Rob (Still alive, just hyper busy with work!):Â I know I say this a lot, but I really like co-operative games. This is one of those deck-building games where the players are heroes defending the city against the threat of monsters. The game has a lot of replayability with a variety of threat decks and different cards to set up your market differently each game. I like the art and a lot of basic design elements.
Each turn, you add points to the Monster Power pool and, if there are enough points, those points are spent to bring the top card of their deck into play. Depending on what youâre fighting, you might have really tough monsters with high costs, so you know theyâre coming and have some time to prepare a strategy, or a lot of weak, low cost things coming out very quickly. In this deck, youâll also have the titular Shadowrifts, objectives that provide an option for victory.
Once they spawn, monsters move each turn along their track and usually have an ability that triggers at each place on the track. These abilities do things like Wound the heroes, kill villagers, cause you to discard, bring other cards into play, or even just causing the heroes to lose the game outright. As you might expect, itâs important for the heroes to attack these threats and get them off the board before they wreak too much havoc.
In order to deal with these threats, the heroes have access to a lot of card options. There are a rotating group of Villagers that come out each turn and a market of cards to buy that include Actions, Attacks, Skills, Loot, Walls, & Travelers that could join your village. Each turn, you spend Prowess (and sometimes Gold) to buy these cards. Travelers & Walls get added to your deck of Villagers and the other cards go into your personal deck. You can also buy Gold with Prowess, which youâll need to do a lot to afford those Walls and Travelers. The various cards that go into your deck grant you a wide range of abilities to help deal with the threats.Â
Thereâs something pretty interesting to me in this idea of having multiple decks that youâre building at the same time. You have your personal deck full of spells and attacks and the currency of the game, like a normal deck-builder, but you also have this Village deck that youâre building with Walls and Travelers. In the same way your personal deck gets filled with junk as you gain Wounds and Afflictions, the Village deck gets junk in it; whenever a Villager is killed, a Corpse goes into the deck in its place. There are also Travelers with a red background that have negative affects whenever they come up. If you ever draw nothing but bad Villager cards, you lose the game, in the same way that drawing all Wounds and Afflictions from your personal deck causes a loss.
The problem with Shadowrift is that it just doesnât seem to work for 2 players. I think it would be a pretty decent 4 player game, but reducing the player count slows it down to an unreasonable degree. The Monster Power pool doesnât fill fast enough to feel like much is happening and, even when something does come out, youâre still looking for 2 cards shuffled into 20 for the victory condition of sealing Shadowrifts. You end up with a lot of turns where you donât have anything to attack and not enough currency to do anything interesting.
In the game we played for this review, we just threw all our resources into building Walls, which is the other victory condition. The game still took longer than it felt like it should at about 90 minutes, but we werenât even halfway through the deck looking for Shadowrifts. The last time we played, we focused on that victory condition and both felt like the game had overstayed its welcome.
So, I want to like Shadowrift a lot. I think it probably plays pretty well with a larger group to generate more Monster Power each turn and pool resources to tackle those threats. As a two player game, itâs kind of miserable. I give it a conservative 5.75 out of 10, hoping that my ranking will go up if I ever teach it to a group of people. If I were rating it solely on the two player experience, it would probably be about a 4 out of 10.
Sean: Thereâs a strong chance I would like this game more if Aeonâs End didnât exist. Itâs funny because this one came first, went out of print, then both games were up on Kickstarter and Rob backed them. Aeonâs End showed up first and we loved it. Shadowrift showed up and we walked away from that initial play thinking, âWow, that took waaaaaay too long and it wasnât even challenging. We must have done something wrong!â So we let it sit for about six months before coming back to it for a review. Same experience, except this time instead of wasting time waiting on the monster deck to unload and reveal all the rifts, I decided about 10 minutes in to do nothing but work on building walls. We were never in any kind of impeding danger and none of the villagers were killed.
Donât get me wrong - Shadowrift and Aeonâs End are not the same game. Even though theyâre both cooperative deckbuilders about saving a town from impending doom, AE is unique in how it uses the deckbuilding mechanic. Shadowrift is not. Weâve played both games twice with two players, AE has been enjoyable and challenging both times, Shadowrift has been the opposite. If you asked me which of these you should purchase, I would hands down recommend Aeonâs End. Iâm still willing to give this more plays and see if it changes with different combinations of cards, maybe either playing with fewer things in the monster deck or playing with a third person would make all the difference.
I also donât understand the Loot cards. We havenât purchased them in either game - they just seem too expensive to be worth it. I wonder if this would change with a different player count too. Another mild complaint I have about the game is how often you see the same cards in your village. I wish the game had more variety there because I get tired of looking at my options and once again seeing that I have a Child, a Mayor, two Guards, and a Corpse just hanging around being unhelpful.
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