sorry this is a gamejam

Not sure what you mean by that. The rules specifically say you can make a tabletop game, so we did. The pdf has the full rules, board, cards, and tokens.

This is a game.

i don't understand the purpose and the concepto of this.

It's a print-and-play single player tabletop game. The rules, board, etc....everything you need to play except for dice...are in the pdf file. I know tabletop games are not very common for LDJam, but I decided to do one as a change of pace.

I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I appreciate you taking a look at it anyway.

It is interesting to see a tabletop game entered in this jam, not to say that it's a bad thing. I really liked the cutouts, very creative. The rules do take a decent amount of time to read through but the game looks like it would be entertaining, it also has the added bonus of not needing friends to play it :-). I know you probably receive a lot of feedback bashing you for making a tabletop game when the vast majority of entries are video games, but I think you did very nice job. Good work!

Dude, tabletop games for a game jam are really a challenging thing, because of LOTS of factors, and I totally understand that people, sometimes, might not get it. I find it, though, to be a really amazing feat to make a tabletop game, with the rules you laid out here! There's some really amazingly creative work behind these types of projects that I find fascinating.

Although I didn't play it (no working printer here to print :pensive:) I read the rules and checked the full PDF and your 3D model of the tentacle monster and it's really an awesome work! So congrats in making it!

Since it's a solitary game, as soon as I'm able to print it I'll try it! :O I can also see it totally as a strategy game for PC! Thinking for a bit, it's totally possible to build it even using HTML/JS, to make it accessible! :D

If I have the time and possibility, I'd like to try and do that anytime in the future! :P Looks like it could bring the game to a bigger audience! :D

Cheers and Good Luck! :)

Thanks, @wmerges and @yuigoto. I wouldn't say anyone was really bashing us. I think it was more like confusion about why we did tabletop. Or maybe they didn't realize it had rules and thought it was pics only or something? I don't know.

Also, we were planning on making a video with everything set up, showing how the dice rolling monster works. We just ran out of time. We'll probably make and post a gameplay video over the weekend.

We are considering turning this into a video game. It was fun being able to spend an entire weekend on mechanics, rather than having to keep the gameplay simple enough to code in a weekend.

That's a great decision you made there, it also helps a lot later when you code the game! :D I'll keep this in check so I can see when you write the video game too, to play it whenever I want! :D

People often get confused, but it's always some great creative job making these types of games, so nice job there! :)

I wish I had the time to print and play this game. It looks like you put a lot of effort into it; good job!

As someone who plays a lot of board games I want to preface this with I don't mean it to be as harsh as it will sound. Also note that I did not play the game, I am simply judging on the rule set and materials provided in the PDF.

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There is a lot of streamlining that needs to be done with the rules. For a board game, being able to play the game from the rules only is extremely important. The most important bit of the rules is those that are used most frequently, in particular the game phases. Your game has 7 phase:
1. Turn Over New Cards
2. Generate Power
3. Deploy Troops
4. Recruit Troops
5. Purchase, Discard, and Repair
6. Monster Attack
7. Counter-Attack

In general I think you could tidy things up and make the mental road map to playing your game simpler by combining some of these. I would propose:

1. Event Phase
2. Upkeep Phase
3. Action Phase
4. Monster Phase

Note this changes very few actual rules, it would simply group similar things together for comprehension. During the event phase you simply flip and activate the next event and get rid of the previous one. During upkeep you put out cards if needed and generate power and troops (this is a slight tweak but I don't think it would change things all that much, that the troops come out and then you can move them). After that you have the action phase where you would be able to move troops around, buy things, repair things, etc. This is where all the decisions happen and including a player aid with available actions would help players know what they can do. After that is the monster phase, where the monster attacks and troops defend and counter attack.

While this is simply a cosmetic change (this would change very few rules) it greatly increases the ability for players to grasp the flow of the game. They handle events, then do the things that happen automatically, then make decisions during the action phase, then fight the monster. I could probably go on with more individual changes that could be made but this illustrates the kind of streamlining I am talking about.

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I just want to say kudos on making a board game for a game jam. It is a difficult thing to do and is more difficult in a lot of ways to just making a video game cause people will critique the game without playing it, as I have done. I look forward to seeing what you come out with in the future and I hope this didn't come out too harsh.

@earthexe Thanks for taking a look at it. I understand that it takes a while (and costs some money in paper and ink) to print it out and play it. I figured most people wouldn't, and that's fine, but I appreciate the feedback.

@phlip45 Thank you for taking the time to leave detailed comments, and it didn't come across as harsh at all. One of the main reasons I do game jams is to get feedback. Comments like these are far more helpful than having friends tell you it's perfect in every way.

I agree that the rules need a fair amount of tightening up. The turn phases especially are pretty unruly. I probably will do what you suggest and combine some of them. I'm planning on doing some more iterations of this and possibly making it into a video game once I get the mechanics working the way I want (and add a lot more content.)

I played it with a friend. It was pretty cool; it had the right amount of choices to make each turn. We lost by 1 because R&D got damaged when we were about to nuke it, but that was our fault, so it was good.

It was a bit weird that the troops couldn't be moved when they were produced. This made the first turn feel odd because we couldn't really do anything, and it also means the barracks pretty much never get damaged.

