Hello Jay and John!

I like your game! The music is fantastic, the gameplay is promising and the pixel art, color palette and overall look is just great. A lot of meaningful feedback is given already, so let me try to add some new thoughts.

Controls and feedback

• Rotating the tiles might be worth a try, as it would allow some more intentional placements (see below)
• When dragging mountain tiles, visual feedback about what gets destroyed would be nice (Jay, you already mentioned "Into the Breach" in one comment - I think this is a fantastic reference for such features - and in general, of cause - the game is a gem in so many aspects)
• Audio feedback (SoundFX) when placing tiles as well as when automated changes are happening, maybe in sequential order, to allow players to follow what is changing bit by bit

More advanced rules

• At the moment there are auto-rules for human expansion, but the nature part is only manually controlled be the actions of players
• To emphasise the puzzle character of your game, I would suggest to add auto-rules also for the expansion of nature - patterns, players have to achive to trigger certain events - let's call them "Revenge of Nature" as an example
• For example (ideas lean on typical natural catastrophies)
  • A block of 3x3 mountains turn into a single, huge 3x3 vulcano
  • A block of 3x3 trees turns into a single "Tree of Gaia" (spawns new adjacent trees every turn, when destroyed/harvested by humans, game is lost)
  • A block of 3x3 water has a "deep sea" tile in the center (maybe randomly spawning hurricanes, or fictional creatures like Nessie or Godzilla, if you want to go fancy)

Think this is all that was jumping into my head while enjoying playing your game.

Wish you good luck with the current Jam and as well with the future development of your game. Looking forward to it!

I love the graphics! Very good pixel art and I liked the UI too

My critique would be that it felt like the outcome of the game is mostly determined by how many mountains the player is given, since they are the only means of removing humans.

Some possible solutions:

• Add effects to the other terrains. Like Forests will only begin being consumed three turns after being played, or only the closest bank of water can be farmed or something
• Slow the spread of humanity. Exponential growth gets out of hand quickly, slowing it may give the player a fighting chance

Great game i like the artwork and the concept!

I didn't really fully grasp the game and won most of the time with mountains and lost when i didn't get any haha

But even though i didn't understand, the theme and art alone is great and with a few tutorials everything will be fixed :)

The look and feel is great! The way humans expand, though logical and *very* thematically accurate, feels quite punishing when you don't get the right pieces to block their advances, especially when the forests get turned against you. Also there are cases where you can completely block the humans' advance and end up having to play by yourself and just fill the remaining spaces on the board with no pushback. I feel like there's a lot of room for growth (heh) in the puzzles, and the concept is great so I hope you keep working on it :D

Just thought: is it supposed to turn the entire bunch of trees into the cities, and surround the entire bunch of mountains with mines?

The game feels very nice and I support the core idea with my full passion. Portraying humans as overexpanding threat is what games rarely do, but this is a very important message. 

The music fits the theme and tempo of the game pretty good. Art looks coherent and beautiful.

As for the game mechanics — it looks a little bit too random, as if the game lacks ways to communicate to the player when and where humanity will expand. I lost some games placing just a few tiles, and won some just randomly dropping the stuff on board. 

The overall logic seems understandable — mountains can cut off cities, cities would grow to adjacent tiles (sometimes?), rivers are op but you need to roll for them before tiles are getting used for other stuff etc. But I found it hard to actually strategically plan on what to do, as if random tiles are more responsible for me winning or not. 

I think that two main point on how to improve fun of the game are:

1. More clear communication on "human turn". When they will expand and where, so the player can act in advance and stop it. 

2. Less influence of random. To make more options in placing tiles and their types. Maybe simply expanding the number of available tiles from 2 to 3 will do, or changing the logic from total random to include some important types of tiles once in a while. 

Anyways cool concept and a very much playable prototype. Good work!

Hi. 

The game definitely needs a turorial or an in-game explanation of the mechanics. They were not clear to me.

The game doesn't have sound. Is that a bug?

A bit of animation would also be cool.

I feel that there is some potential here. I am looking forward to an update. Cheers.