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Covenant of the Onyx Flame (RootJam 2024)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Use of this year's theme | #3 | 4.273 | 4.273 |
| Creativity/Uniqueness | #13 | 3.591 | 3.591 |
| Clarity of Rules/Mechanics | #19 | 2.818 | 2.818 |
Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Includes Law of Root?
No
Includes PnP?
Yes
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Comments
I've got the unique oppression to review and rate your new version with updates! It's a lot easier to understand for the most part, and I'm able to follow along with their mechanics and game plan a lot better.
It's super duper important with these guys to be able to play a game with em in order to criticize for the most part, just since they're pretty involved and it would be tough to gauge their strength without actually seeing it in action.
Still I gotta really commend the creativity put into their mechanics and their theming. The one time abilities are fun and unique to them as well!
You're 3/3 in my opinion 😆.
I spent well over 15 minutes puzzling over the board, simply trying to figure out what the heck I was looking at, to be completely honest. It seems like a great idea, with sacrificing to then use souls as a currency to do actions, with the fear that if you sacrifice too much, warriors can be permanently removed if you try to do too much. However, I'm lost as to where you get enough warriors on the board to do all the sacrificing needed. The only two ways to get warriors on the board is to have no altars, and get them when placed, or spend 1 soul per warrior placed. However, throughout the game, you remove warriors from the board for 1 soul. There is no real way to get multiple warriors on the board, the recruitment needs a full rework or something, but it currently doesn't work unless I am blind.
Additionally, the amount of "OR"s is ridiculous. Every action you do needs to be completely simplified down to one thing, especially since you have this many separate actions. This needs to be simpler. My suggestion - make one area where you do all actions with souls, in one area, without all the types of actions (move, battle, etc) being scattered all over the board. Similarly, put all the types of sacrifice you can do into one area and simplified. Instead of a lot of actions that are "Spend X souls OR sacrifice Y warriors to do _____", just sacrifice into souls in one area, then do actions with souls in another. All your action economy goes through souls at one point, no skipping by sacrificing straight up. That should help your clarity immensely.
The good things: Midnight - fun idea and definitely adds, I like it and it seems to work well.
One-time use ability - Very interesting and adds strategy for when to use it. Adds even more sacrifice thematic things.
Spring of Rebirth - Good idea, make it smaller, like 10 warriors or something, you'll never realistically hit that 15 limit I think, and 10 adds to the strategy of not wanting to go over.
Ultimately - good ideas, but the theme and fun interesting mechanics are lost in the confusing things, the soul vs sacrifice thing needs to be simplified, and recruiting needs to be more obvious and easier as its impossible to sacrifice enough warriors to do anything without large amounts of recruiting.
Hiya! You've got some valid points there, I admit. I've greatly limited the ORs since even I had some problems in my test game yesterday. This shouldn't be the case, heh.
Anyways. Here's the summary of latest changes which are yet to be tested:
1. New action, burst recruit. Remove X warriors permamently from the game, recruit 2 times X on clearings with altars straight from pool.
2. Only one OR left (in the evening). Well, and one more in actions for souls block to conserve space on board.
3. Spend souls to fuel actions: block of actions added in Daylight for clarification. Only Ember Rush is a separate action since I don't want player to be able to mix it with other actions.
4. Fixed Craft option - since I've noticed I uploaded the version of board without it :|
Newest version is there if you'd care to look. I'll try to upload the board to the entry page too.
oh, and I'll try with 10 warriors limit in Spring of Rebirth. We'll see how they play with that.
Thanks tho - it should be much easier to understand them and their flow now (i hope!).
Blichew
I spent well over 15 minutes puzzling over the board, simply trying to figure out what the heck I was looking at, to be completely honest. It seems like a great idea, with sacrificing to then use souls as a currency to do actions, with the fear that if you sacrifice too much, warriors can be permanently removed if you try to do too much. However, I'm lost as to where you get enough warriors on the board to do all the sacrificing needed. The only two ways to get warriors on the board is to have no altars, and get them when placed, or spend 1 soul per warrior placed. However, throughout the game, you remove warriors from the board for 1 soul. There is no real way to get multiple warriors on the board, the recruitment needs a full rework or something, but it currently doesn't work unless I am blind.
Additionally, the amount of "OR"s is ridiculous. Every action you do needs to be completely simplified down to one thing, especially since you have this many separate actions. This needs to be simpler. My suggestion - make one area where you do all actions with souls, in one area, without all the types of actions (move, battle, etc) being scattered all over the board. Similarly, put all the types of sacrifice you can do into one area and simplified. Instead of a lot of actions that are "Spend X souls OR sacrifice Y warriors to do _____", just sacrifice into souls in one area, then do actions with souls in another. All your action economy goes through souls at one point, no skipping by sacrificing straight up. That should help your clarity immensely.
The good things: Midnight - fun idea and definitely adds, I like it and it seems to work well.
One-time use ability - Very interesting and adds strategy for when to use it. Adds even more sacrifice.
Spring of Rebirth - Good idea, make it smaller, like 10 warriors or something, you'll never realistically hit that 15 limit I think, and 10 adds to the strategy of not wanting to go over.
Ultimately - good ideas, but the theme and fun interesting mechanics are lost in the confusing things, the soul vs sacrifice thing needs to be simplified, and recruiting needs to be more obvious and easier as its impossible to sacrifice enough warriors to do anything without large amounts of recruiting.
I like the idea of a faction having a one-time ability similar to the scoundrel's torch. Also the artwork is both cute and terrifying.
I think the numbers are a bit difficult to parse, partly because I don't know what you have as your warrior supply. Do the sacrificed souls need to scale like that? For a game as short as root is, I'm not sure there should be anything besides the scoreline and army supply that exceeds 7-9. Think of the duchy ministers, moods, roosts, sympathy, etc. I would probably trim this down to fit within the complexity budget of Root.
Hey! thanks for the comment. So you're thinking about the pool of warriors at around 20 instead of 28? or you're talking strictly about souls pool? The pool is really that high because of that one time ability that I wanted to be really useful.
Maybe you're right and the numbers could be trimmed down: souls pool max at 10, Rebirth pool maybe 12 and total pool of warriors might be at 20. I've only played one test game before and since I've went all-in with 3 faction submissions I plan to test them further down the line.
Cheers,
Blichew