Taxcellent

feraligatr 2025-10-07 00:09

I do love the visual consistency and looks of this game. It looks very clean, and the tiles are very charming. The music is very chill, which fit the mood of the game very well. I was a bit irritated about how exactly the game mechanics work and how taxes are calculated and collected. I've given it 4 runs, where after each I was maybe at 2k max after 12 months. Yet it was very satisfying to see tiles plopping up and seeing some positive effects on the cities. I think I will give it a try later again, my brain is a bit fried at the moment.

pixel-studios 2025-10-07 00:20

Loved the gameplay, graphics were great, music was good too. I had a great time playing, well done

fis 2025-10-07 20:16

Beautiful game, well composed - but I fear I do not have the talent to make the king happy :<

Ended up with about 10k (tried several times).

jordan-neff 2025-10-08 04:24

WOW! Super ambitious game with a ton of depth to it! And I absolutely LOVE the board game aesthetic ❤️🎲

I will admit I was pretty overwhelmed at the start with how much information I was looking at. It wasn't until a bit later in the game that some things started to click. My 2nd playthrough went a lot better than my first, but I still ran into the issue of two of my cities losing their entire population so I only made it to 12k at the end :slight_frown:

Overall though really awesome entry! Props to your team for making something with so many moving parts and having it all work. Major kudos.

b0guslaw 2025-10-08 16:53

Let me get the good stuff out of the way first: I love the art style. Having the map on a table with smaller assets off to the side is a genius idea and gives the game a boardgame-y style, which works really really well. I also like the take on the collector theme, I think its genuinely very fun.

What I didn't like to much was the UI: I think some colored text during the rounds would have given a better visual feedback if an effect is good or bad or for you.

Unfortunately also, your game hard crashed for me on the third or fourth month when selected City break tax. It would lock up and crash out, no idea why.

Overall though, even the crash, what I did not like is far overshadowed by what I did like. You have a very polished game on your hands there and with some polish and enhancements I can definitely see this as a commercial product. Incredibly cool work!

grizeldi 2025-10-08 16:58

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

@b0guslaw That crash is a known bug, but unfortunately we never managed to find how to reproduce it so we'd be able to fix it. We'll continue trying to hunt it down, but I don't expect much success there.

custodi 2025-10-08 18:53

Good game, but tutorial is not clear. I somehow make money, even though taxes were higher than income of village. It has potential, but it needs some work.

someone 2025-10-08 20:00

I love the aesthetic. Felt like a nice complete game. The benefits of a team I guess. I somehow managed to win on my first attempt in 10 months, though I still have no idea what I was doing. There seems to be a lot of complexity there but I really wasn't following most if it.

pickydogfish 2025-10-08 20:43

@someone It's definitely the benefits of a (tried and tested) team.

Still, it's been a bit of a struggle fitting this amount of complexity into a game jam game, but mostly from a game design perspective. We tried to make the game short (only 12 turns) to allow people to play the whole thing for the jam rating, but that means that all the systems have to respond to players actions pretty fast. And with the region income, tax, basic upkeep, population and happiness stats being quite closely related to each other, it's a pain in the ass to balance. Also the map is randomly generated, which adds replayability, but also means that sometimes you get amazing income right off the bat, and sometimes it's pretty bad, making it harder to balance once again.

Maybe we bit off a bit more than we could chew, game design and UI/UX wise.

But honestly, it's been a lot of fun trying to balance the systems. I usually don't enjoy the number tweaking part all that much, but I didn't hate it this time. We already released a small rebalanced version (the one you probably played), and we might do one more.

And thanks for all the feedback guys! Much appreciated!

jadener 2025-10-08 20:44

Love the aesthetic, the strategy and concept. But I run into a bug, where the game crashes on month 9 :(

aqtun 2025-10-08 20:53

I really like the game from the visual perspective, the UI, music and the art-style overall is very consistent. Weirdly enough, even though I got to 16k on my first playthrough, I thought I wasn't getting how the gameplay works, but after reading other comments it seems that my assumptions were correct on how the game works. I feel like adding an indicator telling the player "hey you did good this turn" would go a long way. Maybe highlighting each region in a color ranging from red to green based on currently tiles placed and enforced policies/purchased tiles/upgrades?

pickydogfish 2025-10-08 22:09

@aqtun We do have a bit of a problem with conveying all the information to the player. Making the numbers that fly up colored would be an easy way to improve things a little bit, but that would only go so far. I think some sort of an interactive tutorial would be needed to explain everything, as there is just too much going on.

I'd love to hear people's opinions about the UI. What are you checking after a turn? Are the graphs useful? When you click on a region, is the top table of information useful? Are the per tile type values helpful? Is there something else you'd like to see there?

In case anyone actually answers these questions, thank you in advance :)

eugenik 2025-10-09 04:21

Great game, Love the art style

jk5000 2025-10-13 12:05

The game looks amazing, and the idea seem fun. But I have near no idea what is happening, and my choices was pretty random, and I still manage to win after 11 months.

kayrum 2025-10-14 10:53

Very relaxing. Love the Tabletop style.

6knowledge 2025-10-14 12:16

Surprisingly well done for a jam game, but guess having a team does come with that benefit. The general style is nicely done and liked the overall vibe. The gameplay may not exactly be quite high up on my personal list but it is a very fine game regardless.

rayhimmel 2025-10-24 17:53

pretty well done although i was a little bit stoopid and only got the stuff together the second play