anthonyharmitage 2021-04-26 13:52
Suprised to see a tabletop one here. Artwork definitely is nice, makes me wanna get a plush blobfish)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → 20,000 Leagues
By marcmagus
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 195 | 3.76 | 53 | |
| Fun | 263 | 3.62 | 51 | |
| Innovation | 111 | 3.90 | 54 | |
| Theme | 329 | 3.77 | 52 | |
| Graphics | 389 | 3.52 | 53 | |
| Humor | 171 | 3.29 | 44 | |
| Mood | 304 | 3.48 | 47 |
Suprised to see a tabletop one here. Artwork definitely is nice, makes me wanna get a plush blobfish)
I'll print it out, I have a physical game night tomorrow!
Love the artwork and the tabletop genre! Really elegant and lovely!
Cool, I love the idea of a card game in a game jam!
Really like the concept and rules. Didn't play yet, but rated what i could based on the video :)
Very fun. The graphics are beautiful. Great work!
Wow a card game in LD! Luckily we were prepared to play it in TTS. Had a ton of fun playing a multiplayer game on stream. We were a little confused on the rules but I think that was our fault for rushing through reading the rules. Definitely some interesting mechanics going on here. I feel like I need to play it a few more times to really get an idea for it all. Here's the timestamped link to us playing it on stream: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003143985?t=5h46m25s
Fascinating to have a physical card game. :) Good job.
Hi @marcmagus, we played your game tonight after dinner! It was a lot of fun, it only takes one round to understand the game and then you can dive in. tableTop.jpeg We printed the game on quite heavy paper and cut them by hand.
Some notes : * For non english player, we several time got confused by the scuba diver instead of the dive-dive-dive card * The corner indication should be larger and away from the corner ( as hand cutting is a messy job... ) * I think getting a **very small** gutter between card would also be nice.
Game play with it was a lot of fun.
On the rules we were not sure of : * Set values are for **your** collected cards only ? ( cause the score table goes up to 9 while for a 3 player game you only ever play 6 cards ) * The rules should have a more unified (albeit more boring) wording ( jelly [5] Set scores x^x ...)
The game is beautiful, maybe the kids will colors the card tomorrow.
@dhim Thanks for the feedback! Good comment about card layout; making the numbers bigger would help quite a bit. Also they should be in the top-left, that was a foolish choice on my part. I'll look at it with and without a gutter next time I do a P&P.
You read the rules correctly that set values are for your collected cards only, yes.
I notice an implication from your question that you got a different question wrong, in the same way that @bongard22's group did, which makes it clear to me I could have written the rules more clearly to call out a difference from expectations: you only count up score at the end of the game, accruing cards over all three rounds. This differs from Sushi Go and thus expectations. (The table goes up to 9 because there are 9 in the deck and you could theoretically get them all)
Hello man, I can't even stress enough how much I appreaciate someone making a board game for Ludum Dare. That's just amazing! I think there is always just like one or two people making board games each LD.
Unfortunately I don't have materials and time to test your game, I voted for it according to your video. I hope it's okay. AND I LOVED IT! I am amazed you managed to test a board game only within 48 hours especially when you have so many pictures for each card. You have my respect friend.
I always try to make sure to play tablestop simulator games because it's always refreshing to see a submission in a different format than made in Unity or GameMaker Studio. The art work of the cards is clear and easy to spot and the rules are easy to follow. I really enjoyed this game!
I also appreciate someone making a board game. I love this and the instructions are very clear and it would feel very polished printed on glossy cardstock.
So I printed the game out before I read the rules and as a result we played it in 2 players. We adjusted the amount of cards per round to 7, but our experience might have been skewed by the illegal number of players ;).
Cards design is basic but that actually goes well with the pure outline ink art. The value numbers on the cards are too small for comfort and too close to the edge. It would also be nice if you would incorporate a card type "Attraction" somewhere (like centered on the bottom for example, could move "hazard" there as well for unified design).
