Dungeon PicNic has a wonderful theme. I loved how you had to eat the slimes and dragons to survive. I think this game has a lot of potential to become a fun solo dungeon crawler.
Feedback:
- Skinning and crafting seems a little bit clunky → Most improvement could be found in that system. I'm a little bit lost right now in what to aim for. It kind of requires you to know the full system ahead of time to engage with it. I’m wondering if there was a simpler system that go rid of skinning. (And only being able to skin once per floor, feels like a fix to a system that isn’t properly balanced). It felt weird that skimming indirectly increased the probability to draw the boss now that the pile is smaller. See details on Boss feedback below.
- Maybe there could be a more simplified tech tree, where you start with 2 different cards that you can craft (costs on the back of the card) and when you craft it, you flip the card over to activate it. And then the card you just crafted tells you what the next upgrades are that you can craft moving forward from this that you can bring into play from the side deck. (Currently your system works in reverse, where people need to know the card that comes later, to upgrade their current card.)
- It’s currently quite random when the boss shows up. Felt like a bug to me, not sure if I played it right, but I shuffled the Boss into the Enemy stack. The intuitive fix for this that came to mind right away: Have the boss come into play when the pile is empty and you still need to draw a card.
- 2 Dice is very little space to manipulate dice. I’m wondering, if there isn’t “more to do” in that space if 4-5 Dice were used in some way → Maybe the game could have some type of Yaazee mechanic, where you try to roll certain specific results to activate special attacks. And reroll dice once or twice. (Without removing the roll high mechanic. Basically combining them into a more varied experience.)
Example: You still need the total strength of monsters to beat the. But then if your result has a double, you can use your class ability/special weapon that automatically defeats an Enemy of a certain type. Or just increases the score. So it creates this design space, where you still try to roll high. But sometimes it is important to not do that and rather roll certain results to activate abilities.
→ When using such a system Enemies could also have “counterattacks” if you roll certain results. For example if you roll a 6 on a specific enemy they eat 1 water. So you have to strategize around if you want to keep the 6, or reroll that 6 but face the danger of rolling too low to defeat the enemy. (A similar mechanic is currently used on Slime Queen.)
Nit-Picking:
- It is unclear where or how Monsters return to their stack. Bottom? Shuffled back in?
- 3 Cards to track numbers under each other is hard to track. Outside the Jam this mechanic should probably be replaced with dice. (Could probably do this with a single card with a slot for 3 different colored dice.