We also found that the power on the left side of the board was under-utilized. Most of the R&D cards are a bit situational, so we didn't always want to buy them, and as mentioned the barracks never get damaged.

For what it's worth I found the current phase breakdown very useful. It was very easy to remember exactly what to do each turn and when. If the board just said "upkeep phase" I would have had to refer to the rules more to remember what actually happened during that phase. The board was very good and had all the information we needed to refer to during the game on it.

Okay! I finally got a chance to print it out and play it. (took photos because I used counters instead of cutting out those little bits of paper). First initial reaction to finishing the game was that it ended too fast. I think I misread a rule or two because first round the Monster got an attack boost. That didn't give me enough time to generate and deploy troops before it busted various buildings. Once that happened I felt like I was playing catch up against an impossible foe. I have a few questions about rules and flow.

When I deploy to the battlefield, are those units only for rerolls? If so I feel as though they're better suited to sit somewhere where I can spend them for more dice in the future.

R&D seemed really really expensive. With my only generating 4 units a turn having to spend on Armory and then upgrades with R&D only for one event card to wipe out everything seemed hard. Are they all multiple use? (Like I can basically spam the Big 'Ol Nuke until running out of power.

If the creature has 4 successful attacks, all of them land on one building that has 1 troop on there. Do I get 1 chance to block or 4? It may seem ridiculous, but that was the only way I was able to save my buildings once repaired.

Most importantly, are you going to continue to work on this? I'd really like to keep up to date with it. :)

@bmacintosh I'm considering doing away with the rule about not moving troops the first turn. Honestly, I think I included it as a reflex because of all the years of playing Magic the Gathering, with its "summoning sickness" mechanic. But not sure it really adds anything to this game. It would also eliminate a phase, allowing me to have the generate troops and deploy troops as a combined phase.

In my playtests, the left side does seem to be used less. I may make some adjustments there at some point, but first I want to flesh out the R&D deck more. Originally, I think it had eight cards, but I changed how the counter-attack phase worked, and half of the cards no longer made sense. I want R&D to be more expensive and kind of crazy experimental stuff with a risk/reward decision to make. But that's probably the part of the game that's most lacking right now.

As far as the phases go, I'm wondering if I should combine the two suggested approaches...keep them broken out into separate parts so you don't have to keep going back to the rules, but group related phases under a single heading.

@mrtroy I don't think you misread the rule about the monster getting a first turn boost. Sounds like you had a bad draw on the event deck...but yeah, I agree that's a problem. There should be some luck, but you shouldn't get hamstrung on the first turn. Maybe I'll look at making the event deck increase in difficulty as you go, sort of like Eldritch Horror does with it's Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3 Mythos Deck construction.

Right now the battlefield troops are only used to allow you to sacrifice for rerolls, but I plan on expanding that. It would be cool to have weapons and vehicles that have additional abilities that allow you to power them with troops (with or without the sacrifice). Maybe it could tie in with some event cards also, like "At the end of the turn, if you have more than three troops on the battlefield, then [some kind of good effect]".

Some of the R&D cards are single use, but some of them stay on the battlefield...I think...was pretty tired when I finished up the cards, but I think I have some that work that way. If not, there will be in the next iteration.

Yes, we definitely plan to continue working on this in one form or another. For right now we're planning to do some more iterations as a print & play pdf game, but we're talking about possibly turning it into a video game.


To everybody else...I'm really sorry I haven't tried any of your games yet, but I plan to. My schedule has been pretty busy since the end of the jam and have only gotten to play a handful of games, but I haven't forgotten about you. Thanks for all of the feedback.

Wow! This is really massive! I never saw a tabletop entry before (even tho, I did know it's allowed). I had to read the rules twice to fully comprehend, and didn't had the chance to play (yet). But it looks awesome, I'll try it with my colleagues next week. Nice job! :)

I went through the pdf (no printer here at all and not even enough D6s, so can't play), seems solid. I'm not a qualified enough designer to discuss details though, but I think this would make a nice video game, too :)

Oh man, 8 pages of rules? With cards full of text too? Shorten it!

Since it's the rules, there isn't any need for things like "If the player is unhappy, the player may...".
Just get straight to the point with "The player may...."

There is no need for the continuous reminder that the HQ is purely decorative. State it once in the important notes/rules and move along.
Or since it doesn't have any function, just remove it.

The card text can be shortened greatly.
eg.
- x attack with y rerolls each.
- top card of z deck is played for k cost
- Add x number of item y to z location
- Rolls equal or above k value is are z for n turns.

The game itself is not bad. Once you get the hang of the rules, the game can be pretty fast as it's single player, though because it's single player, the repetitiveness of the game is amplified. Though I find most board games are repetitive. Would be great if there were multiplayer.

@rothens91 Thanks. Please let me know if you get a chance to play it.

@saithir We are probably going to do a video game, but first I want to take a few more passes at it on paper. Iterating and experimenting is obviously much faster on tabletop than in code.

@rubyleehs Ageed. The writing needs some major editing. I do plan to reword the card text especially, but I will probably hold off on that until I do some more work on the gameplay. Once it's fleshed out more it will be easier to make good decisions about what terms to use, etc.

This is a tabletop game people :D Don't freak out!

Nice to see a tabletop game ! From the rules, it seems interesting to play, but I don't have access to a printer for now. I'll definitely try it out when I can ! Congrats for the entry and the 3D models ;)