And from the quality of life perspective - and to save the trees - you could totally fit your rules on one page if you'd go for a two-column layout and make the font somewhat smaller. Also, some printer-friendly margins would be nice. I can already see it in my minds eye, and it looks nice :). I know that layout of a manual is not a first concern if you have 48 hours to make a game.
Rules were clear and easy to follow. The only point of confusion for us was the fact that numbers in the Scuba Diver row of the scoring table go only up to 6 for some reason and there are clearly more than 6 different types of attractions. So we wondered for a while if there is a cap on how many points a diver can score (and that cap is 6), but eventually we figured "nah".
The game plays nice and fast, is completely easy to grasp - so it could be a great party game, actually. Although in our household the go-to party game is Twilight Imperium :laughing: But it also allows for employing a bit of devious strategies, which I personally appreciate. Nothing like stealing a scuba diver just in a nick of time and leaving your husband with a second tuna ;)!
Well done!
photo_2021-05-01_00-34-26.jpg
Very cool, love tabletop card games! Haven't had a chance to actually play yours yet, but I've played enough similar games in the past to tell it'd be fun from your video!
@fabula-rasa thanks for the feedback, and glad you enjoyed the game! I didn't put 2 players on the label because I wasn't confident I could make the 2 player experience have the effect I intended and didn't have time for the extra playtesting it would require knowing that games often behave very differently with 2 players than multi-player. I suspect it would be good to shrink the deck a little, maybe something like "Remove all Fusiliers and 1 each of Jelly, Shark, Tuna, SCUBA, Ray, Crab, Snail" along with a 7 card hand size.
Sounds like you got the basic interactions I was hoping for, which is great to hear.
Great feedback on layout, thank you. Definitely wish I'd made those numbers bigger.
(On SCUBA Divers, the table row goes up to 6 because that's how many there are in the game, so the set scores "how many SCUBA Divers you have (up to 6) times how many unique attractions you have, as long as you have at least 2 SCUBA Divers". That row of the table isn't my best work.)
Not printed yet, but I'm planning on sending it to the GD of my team (who is a tabletop fan and happens to have a printer :sparkles:), so this is gonna be a useless comment but... I really love the font you used xD Also it made me want to try a tabletop entry for my next LD, thanks for the inspiration.
@alyd-asmar Comments about fonts are never useless! Fonts are very important and great (unless they are garbage, like Comic Sans, of course). I can have whole lengthy conversations about fonts and consider it time well-spent! FONTS :grinning:!
I love seeing full tabletop games, and thank you very much for the video as I don't have a working printer at the moment! I love the concept and think that the game would be a lot of fun to play. It's simple, but for a card game like this, you don't want it to be that complicated. The art on the cards is charming, (and look like I drew them!) so that's a big plus. I'm not sure I like the use of 2^x, since that amount of math often is too much of a barrier. I think the eels should just display the values on the card (like with the fusilier, coral, etc.). Overall, I quite like this, and you should develop this into a professional form! I haven't played Sushi Go, but it seems like the play style is a bit different, and it's different enough that it forms its own game :)
@fabula-rasa Well I'm a newbie when it comes to fonts (as I have a tendency to just end up hand drawing all of my letter art), but it's nice to find people that are enthusiastic about it too :blush: (one of my favorite things is how precise and technical it rapidly gets... like when some random type designer gets criticized for being too prone to tilting the center of the letter "e" in their work) This one reminded me of the elegant Computer Modern (probably partly due to the numbers), but with a little more pep. And... tilted e centers are a real plus for that! :laughing: Cool choice anyways. Next time I'll come back with gameplay feedback I promise :stuck_out_tongue:
@alyd-asmar A typography nerd friend of mine pointed me at [The League of Movable Type](https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/) some years back and they're my first stop when looking for fonts for anything.
