Play experiment
Over The Ages's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| How easy to understand and use the game’s rules are | #3 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
| How elegant the game’s design is | #24 | 2.400 | 2.400 |
| How captivating the tone, feel and style of the game are | #25 | 2.400 | 2.400 |
| How strongly maps are integrated in the game’s design | #26 | 1.800 | 1.800 |
| How well the game fits the theme and goal of the jam | #26 | 2.200 | 2.200 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Kind of echoing OrionCanning's comments, I think it seems like a fun game but some more interaction between players would, I think, make it more gripping. Maybe some kind of mechanism of holding & trading cards or resources?
As for story, I think a fruitful way of looking at it might be that you don't need to tell a story, but if you can provide interesting prompts or ask compelling questions then you create a framework for the players to imagine their own stories around. And that's something that can be done through pretty small measures - some of your card prompts already do that, like a contry suddenly falling victim to the plague and so on.
Thanks for sharing!
I like the idea of this game, building up countries and seeing how they fare over time, but I see a lot of room for improvement. I would like to see more player interaction, as the only choice you really get to make is which stats to put points in and the rest is random. It doesn't seem like there is much room for strategy, and there aren't any instructions for how to tell a story. The order of the cards mostly decides how it goes. That could be fun, but I think it would be more interesting if you had more choices of actions and ways to interact with the other countries or players. Either in a strategic way or in a way that creates interesting characters and stories (maybe both). Also more interaction with the map would be nice, reasons to draw and add things to the map for example.
Regardless it feels like a good start for a game, something you could build from if you had more time. I hope that's constructive and you continue to make games and improve on your designs!
Thank you so much for the feedback.
Indeed, the focus of the game is knowing what events occured and what events can possibly follow and balancing your stats accordingly. I focused more on that because I'm not good at telling stories. I'm a software developer by trade and my creative part sorely lacks which is why I end up focusing more on the numbers and deterministic interaction than story and emotion :)
I would have liked to add more interaction to the game map, beyond just tracking your neighbours, but I was all out of ideas there.
I will definitely continue making games and try to improve myself, both pen'n'paper and digital. I'm currently trying to finish my submission for Me,Myself and My RPG game jam (again, with a numbers heavy and light storytelling because me).
Not all games have to be about telling a story, of course, though I did get the impression this game jam wanted games of that kind. I think the most helpful way to help players create story is to give them a something to base their characters off of, and something to help them decide what their relationships to other characters are. These are usually the first choices you make in a game and it's a lot harder to make something up from a void than it is with a seed, a prompt or idea to inspire you. This can often be as simple as a list of evocative words or phrases to choose from. Many of the events in your game could serve as prompts to build scenes or narration from with a little more guidance, likewise so could the stats and type of country be a basis for character creation.
Sometimes you make the mechanics for a game first, and figure out what kind of story they create, and sometimes you come up with what kind of story you want to tell and make mechanics that do that. Nothing wrong with the former.