Nice interface! I died before I could eat my apples!

Nicely done! I enjoyed the ambiance and the quirky feel of the game. Very creative mix of gameplay and topic.

I played the game multiple times and every time I die miserably. The probability is kind of skewed and jokes were funny.

Fantastic! The game fits the theme, is highly original, plays well. What's not to love? Great work, all of you. This is one of my favorites so far.

I really enjoyed the concept in this. Situations were fun and addicting enough that I kept going for a long time. I did find it to be kinda hard to get the hang of it, and haven't gotten more than 25 coins... still, being able to fetch a sword felt very nice. Will definitely play more!

14 days is my record till now. It's so much fun (even though I just keep dying)

Nicely done :D

Thanks for the feedback everyone! It's definitely a bit rough when you start out as a beggar, but as you start accumulating a bit of wealth it becomes a bit easier :)

One tip is to maximize coin gain until you can get to around 5 coin and then try to balance HP and coin until you can start snowballing.

A bit too punishing with bad luck events. It's hard to ever get over 5 coins most of the time. But still enjoyable. A monkey stole my socks.

I think I may have discovered a glitch. I sold my sword and shield to the round table, and the card said I received 100 coins, but I did not receive the 100 coins.

Otherwise, this was a pretty smart game!

@bodaciouslycrazy, thanks for the report, you're right. I just did a playthrough and noticed that too!

One other glitch is that the "Beg" option for Merlin shows +5 hp but it's actually +10 hp (the intention was +10 hp)

Very fun game. I enjoy how everything can come crashing down even if you get a good run.

"Prepare Apples for Showdown" gives an error "events/appleShowdown.lua:36: attempt to index global 'items' (a nil value)". Looking at the code it appears that "items.apple" was meant to be "item.apple", in that file.

Also in 'appleShowdown', the text says "Chance of victory: # of apples * 10%", but the actual logic is "Chance of victory: # of apples * 1%"

Thanks @bodaciouslycrazy and @mankarse for the bug reports, I've uploaded a new build with the bug fixes!

First time I played I died without getting a single coin and was a bit confused. Second time I went on a journey making a name for myself in the rat business eventually owning rat-factories. Had a lot of fun! Really cool twist on a clicker game, the coin flip mechanic really adds to it as well as the narrative.

I really enjoyed the concept behind this game. I was excited by the D&D style presentation of scenarios without graphics, just using my imagination. I think overall, with some UX improvements to help guide the player to understand their options, and a little bit more leniency in the early game with more ways to secure money, It'll be easier to get "into" the game. I felt like I was being pushed out of being able to make choices by the dice rolls. Overall, I liked this. I'd love to play a v2.0.

Man how am I gonna trip on an apple like that?!

Excellent game and the main reason I love reviewing games on LD. This is a really unique mechanic that I admittedly didn't fully grasp at first. I initially thought "what's up with this game? I can just mash on beg and be done with this." Once you start getting an economy going though, there's a lot of brilliance to the design. Money is a constant thing to juggle, higher priority than even HP. I loved having to play risk reward calculations constantly but at the same time being able to make smart decisions (which my game also experiments with). Maybe I'm just foolish but it took me a long time to realize I should flip 2-3 coins depending on how many I need split up, and then make my decision based on H vs T values. Once I realized that I started making a decent amount of progress.

One thing I like about the game is that there are distinct phases to the game. I think that's something all good game should have to keep the player on their feet. You have the begging phase in the beginning where you're just trying to minimize damage, the economy phase, and then building quest items while maintaining your cash flow. It's all very well done. What's even more unique about this game is that you can easily go BACK to a previous phase, even all the way back to a beggar if improperly planned. Again, this helps shake up the player's plans and keeps things interesting.

It's hard to think of additions I'd add to the game, it all seems so well connected. How did you guys come up with the mechanics?

Spent a little while on this one, funny story and interesting idea! Here is a video of my playthrough if you are interested:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/492120651

@peachtreeoath, thanks for the really detailed review and I'm glad the mechanics and strategy eventually made sense to you!

To be honest, we were pretty worried about balance since we were so focused on getting enough content in during the jam that we did nearly zero playtesting. And there are definitely things like not enough events that use up rats, the knight storyline requiring too many items, etc. that we will rebalance in a post-jam game.

As for how we came up with mechanics, we spent about the first 2 hours of the jam brainstorming, here's a snippet from our group chat:
```
> a rags to riches game
> start off as a beggar and beg for money and then later on you buy stuff with the money, trade it, barter, etc.
The gameplay would be "pick 1 of 3 options" at each turn of the game. E.g.
"Beg for money from the visiting noble"
"Attempt to steal the passerby's pocketwatch"
"Sing a song and hope someone gives you some gold"
> depending on some stats and stuff the options at each turn change
> Similar to [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reigns/id1114127463](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reigns/id1114127463) but the setting is you start off as a beggar and you win the game when you become king.
```

The coin flipping mechanic came once we decided on this idea and then thought about how to make the choices more interesting. A couple of us are really into [Dicey Dungeons](https://store.steampowered.com/app/861540/Dicey_Dungeons/) at the moment so we thought about a lightweight version of Dicey Dungeon mechanics and landed on using flipping coins instead of rolling dice.

@jake-marks, thanks for the playthrough! The stormy weather event ended up being pretty rough in the jam version since it can show up before you even have 5 coins and make you take 5 hp. Nice job getting a shield and apple pie!

@herman-chau YES! I love Dicey Dungeons and you can actually see its influence in the game I submitted (via actions at the top with requirements). Honestly I liked this way more than Reigns because there are more goals and thus decisions mattered more, at the cost of complexity of course but LD people have more tolerance than most.

Of the games I've played so far this LD, this might be my favorite. Was a little confused initially, but didn't take long to get the hang of. So a little instruction in the beginning wouldn't hurt. The events do seem like they could using some weighing depending on what items/events you already encountered. Took me forever to get the shield event to pop up a second time. I never figured out if the red fish or cat had a purpose. I also lost in the showdown against the old lady. Maybe I'll try again later. Great job on this unique entry!

The begging phase is really harsh, but I think that is OK because it makes you think about life, you know? :smile_cat: Really cool game!

Oh, no! I was on a roll with this until the apple showdown!

ETA: at least it saved my last progress, far enough for me to see this screen:

What an epic showdown with the apple scrounge.

OK, real review.

I actually quite enjoyed this rogue-like experience. The writing had quite a lot of charm, and though it took a while, the stats were informative enough to shift the game to my favor. I do think some more positive cards where begging gave coins appear earlier would have helped the player understand the outcomes a little more.

It took a while to register, but I do appreciate that certain conditions, such as the amount of coins you have at hand, or triggering certain outcomes, helped trigger certain cards to appear, fleshing out the world a little bit more. That said, it is a bit slow-going on many playthrough, so some balancing on quickening the pace of the story would have been appreciated.

@omiya-games, congratulations on the win!!! I'll look into the Apple Showdown bug, it's probably a simple typo of `items` instead of `item`.

Thank you for the detailed review and I'm glad you enjoyed the game and the systems we implemented!