Shogun Showdown Will Be Your Next Roguelike Deckbuilder Obsession

Since Slay the Spire helped popularize roguelike deckbuilders— games about building a deck and battling procedurally generated adversaries—there’s been no shortage of titles inspired by its card drafting goodness, with hundreds of similar experiences popping up on Steam in the years since its release. However, despite many of these sticking closely to Slay the Spire’s formula, there are also plenty that go to decidedly different places, mixing in new innovations and twists that keep things fresh. In fact, most of the ones that have broken through in recent years have had their own unique angles: Dicey Dungeons incorporated D&D-style dice rolls, One Step From Eden built on the grid-based duels of Mega Man Battle Network, Balatro broke from the Magic The Gathering roots of the genre by using playing cards and introducing the aesthetics of a psychedelic casino, and Inscryption utilized horror and meta elements to blast apart the entire premise.

And then, earlier this month, we got the 1.0 release for Shogun Showdown, another game that maintains the central charms of a roguelike deckbuilder while breaking off on its own fascinating tangent. Like those other time-obliterating vortexes of virtuous cycles and unfortunate defeats, this one is hard to pull yourself away as you slowly build up your arsenal, end a run, and then promptly dive back in as you attempt to craft an unstoppable combination. And beyond maintaining that core recipe, it also successfully borrows from another beloved roguelike (one without any cards), Into The Breach, resulting in a brain-teasing tactical experience where fights are fair, legible, and lead to plenty of compelling choices.

As for the setup, you play as one of five warriors attempting to best the Shogun, who has unleashed some manner of supernatural calamity on the world. You learn more about this fantastical feudal backdrop as you complete runs, but the worldbuilding is fairly cryptic and not necessarily the main draw. However, things get very interesting when it comes to the battles, which are turn-based on a 2D grid and presented via a side-on perspective. The basic actions you can take each turn are to move forward or backward, turn around, queue up an attack, or unleash all of your queued strikes at once (you can store a maximum of three). Beyond the turn-based tactics similarities, Into the Breach is also a good comparison when it comes to enemy behavior—the bad guys’ next move will always be telegraphed beforehand, and most unit types will behave predictably by trying to get into strike range every turn they can.

For how the deckbuilding works, at the beginning of each run, you have two starter “tiles” that function as your attacks; for instance, the class you start with, The Wanderer, has a dual swords tile, which allows her to simultaneously attack the space in front of and behind her for two damage, and the arrow tile, which lets her shoot a projectile for two damage. Each tile has a cooldown, meaning you need to wait a certain number of turns before you can use it again. This is perhaps the most radical change compared to most other deck-based games because instead of channeling the heart of the cards and praying you draw the right thing, here, you will always know how long until you can use a particular tile again.

And while all this sounds like you may have too much control due to an apparent lack of randomness, where fights get tricky is that you’re almost always surrounded and outnumbered, battling waves of foes with only ten pips of health (most enemy attacks deal at least two to three damage), meaning every action counts. Thankfully, these opponents essentially come at you in single file lines from in front and behind, like in a martial arts movie, but still, the margin for error, especially on later difficulties, is thin. Importantly, each of the playable characters has their own movement abilities to get out of a pinch. For example, the starting class ability lets you swap places with a combatant in front of you, essentially using them as a meat shield, which sets up many stylish sequences that involve friendly fire.

When it comes to the deckbuilding, while there aren’t many unique tiles, and you only get a handful of opportunities to get new ones, there is a great degree of flexibility when it comes to how you upgrade these skills. After almost every scuffle, you can upgrade a tile to lower its cooldown time, boost its attack power, or add enchantments, like poison which deals damage over time, or ice that freezes them in place. Most importantly, each tile can be improved multiple times, and you can even increase the number of slots they have for upgrades, meaning you can beef up a single attack until it’s a samurai-annihilating powerhouse. Often, more powerful upgrades will come with downsides, like an increase in cooldown, so juicing these moves up without making them unreliable is a constant balancing act.

Adding to the complexity is the need for a weapon for every occasion: close-ranged tiles usually have quick cooldowns, making them a must-have, projectiles let you counter ranged units, and movement tiles get you out of tricky spots. Frequently, you’ll need to combine all of these in a single turn, taking out several units in sequence to ensure once you cut down the samurai in front of you, the archer behind them with an arrow already nocked won’t put one in between your eyes the second they have a line of sight. To get around these kinds of situations, you’ll often want to perform combo kills, where you take down multiple enemies in a single turn, and doing this will also trigger certain abilities, adding additional incentive to be clever. Beyond the tactical benefits, it’s simply satisfying to orchestrate these little martial arts set pieces as you spin to cut through a pair of foes on your flanks before throwing a shuriken through an unsuspecting third.

And while the game skews more toward a deterministic way of thinking because enemy behavior is always telegraphed and your attacks hit with 100% accuracy, there is also a light sprinkling of chaos throughout. You don’t know what kind of adversaries will spawn in between each wave, and everything around the rewards, like upgrades, shop items, and new tiles, are randomized, keeping things fresh between each run. Essentially, Shogun Showdown elegantly balances fairness and unpredictability by having foes that behave consistently with other elements that force you to adapt on the fly.

Another element that distinguishes this take on this sub-genre is that on top of maintaining the most essential element for this style of game—having decisions that frequently feel difficult, meaningful, and interesting—it also minimizes one factor that’s particularly painful for newer players: building a deck that minimizes bad hands. It takes a lot of practice to get a knack for knowing how many of certain cards you want in your deck, and for many beginners, it’s difficult to tell if you’re losing due to poor luck or because you’re missing out on the nebulous ratios needed to draw consistently. By contrast, here you can clearly see the cooldowns of your tiles, making it much easier to understand where you’re going wrong and letting you focus more on the tactical decisions that go into each turn.

Listen, I get the complaints, especially for folks with no interest in cards; roguelike deckbuilders have rapidly become a hot genre, sometimes to the point where it feels like every other game made by a smaller team checks these same boxes. But while there are a lot of them, a significant chunk of these find their own fascinating niches, which not only helps distinguish them among genre-diehards but also helps newcomers wrap their heads around a style of experience they may not get the appeal of. By removing the traditional concept of a deck while retaining complexity and tough choices, Shogun Showdown threatens to suck in a whole new cohort until they’re haggling at their local boardgame shop for the Planeswalker that will tie their deck together (ok, maybe they won’t go that far, but still). There may be a lot of games about cards these days, but as long as we continue to get ones that shuffle things up in bold and compelling ways, I’m not worried about getting sick of the genre any time soon.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.