New Card Game Shaka Shredders Has Magnetic Personality But Too Many Mechanics

Shaka Shredders features “Swaptop” magnetic cards that split in half, allowing players to mix and match characters/stats with archetypes & abilities.

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Shaka Shredders is an innovative new card game from Sunslap Studios launching on Kickstarter today. Unlike normal TCGs, Shaka Shredders features “Swaptop” magnetic cards that split in half, allowing players to mix and match characters and stats with archetypes and abilities. It’s definitely a unique and intriguing technology that creates a ton of opportunities for complex strategy (and plenty of headaches when designing balanced cards, I can only assume) but I found the actual gameplay and rules to be frustratingly overcomplicated.

Shaka Shredders has a fun theme, memorable artwork and characters, and a really inventive magnetic swapping mechanic, but I had a hard time learning and teaching this game to experienced TCG players. It may look like a kid’s card game, but Shaka Shredders requires players to learn a ton of terminology and retain a lot of rules while they play.

Shredding On Shakana

In Shaka Shredders, players take on the role of a coach for a team of anthropomorphic extreme sports animals. The box includes 2 premade 20-card decks: The Grotto Goons surfers and the Tiki Tech Lasers skaters. Players take turns playing cards, swapping shredders, and challenging each other to perform their best trick. The challenger with the higher talent either “embarrasses” their competitors (discard) or earns “cheers” for their team. The first player to earn 20 cheers wins.

Turn order in Shaka Shredders is actually pretty simple: Draw a card, play a card, do a swap (if you want) and then challenge your opponent with any of your “performer” cards. Players can choose to defend with one of their own performers, and the Shredder with the higher talent wins, defaulting to a secondary stat called Attitude if there’s a tie. What overcomplicates challenges is the baffling amount of keywords and symbols all over the cards, the fluid role of interchangeable “assist” cards, and the lack of care and consistency the rule book uses to teach the player.

There’s a cheat sheet in the rulebook that breaks down all of the symbols and keywords contained on each card. Every Shredder (top half) has a rank, a sport, a talent score, a popularity score, an attitude score, a unique ability, and a combo type. If they’re a performer type, also known as a “Trick”, they’ll have a fandom type, a trick action, and a combo requirement/combo action. If they’re an assist type, they’ll have a fandom and at least 2 assist requirements and assist bonuses. To determine what the assist card does, you have to match their Shredders combo type symbol with the associated assist requirement symbol, then read the bonus – which will often reference on or more of the stat values, fandoms, combo type, or card type of one of your or your opponent’s cards.

When determining which Shredder wins a challenge, you need to combine your challenger’s talent value with their specific ability and their combined assist card’s specific ability (if they apply), as well as the assist card’s activated assist ability, based on the assist card’s combo type…then compare that total value to your opponents. If there’s a tie you compare each card’s attitude value, which may or may not be similarly affected by each card’s specific ability. We got the hang of the entire challenge process after 4 games, but we still found ourselves reading every single character’s ability and assist ability with each challenge to make sure we were tabulating their total score correctly, which was further complicated by constant Shredder swapping.

Consistency And Readability Issues

The rules and cards use a bunch of terms interchangeability, which leads to a lot of confusion. Shredders and Roles are also called Slabs and Slices; Performers are also called Tricks; Cheer, Talent, and Score all sort of mean the same thing. This last one is a big problem, because in all of the sections of the rule book where challenges are described, it never once uses the term Talent. It took us 3 games to realize that challengers are supposed to compare Talent scores. Trick cards say “Score [Star] points” and the Talent score has a star behind it, but the word talent is never used in the rules – it just says score. It wasn’t until we found one Shredder with an ability that says “My challenges compare Popularity instead of Talent” that we realized score also means Talent. Every other card uses the word score…unless they use Cheer to refer to points earned specifically.

Readability is a big issue on the game board as well. Some of these issues are small, such as the need to come up with your own way to keep track of cheers (we used 2 20-sided dice I just happened to have) while other issues can be pretty frustrating. When you challenge with a card (or in some cases when a card gets dissed) it becomes exhausted and needs to be flipped over. That flipped over card can still be targeted on your opponent’s turn, but now you’ve got to flip it back and forth every time you want to read what the card is.

All trick role cards have a combo that requires players to swap Shredders with different combo types on 3 separate challenges/defends. With each stage of the combo, you’re meant to track it by rotating the card 90 degrees, but when I’m looking at my opponent’s card upside down, I have to do some mental processing to understand what stage of the combo they’re on. Assist cards combine with performers to give them an assist bonus, but the rules don’t give any indication as to how the cards should be stacked or shown that they’re “combined,” and covering one card with another makes things more confusing.

What’s more, there’s a staggering amount of symbols and terminology to learn. There’s a different symbol and name for every sport, every fandom, every combo type (grab, flip, and spin so far), and every stat type (talent, popularity, and attitude). Even as a seasoned TCG player there’s a lot of new terminology to learn for familiar concepts. Discarding is called Embarrassing, the discard pile is called the Locker, Dissers (ability cards) have a card cost called Energize, and points are called cheers.

Swaptop Has Potential

Shaka Shredders has a very kid-friendly design. All of the cards have cute animals with funny names and bright colors. The magnetic cards are super durable, water-resistant, and are difficult to crease. Everything here would seem to communicate this is a great game to get kids into TCGs, but it’s so complicated I think I would have a hard time teaching this game to my 8-year-old nephew.

The set I have is just a prototype and I’ve been told there will be some changes before the real first edition is sent to backers. The magnetic cards are way too magnetized and require sleeves to use, which makes swapping a big of a pain, but Sunslap Studios promises the next version won’t have that problem.

Currently, one of the decks is obviously at a much higher power level than the other. Every single Disser in the surfer deck can embarrass opponents, some multiple at once, but not a single Disser in the skater deck has hard removal. Over a dozen games, I found that once the surfers get ahead there’s no stopping them. The studio said balance changes will happen before version 1 as well, so I’m hopeful for fairer games.

All that being said, I really like the Swaptop concept and I think thematically Shaka Shredders is really strong. The rule book needs a complete overhaul and the decks need a balance pass, but I could see Shaka Shredders turning out to be a fun game. It’s not a good entry into TCGs for kids, but if they’ve outgrown Pokémon and are ready for something challenging, Shake Shredders is worth checking out.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/shaka-shredders-card-game-review/