Deck of plants by FancyReckless
Deckbuilding game, where you plant plants, water them and collect for money to pay rent. Make sure to use special abilities of plants.

How to play: Use mouse, drag plant cards on the field. Once you're done, end your turn. Every turn plant loses 1 water, if this goes to 0 - plant dies. Rent collector comes once in a while, so make sure you can pay up.
credits:
music: https://soundcloud.com/congus-bongus/rhythm-garden
plant art: https://apsyll.itch.io/top-down-fantasy-crops
Color pallete for other stuff taken from plant art pack
Edit: As per jam rules, fixed bug where your mouse hover sometimes fall through shop window and "On Water" effect gets mixed with "On Collect"
| Link | https://fancyhat.itch.io/deck-of-plants |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/deck-of-cards |
Ratings
| Overall | 21th | 4.288⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 41th | 4.115⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 22th | 4.192⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 3th | 4.596⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 24th | 4.327⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
EDIT:
I played the "fixed" version and this is how long I lasted:

An absolute blast
It's really neat and easy to learn. You did an amazing job of making all the information clear.
It also feels very satisfying!
Great entry!
I enjoyed the run I had with it, but found it a bit too simplistic and restrictive to really be able to push myself progression wise, the tiny deck size and amount of cards you can play per turn made the meta pretty much just "rush the plant that takes 20 turns but makes a ton of money" and water it on every other turn, I didn't really find much advantage to any of the other plants.
If that was balanced out a tiny bit more I think it'd make the gameplay a lot more engaging and challenging, good work regardless :)
Of course I may be wrong and it's not actually the best strategy.

Here’s the start of your game if you wanted to re-watch initial thoughts youtu.be/qbBq_nBKk5k?t=4002
Loved the variety of plants, rewards, and cards available! Congrats on the great game!
On the other hand, after playing for a while, I found myself thinking about what would be the "goal" - am I going for a high score? or to survive as many turns as possible? (in that case, a total turn counter would be nice). Maybe increasing the pace of the tax collector a bit would make the game more intense, not sure.
Also, I felt myself wishing to be able to see the water level of the plants without mousing over it!
Anyway, very fun game, could spend a lot of time on this one :carrot:
The idea was a really fantastic use of the theme! I was having a lot of fun playing this one -whole lot of potential here to expand on -I would definitely buy this game. Amazing work! :D
So, I initially played this because I also made a deck-builder for this jam, and I saw yours on itch.io or something like that, and just had to see how other people built deck-builders for the same theme. I have to say, I think you did a much better job than me. :smile: But, our games both had a similar "water" mechanic, which is an interesting similarity!
The run I did, I used mostly tomalones + the orange plant (the one that does +2 coins for each copy of itself), can't remember its name. Near the end I switched to just that orange plant, as the ability of it to stack more money with more plants on the screen was very helpful.
More specifically, I think that an important property of cards in this game is how much money the card can earn divided by how many turns it takes to grow... basically its money/turns. And for that orange one, I was easily getting a ratio of 2 or more near the end, as it only took 5 turns to grow. Compared to the tomalone, which has a ratio of 1, I think this orange plant could be very powerful, and I might do another playthrough later to explore the strategy more.
But that's something... this game is really fun! I literally want to go back and try to explore my strategy more! I haven't played a Ludum Dare 52 game with that property yet.
So, I think the way you balanced the card deck is pretty good. There are some cards that seem perhaps overpowered, such as rain, but overall it seems reasonably balanced and I think there is probably more than one good strategy (and for cards like rain that are really powerful, it seems like they are powerful in every strategy, so it's pretty fair overall).
In particular, I definitely saw other people using tomalones... and I'm guessing it's possible to get pretty far with those. But I think that orange plant can probably do just as well if not better. So, seems like there is some nice balance there.
One thing that I think bit me is I completely misread the "+1 max energy" card. I kept reading it as "+1 energy," and so I never picked it up, as it seemed ridiculously difficult to grow for just 1 energy. But with 1 MAX energy... now that's a different situation!
That seems to be an occasional problem with deck building games -- I think I've had similar reading issues with Slay the Spire, for example. I think this was the only misread I had in this game, though. Maybe just underlining "max" would be a minor but helpful change.
I feel like the mechanics for gaining and getting rid of cards felt nice. Getting rid of cards is always powerful, for sure, but I feel like its gradual enough in this game that it doesn't feel too easy to just build a super powerful deck immediately. But it is kind of a nice feeling to be able to slowly build a better deck by repeatedly discarding cards.
By the way, my score was 169 days. Definitely not as good as some of the scores I saw on the itch page. :smile: