Really good use of the theme. Never seen a Tabletop Simulator game in Ludum Dare so a 5 for innovation off me.

I love the card art! Seconding @taffaz, really cool to see a mod submission!

Really good idea! Added to bookmarks.. )

This game looks amazing, sadly I don't have tabletop simulator, but I'm intrigued to buy it just for this game... Hm... :smirk:

Nice consept and love the art. Nice to see something different.

Absolutely fantastic, I really like having a tabletop submission here. Visuals were great, everything was clear and obvious. Only thing I missed would be some tokens or something to keep track of items I use from parts.

The rules took a little time to get used to, but actually are very clear and intuitive. Pruning took the longest to figure out, and two thing that still aren't clear are whether you can use item from grown parts on the same turn (I just assumed not), and what the Regrow card does (I assumed it regrows the current part without item cost). Besides that, thoroughly enjoyed playing and may even try it out with some friends to see how it works with multiple players! Nice job!

Looks interesting. Can you add text description for people without Tabletop Simulator?

Thanks for the comment @Baturinsky, i have saved the game asset files as a Print and Play and have added the link into the description.

This will let you see the card assets in more detail and read through the game rules.

So owning tabletop simulator meant i could try out this game :smile:
This game was a really bold and interesting entry for a Ludum Dare and i found it a very fun and challenging game.
It took me a little while to get used to the rules and gameplay but once i did i really enjoyed the game and it kept me going for longer than other submissions i've played. The graphics and details on the card worked well and there was a good level of complexity to it. As someone else said, a way to mark a card resource as used (e.g. bird bath) would be useful but otherwise it all worked well.

Well done on a unique and great entry to the compo!

Interesting idea, I like the tabletop sim of it. hits the theme nicely :)

wo!!! great idea is very beatifull!!

Good thing this pandemic just caused me to buy Table Top Simulator! Quick question: Is this game valid for more than 1 player? I'm guessing it'll just be slightly easier, but otherwise seems fine... Might be good to put a "for 1-4 players" somewhere =). Ah, I see in the workshop entry it seems to indicate 1-4, but couldn't find it in the rules or the description anywhere.

Rules question: what is the point of Moving? I'm assuming some actions require you to be there to do them, but which ones? Just Grow the Tree? If Prune, where do you go when the card you remove is gone?

I really like that the game starts with the win condition satisfied, don't think I've seen that before =). Though, unless I'm missing something, is there any reason you can't just prune 3 leaves on the first turn, prevent the 29 decay, and instantly win?

The whole thing kind of works nice, good stuff

Good catch on the prune mechanic @jimbly, this was intended to say that you can prune from adjacent pieces (i have made a rules v1.01 as i unintentionally deleted this from the initial rules). This fixes your two questions on pruning as you would still be stood on a branch when a leaf is removed and you would not have the action count to prune 3 leaves on your first turn. This is a balance though as you then have less leaves available for the end game. I have also clarified that the canopy does not count as adjacent when pruning (preventing a potential 3 prune turn).

Regarding moving, the grow action on the player aid states you must be on the piece being grown. However this wasn't explicit in the rule document so that is now clear in v1.01

I have added a note about player count to the game description. This game is designed as a solo game but works as multiplayer co-op. The decay phase would happen after each player’s turn so each player would need to grow enough to prevent the decay on their turn.

Thanks very much for the valuable feedback.

Played through a game, and managed to win, but ended up having to spend a while decaying and undecaying a couple branches just to burn through twigs and sap to hoard enough water to finally flip back the last couple trunk cards. Enjoyed it! Cards look great.

Two more minor rules clarification questions: are you no longer allowed to draw once you have 7 cards, or do you discard if you go over? I played it as being unable to draw once I'm at 7, but that meant some running in place turns where nothing could possibly go wrong (just decay and undecay the same three things each turn to spend twigs/sap from my hand), which was kind of boring bookkeeping - I'd suggest maybe a "discard any number" or "discard exactly 3" action.

Also, the rules state that if all trunk pieces are decayed, you lose, however the very base trunk piece has a cost to become undecayed, which is confusing. I played with the literal interpretation, but it seems either that trunk should say "you lose" on the other side, or maybe the rule is really "if you need to decay a trunk piece and you cannot, you lose".

https://youtu.be/a0NSihMrICg Made a blind playthrough with my thoughts as I played the game. Had to infer a couple rules so might have played it a bit wrong but the thing I noticed is that if you have the piece that gives you 2 water and pieces that give you at least 2 sap, you can't lose the game at that point. From there it just became a sort of puzzle instead of a game. Not sure if that is intended or not, or if I missed some rules somewhere.

I assumed that when the discard pile was empty you shuffled it and it became a new foraging deck. I also found that once you had used the twigs to build the cool stuff, they were utterly useless. I had to assume you could draw more than 7 cards but could just discard to max, otherwise I didn't see a way to win unless you were very lucky (if it is even possible) as your hand would just clog up with useless twigs.

Damn! I wanted to play this - it looked really interesting from the splash art (so good job with that!). Alas, I do not own Tabletop Simulator. Kudos for making a board game so quickly, though! I haven't seen that in LD before.

Thanks again @jimbly. During my play throughs I would discard cards as a free action to make space to then draw up to 7. I’m amazed that didn’t make it into the rules write up!

Another good spot on the final trunk card. This should be a ‘game over’ card as you would never get the chance to recover it if it decays. Something ill add to the list of art changes to make after the play+rate is over.

@phlip45, thanks for the play through! It was great to see that the rules (while needing a little work) were easy enough for you to figure out. While I managed to balance a few things during the time, I didn’t get far enough to fully balance the lose condition, given a few more play throughs I would probably have ended up making the sap cost of trunk pieces higher to balance with the +2 building and the +1 leaves, while not eating into the water resource which can be a limit.

Also, Yes to reshuffling the foraging deck. Running out of foraging cards was one of my possibilities for a lose condition something like the local area has been stripped of resources, however that would need much more time spent balancing the deck distribution. Another option was a trade mechanic i.e. 3 twigs for a water, but that felt thematically wrong so I avoided it.

Thanks again!

@fizzget If you wanted to make running out of cards part of the lose condition you could do make a rule something like, 'Everytime you reshuffle the foraging deck, remove the top 5 cards from the game' then if you ever completely run out of deck you lose. I would think most people would lose via this method, so changing the number of cards removed when reshuffling is also a good way to have an easy, medium, and hard difficulty.

Thanks for including a Print and Play version, it's very refreshing to see such an unusual medium! (Plus I don't have Tabletop Simulator, so it allowed me to try this game.) The fully laid out modular tree looks great.

What piqued my interest initially was that my game (a Jam entry) also happens to be one where you're trying to keep a tree alive by managing some of its basic resources in different sections of the plant, but the similarities probably stop there :)

Just floored like most people by the application of tabletop sim as a platform for making games. Off the charts for innovation. The card art is great. I know how painstaking working in tabletop sim can be so kudos!

Nice graphics can be improve a lot in theme and humor but it is still a nice game.

What a pity I don't have a printer to try the game. But I like the game concept very much. There are not many card games on Ludum Dare. From what I can see form all cards games not a sigle one recived over 20 votes. I am guessing that your game will be the first one. Congratulations on the idea and implementation!

@ditam i just played your game and it's great! it feels like my game is the 'explain like I'm 5' of how a tree works to your degree course. Your game even inspired my to look up a few things about how trees work and i'm glad it did. thanks for mentioning it.

@fizzget thanks for the kind words! :) When I set out to make a game inspired by real tree biology, I knew I was going to have to sacrifice some gameplay "fun", so it is great to see that people can enjoy it nonetheless. I'm glad you were inspired to look up things, in fact, one low-priority item on my todo-list was adding wikipedia (or even scientific study) links to the relevant updates and mechanisms. Who knows, maybe I'll get around to it with one of my post-jam updates.

Really cool Idea!
Do not have Tabletop Simulator, but will try to print and play soon.

Very unique game idea and style!