@incobalt That's a really good point. I made a late decision to put all the triangular numbers directly on the card and it was a good choice; I should have done it for Eels and Jellies as well. I also shouldn't have both Eels and Jellies, it's bad design, but I kept pushing off resolving that and never did. (If you check out the PDF you'll see I include a table of values for 2^x and others, but, yes, directly on the card would be perfect)
Ideally I also would have included card counts for each card directly on the cards, but...didn't get there.
I unfortunately had to play all three players myself, lol, but I'll absolutely give any tabletop entry a look!
**presentation:**
As has been already mentioned, the score numbers could have used a bigger size. Once you play a little bit you can start to recognize the images but for first timers, the score should really pop out and make itself obvious.
I had difficulty determining if the Diver counted itself as a unique attractions. I found that the rules explained that but it felt missing from the card. Perhaps each card could have a printed designation somewhere on it. Either Hazard, Attraction, Event (dive cards and maybe more later?), or Diver.
**Gameplay: **
I feel like the crab and snail could be replaced. There is something to be said for giving a player intentionally bad choices to make the good ones feel better but when you only get a max of 15 cards in a game, each choice should feel as good as you can make it. I feel like this is one of the things that makes Sushi Go so much fun.
The quantity of Dive and Hazard cards felt off. I'm not sure exactly what kind of tweak would help but it just felt to unpredictable for the hazards to ever really be worth it.
After thinking for a bit, I came up with a mechanic that might help the feel of the dive cards. Perhaps each turn before drafting, you roll a dice up one number to represent the nautalis diving deeper. Then have hazards and dive cards (or resurface cards?) be worth the current depth instead of the static 5. That could add a fun push your luck kind of mechanic and make it perhaps easier to read when to play hazards. In addition, maybe instead of simply having a number of cards to draft, you draw a card each round so hand sizes stay the same. The depth counter can gamble higher and the mystery of does anyone have a hazard card stays a danger, even once all the hands have gone around the table.
Yikes, I hope I haven't come off too critical. I really liked this game and that just makes want to direct it and theorize about it. So some of the things I liked:
The cumulative collections over all three rounds is a nice departure from a game like Sushi Go. It allows you to develop an actuall long term strategy and makes card denial less devastating.
The art was very cute. I especially liked the Colossal Squid.
The Scuba Diver Card was a really cool one. It added a fairly powerful incentive/strategy to go against most of the other mechanics which means not everyone has to go for the same strategy.
The ability to play the dive cards in multiple ways was clever. It balances a risk with versatility.
Honestly, this inspires me to perhaps try my hand at tabletop one of these times. Great job
It was a bit of a struggle to play this, since my friends do not live near me, and not all of us can run Tabletop Simulator, but we managed to get a Minecraft server set up to play the game. The resulting game was a little awkward, but definitely still playable. The other thing we struggled with was understanding the rules; by the end of the second game we played we had resolved confusions over the handling of **Dive! Dive! Dive!** and the scoring of **Dive! Dive! Dive!**, **Clear Waters**, **Sea Turtle**, **Coral**/**Butterflyfish**/**Fusilier**, and **Eel**. Generally the points of confusion were over the meaning round, and mixing up total score for a set of cards with its per card score.
In terms of the gameplay itself, there were two areas where I feel there can be improvement:
* **SCUBA Diver** seems maybe too strong. In both our games the person who collected two of them used them to win without too much effort. Though that being said, the chances of drawing at least two opening hands with **SCUBA Diver**s doesn't seem like it would be super likely so perhaps we were just unlucky that we had it happen in 2/2 of our games.
* In both games we played, it was clear by the start of the third round that my tableau was not of sufficient quality to give me a shot at winning the game. As such I felt a bit at a loss of what I should be focusing on. Should I be trying to get as high a score as possible? Should I doing my best to pass the person closest ahead of me to I can place higher in the final score ranking? Something else? Bargaining my aid to the player in second does not seem like it would be useful since it doesn't seem like ganging up on the person in the lead has much potential to affect their ability to hold onto the first spot.
