April Game

April: Early April

The April game is done, hooray! What, March? Haven't heard of it.

This one started as an attempt to make a Harvest Moon / Stardew Valley inspired crafting kind of game, and it morphed in some funny ways. It's now a rather dense game about the interactions between natural phenomena - dandelions feed off their fellow plants, who drain the water out of ponds to reveal the frogs beneath. You can make booze to pay off the lumberjack to chop down trees for you, or go searching for the boar who will push them over if you give him the right snacks. 

I've been playing a lot of Magic the Gathering, so little card synergies are on the mind in a big way. I think it wound up a bit dense - I wanted to keep the number of cards on the board minimal, to save desk space and to reduce the number of cards I had to make and balance, but to do that each card has to be more nuanced and interact with others in more intricate ways. I found myself really poring over how to set myself up a few moves in advance, and had to tone down the difficulty a bit, not so much because it was untenable but because it really was starting to get far away from the relaxing, edenic feel I was going for. The other MtG DNA in here are the little creature fantasies implied in the rules, which I think came out really well.

Rule writing continues to be elusive, I did my best. Please feel free to reach out to me for clarifications.