopped either by the edge of the grid or by another piece. At the moment, we only have that one piece, right?

So only the edge of the grid can stop us. So we can only go up. So we go there. This is also like a great design like um Plus usually does it like this that um like all of their puzzles are um are like kind I mean this this one does have text but usually like the the puzzles don't have any text and you learn the puzzle just by doing it by like figuring out what you can do but it's kind of similar here.

It's a very clever design also what some video games are doing, right? Because it like wants to teach you that you always have to go to the edge and it like guides you into these to the solution because you can only go one way. You can only move one way until here at least, right? And here you have to start thinking.

But this is like how you understand, okay, you need to like land this space and then you can continue. That's like kind of like what this game teaches you. And then if we would go if we if we went to the right now we would like slide through the goal and here that wouldn't help us right. So instead what we do is we take the other direction that helps us.

We go left then we go up. That's the only way we can go. Then we go right and then we go down. And this is like we are stopped here and we are on the finishing space. This is like how you solve these puzzles. But that's not all of course, right? These puzzles get like a lot more interesting. So let's just do another one where we have two shepherds right here.

So we would to place E2 right here on the two dots and there are two um goal spaces here. That means we need to reach both of them, right? So let's just see how we can do that. Um so it probably makes sense. It doesn't make sense to take this one down here because then this one is kind of lost, right?

So it doesn't make sense. So instead what we will do is uh let me just go with I have to figure it out myself. Yeah, let's just go with this one right here. Then we go with this one right there. Right there. Then we go down here and there. And then this one can go all the way down. Right. That'll be the solution of this puzzle.

Um all right. So let's maybe skip a puzzle or two here for example because they can not only slide, they can al also jump. Jumping means um let me demonstrate it here. Like I can always like slide with the black ones however I want to, right? And like I'm stopped by the other black one as you saw in the puzzle just before.

But if I'm like next to a piece, the black ones, the shepherds can also like jump, but they always exactly jump in the same manner. Always over one obstacle and then uh two spaces. So all together, two spaces over one obstacle. There's no other way they can jump only like this, right? So they couldn't I couldn't jump like this.

H or if there were like two here, I couldn't jump like this, right? That wouldn't be possible. So, same thing here. We have like the two shepherds here, but we only have one goal, right? We only need to reach one of them. All right. So, let's just demonstrate jumping. Also, like a very uh good tutorial here because we just go up, then we go here to the right up.

That's the only only space we can go at the moment, right? And now we need to think, okay, now we need to start thinking. But it's not that hard, right? Because we know how to jump. We jump over here like this. And then we jump over here like this. And we have finished. We have that in that space. Yes, this one is not on a on a gold space, but we only have one, right?

That's fine. Um, so that's how that's how that would work, right? Let me give you a few more examples. I'm going to show you the sheep. I think the sheep are pretty cool. So, we have one shepherd here. And we have two sheep right here. These are the sheep, the white ones. And the white ones also need to go on the gold space, right?

So, we have one sheep that can be anywhere, and one needs to be here, and the shepherd needs to be there at the end. Uh, sheep work a little bit differently. They cannot move on their own. You can only move the shepherds which makes sense, right? At the shepherd we move the sheep. So theatically this does make sense.

Um so we cannot move here because there is a sheep right this blocking us. But remember we can jump and look at the shape. Oops. Look at the shape. Do you realize something? Yes. They stack. So what we do is we jump here. And now when we're on a sheep, we can also like jump again. Then we leave the sheep where it is.

But we can also when we move we move with the sheep right. So that's what we do. So let me let us start again from the beginning. So I would jump over here then go up then I would go here. So and now the sheep is already on the on the go space. That's great. And now remember we can jump with each right.

We can always jump over one obstacle and two spaces. So right there. See? And this is like how we will solve this puzzle. These puzzles are very simple because yes these are these tutorials. These like teach you the game. But believe me, the puzzles become a lot more complicated later on. All right, let's um maybe go to this one here.

Um I don't want to like uh actually like play that. I just want to show you that this one um is an optional challenge. Has an optional challenge, which means solve this puzzle in 18 steps, right? Um so yeah, this is also like a pretty nice one here. Um, then uh what this game also does is here on page 18, you see like some of these have like these stars here and I think they're filled in, right?

These are also filled in, but these stars here um and they're advanced puzzles. It says feel free to skip it because these are harder, right? This is like is it like a challenge thrown your way like with the tools you have at the moment? Um, but they uh you you can just skip them so to speak, right?

This is like an empty page. I don't know. I don't know yet what that tells me. Maybe that's like a hint of what's to come. I'm not quite sure yet, but yeah. And then what we also have is right here with the bumps. Um I'm not going to play this one, but there are also now walls that block you from sliding through or jumping over them, right?