I guess this all sounds very critical, but all in all, even if we were a bit shaky on the rules, I enjoyed both games I played and I'm hoping I'll get to play a few more games of this at least so that I can further explore the strategy.
Was pretty refreshing to try a tabletop jam game, quite nice!
Just wanted to thank you again for playing our game on stream the other day! We played your game with @fabula-rasa, so I dropped by to do my bit of voting. Very nice game and I appreciate that you made art as well! Card mechanics reminded me somewhat of Terraforming Mars, one of my favorite games! Thank you for making yours! :)
Wow ! It's original in the context of a gamejam :) Nice work !
You are well done, a very high-quality game))
This is such a fantastic take on the premise of jamming. Can't wait to play this with my tabletop friends
Nice idea! I'm kinda like the idea of people developing boardgame card games in the Jam. Great work!
I would love to have more in depth Artwork, but nevertheless, good job!
What's wrong with having 2 tunas? I'm curious about the lore :)
It's always very refreshing to see print & play games, and this one seems very neat! Great take on the theme too. Sadly it'll be a while before I can actually try out any 3-or-more player games, eh. (I have also made a card game for this jam, it's a 2 player mining game with an optional 1 vs computer mode. Only in the browser for now, but I'm tempted to turn it print & play post-jam - thanks to great examples like this.)
@ditam It's a silly reference to https://genius.com/Arrogant-worms-sponges-lyrics
Yeah, 3 players is tough right now. If you look upthread someone did try it 2p and it sounds like it worked pretty well, and I had some thoughts on deck trimming to potentially tighten up the experience, but I definitely didn't have time to playtest for 2 at all, so, knowing 2 often feels very different from multi- I didn't want to put 2 on the label. I'd considered a solo mode as well but when I was playtesting with myself I felt like too much of the interesting part of the game involved reasoning about what choices the other players would make, which would be lost.
@$162477 I'm really intrigued by how you played in a Minecraft server. That's pretty cool!
Thanks for the feedback. It sounds like you ran into all of the potential points of confusion that I had noted when working on the rules and tried to address, and it's quite clear from all the feedback that I didn't get quite as much clarity in there as I needed to. Rules writing is really difficult.
SCUBA are indeed very powerful, and my biggest note for continued development is to keep an eye on whether they're good in a way that makes drafting interesting or too good in a way that either reduces interesting choices or makes the game feel too much like luck of the draw of initial hands. I definitely appreciate the feedback that it felt a bit too much on the luck of the draw side for your group. How many players did you have?
Your other question is a little hard to answer for you, as it's much more about the social contract of playing a competitive game than it is about my game in particular. My strong opinion on the answer to that question is "you should do what will make the game feel best for your group". My personal opinion is that in a game like this it is implied that table talk/open negotiation of kingmaking is frowned upon, and that intentional kingmaking (taking actions with the intent of causing a particular player to win over another) violates the implicit social contract, and you should play for the best end-game position you can achieve (whether that's maximize your score, maximize your relative score, maximize your odds of pulling off a come-from-behind victory) But many miles of electronic ink have been spilled on this topic on Boardgame Geek and blogs by writers more thoughtful than I, and all I can really say is I'm sympathetic that you found yourself in a position where you had a whole round to play where you felt like you had already lost, and I hope that you found rounds to be as quick as I anticipated so you weren't in that painful situation for very long.
Wait.... it's a board game! unbelievable
I'm so glad other people are finding ways to play! Without really having any idea about the multiplayer functions of a Minecraft server, I'm also now imagining a card game with blocks enchanted to become actual fish/squids/etc in a pool when players "flip them over." Probably not actually possible and maybe a pile of signs would be more reasonable?
Thanks for letting me fumble through the pdf on stream; [here's the clip](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1009307903?t=0h1m15s) for reference.