hello! i'm making a card game for this jam: https://itch.io/jam/playing-card-jam and i'm looking for playtesters who want to try it out! it's a single player game about killing the gods. the rules are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11sL8utSkuRz-ceF7hMIekkxbiaRrowdrdDuQ0N1-O2s/edit?usp=sharing
i've never made a card game before, so it's a little janky and probably unclear in spots. if you have any feedback or suggestions, i'd love to hear it!
- they/them
- slimefriend.itch.io/
hello! i make games.
i'm looking for work right now! if you need help on a godot, html5, or lua/playdate project, or know someone who does, please don't hesitate to reach out! my email is taylor [at] taylor-anderson.work
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in reply to @slimefriend's post:
hello! this is played with a standard deck of playing cards right? that sounds interesting, i'd be in
yep, just a deck! (ideally with the jokers included, but they're the final boss so you can kind of just use anything in their place)
oooooooh this was fun. got a nailbiting moment where i got a very early king of spades with no spades Attacks in hand and had to weigh my losses carefully and then an incredibly lucky 8 4 5 3 3 final hand that nailed the jokers to the wall
scattered thoughts after one run:
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i feel the instructions could be clearer on when you need to shuffle a pile, there's a few moments (especially with the Spears, though i guess it doesn't matter?) when i wasn't sure if i was supposed to shuffle or not. could have a list at the start going "prepare these piles and shuffle each of them:" then reference them later
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are you supposed to discard used Attack cards or should you shuffle them bacjk into the pile? i'm not sure
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I assume "moves" are an earlier name for Attacks that was left in?
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i assumed killing a god with a card of a different suit still triggers a Spear flip, but is that before or after the God's ability triggers? found myself a the situation where a 4 of hearts and an 8 of clubs would kill the jack of hearts, but i wasn't sure if that would kill it before or after his healing ability triggers. could have a flowchart-like illustration for order of triggers? might be overkill tho
(i'm actually tempted to make one for myself as a portable quickstart guide, this is really fun)
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i'm not sure i understand the queen of hearts' power - what does "cards facing out" refer to?
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do the queen of clubs' and king of hearts' powers also trigger the special abilities of the gods it brings back again? i mean both one-time triggers and continuous conditions
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can i choose the jacks' suits for the king of hearts, are they random, or am i supposed to damage them only with hearts (because king of hearts)? [i played it as "they don't have a suit and can be damaged by anything without flipping a Spear" which probably made the game much easier]
this was mad entertaining, i'd be curious to see it refined
this is great feedback!! let me go thru point by point
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in terms of shuffling the only things you need to shuffle is the god decks (which i specified), and then the main deck after all the stuff has been taken out of it (which i didn't specify but probably should)
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your right, i should include more language about that stuff. i'm probably just gonna have the Attacks go into a discard pile, since that's easier than putting them at the bottom of the deck
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ah yeah, i gotta do a ctrl+f on that stuff
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hmmm that's a good point. i should maybe specify that damage is done BEFORE the spear triggers, so in that case you'd just kill the jack of hearts.
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sorry, the better terminology is probably "cards facing away from you" -- i just wanted it to be like a "blindness" effect.
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yeah, i went back and forth on if the resurrected gods abilities should trigger, i think my answer is gonna be yes on that one. i'll make that clear in the gods abilities
glad to be of help! best of luck with the jam, it's a fun little project
This is fun! I played three games back-to-back (died to puppeteer/died to the twins x2) and am only stopping now because I should be asleep.
There's a few things in the rulebook where I think I'm playing them right, but the rulebook doesn't make it totally clear:
- I'm pretty sure that "flipping" a god as referenced in the god abilities just triggers when it's brought into play, because that's the only thing that would make sense, but this isn't immediately clear because you also flip the card over when you kill it (and puppeteer says "revive" instead).
- Rules-as-written you'd get to take the Rest actions when the gods flipped by the puppeteer and necromancer are killed, but that seems like it'd be too easy. (Semi-relatedly, the things that happen when you kill a god being defined in three different places in the rulebook was a little confusing to me at first).
- Spear sacrifices - can I sacrifice a face-down spear? Surely, right?
A couple of game design things that I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment on: I weirdly like how the balance feels a bit wonky (the king of diamonds can be trivial easy or the jack of clubs a serious problem, depending on what cards you happen to draw) but the twins is maybe a little mean? I went into the final battle with three face-up aces in my last game and just didn't draw well enough to pull it off. Though now that I think about it I could probably mitigate this by deliberately holding on to a high even and odd card through the last king, so call that a skill issue.
Also the witch ability is hilarious. Knowing you have the cards to kill it and having no guarantee you'll be able to actually play them is very funny to me.
Thanks so much for playing it!!! This is amazing feedback!!
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Yeah revive is probably the better wording here.
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This is a great point, and something I honestly don't have an easy answer for....there's no mechanisms currently for increasing the size of your hand while your fighting a God, so it's possible (or even likely, in the Puppeteer's case) that you would just fully run out of moves while fighting the God. And even if I did add a mechanism like that, I'm worried these fights would be too hard if you didn't get anything upon killing these revived Gods. Something I gotta look at.
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You can yeah, I'll specify that.
In terms of the balance problem, something funny I kind of realized midway thru designing this is that I couldn't trust that a fight that was too hard for me in the moment wouldn't have been easier if I had a slightly different hand. What I might do is make your first card reroll free? that might mitigate some of the randomness of it. Something to look into.
Thanks again for taking the time to playtest this!