These are like just hurdles, obstacles. Um but you also have these bumps. And these bumps work like that. They are similar to sheep that you can like jump onto them, but you cannot move them, right? They're like immovable. That's why they don't have any physical pieces. That's why they're printed on here.

Pretty clever idea actually, right? Um, so let's try that out with this one here. We have a sheep here and a shepherd here like this. All right, so let's see. Remember, we cannot move these sheep. They we can only move them with the shepherd when we're on them. So, let's just take our shepherd here and move a little bit around.

Uh, let's see how we do that. Um, I would just go here, right? Because we can we can also like jump over that because that's an obstacle, right? We cannot jump like that. But then we cannot slide because we're on that bump, right? So we need to keep jumping. Jump here. Okay. So let's see how we can do this.

Um actually uh let me just think for a moment. Yeah, of course. So I go down here, right? I slide until that bump because that's an obstacle. Then I jump over that bump here on that one. And then I jump over that one on the sheep. Nice. Then we slide over here. We slide here. So, because we're stopped by that bump, right?

We need to stop there. Then we jump off the sheep over that bump on that bump here. Then we jump over that bump up there. Then we move here. We slide there. Then we jump over that sheep. Now that is an obstacle. It's great. We can actually jump on that one. And then we jump here. And we jump there. And this is how we solve that puzzle, right?

Um, so you see like there are like loads of interesting things, but now there are also herds which is like the n like what like gave the uh game the name, right? So let's just go right here. Um, this is like the tutorial of herds. So I will just show you that one and then I will stop I think because I don't want to like uh spoil too much.

So you see like you have these herds. These look like these sheep, right? So you can also stack the shepherds onto them, but uh they're like they have like these uh two shapes here that are like fixed, right? And you like um you put them like where these uh markings are. In the first in the tutorial, they show you like with like these dotted lines where to put them, but later on you just look at these lines here, right?

Where they connect, you put like these uh herds. So let's put them here. And we have our shepherd right here. Okay. So with these herds are like really interesting and they now really do a lot for this puzzle. What these actually do is they work like sheep. They cannot move by themselves, right? But they can be moved and stacked on.

So same thing as sheep, but because of their shape, they cannot be rotated, right? Because their shape, they can only move in specific ways, right? Like with a sheep, you could move the sheep like pretty much like anywhere here, right? That wouldn't work with that one, right? Because you're like restricted how these these move, right?

similar to like these block puzzles we know like from back then. So, let's try to get there. So, I would jump over here. So, now I can't jump anywhere, right? Because there are no obstacles here or here is now empty space. I can only jump back. So, I have to move. Again, a real great tutorial that like kind of like forces you um into specific moves at the beginning so you kind of get how it works and then later on um you're like free to uh explore that yourself.

So now we we slide and we slide with the entire thing wherever we want to slide, right? So we still cannot jump anywhere. So we need to continue sliding. So let's slide up here like this. Okay? And then now we can jump. So let's jump over here, right? Because we jumped from here over that obstacle over here.

Then we move again the entire thing. Remember we cannot rotate anything, right? Then we jump over here and then we jump over here. That's how that would work with the herds. But of course it like gets more complicated when you have like something like this here, right? Um especially because now you see you need to get the herd on that tile.

Um but only like one of these tile of course like the low one because we cannot rotate it, right? That would be like another thing. Um like actually very simple, right? We would like just jump over here and then we would slide here and there. That's already it, right? But that just shows you how that works.

But believe me, these puzzles like get a lot harder um as we continue here. Um, you see like the they're like huge puzzles later on, right? Even double-sided ones. So, yeah. Um, and there are probably also like mechanisms I haven't figured out. I haven't found yet because I haven't played the entire game yet.

I've like played far enough to like show you how this game works. Um, so I played a little bit farther than this one than this here, but I played like all the puzzles until here and a little bit further even. So, yeah. But I don't want to spoil too much. This is why I will stop my play through for now.

But um yeah, I hope you enjoyed my little showcase of Herd. This is like a game I really enjoy. Um I also like the other puzzle books, but I think this is like my favorite so far. I really enjoy that. It comes in a pretty small and nice box here, right? But essentially, you don't even need the box, right?

This is a book. This is just a book. You just put these in a baggie and then you can just put the baggie in a bag and take this book just with you. And that's it. Um so yeah, that that completely works. I think you could even what you could also do is just take tokens, right? because you just need to know like what moves and what doesn't move and stuff like that.

You could probably just make yourself some tokens. Um, so it's even more travel friendly. But this is like a really cool puzzle game. I really enjoyed this one. Um, so thank you a lot for providing me with a copy I can show off on the channel and I hope you all enjoyed the video and thank you so much for sticking to the very very end.

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