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(+1)

Hey, thanks for the submission. With the big caveat that I haven’t actually played the game, just read it, here’s my review. 

Theme

I think The Hanging Room hits the theme really well. The use of two maps that both offer a glimpse into the actual mission was a great way to address the theme of the jam. I also felt that it was a good amount of complexity: only two maps, but the fact that players can make true or false claims about what happened adds complexity.

Maps

It does seem like play is quite focused on the maps. The game did fall a bit in the category of the maps representing the fiction, rather than being the fiction.

Elegance

The design felt a bit like a more secret-focused Fiasco. I thought the design was pretty straightforward and understandable. However, even after reading some sections a few times, I still didn’t fully understand the use of the deck of cards. I really liked the modularity - it would be straightforward to add elements to many of the lists without breaking the game. Same with adding a new operation type. That is a great feature and leaves a lot of room to build on the game after the jam. It’s a great reminder to me to build modular systems when designing, especially for jams.

My main design question is: what motivates players? From my reading there is no winner, advancement, or principles to play to. That’s my main gripe: as a player, what am I supposed to do? Strictly play to my motivation? What mechanically motivates me to play to that? It goes back to Jared Sorensen’s third question: how does your game encourage or reward players enforcing the theme or goal.

Tone and style

The writing is great. It was clear and really made me imagine being a character in a high-tension spy movie or novel. The choice to evoke le Carré instead of Ian Fleming was smart!

Easy to understand

I thought the rules were relatively easy to follow. There were a few areas that I thought could be clearer. Part of that might be a cultural thing, but I prefer where games make clear, cut and dry rules, rather than leaving it up to the player. One example is “one single action or interaction” (pg 8): this rule could be interpreted differently. Maybe add a time suggestion? Under a minute? Additionally, I think I would need to play to understand how the creating and revealing of secrets really works. I got a bit confused trying to understand Traces.

Overall, I liked it! I would definitely like to play it.

(+1)

Hey Sam, thank you for your comments! It's useful to see what folks didn't find clear, or clear enough: we were figuring things out as we wrote it, and had limited time (and word count) to do rewrites and more examples, so we'll try to address all these in a future version. I'm really glad you liked the tone and think it worked, so thanks for that! Also yes, the modular mission structure is a great touch that my co-designer Flavio thought of, and we're eager to expand on it in new versions! 

I'm going to answer to a few of your specific questions or points - not as rebuttals (all your criticism is very fair) but just to help outline how the game should work, in case you end up trying it before we do an updated version :) 

- In terms of what motivates players, it should indeed be the characters' motivations: I thought of them as player agendas, expressed as in-character roleplaying notes. We can probably emphasize that. It's true there isn't a particular mechanical payoff at this stage, but the game is very light in terms of actual "mechanics" and crunch, so it's a bit difficult to hang things on that. We've been thinking of connecting the motivations to the order in which players pick their epilogue, but I was not super convinced it was thematically spot on.  It's a note we have for playtest. 

- You're not the first reviewer who raises the role and functioning of the cards, so we probably should have been more clear about that in our writing: essentially, the cards work as tokens, nothing more. You get a card when you Approach or Reveal your own relationships, you spend a card when you Act, or when you Reveal anothers' relationship, lie or motivation. The other thing is, you write the card's rank and suit on a map element, and have to reincorporate that element in your narration when you spend that card to do something. This is a way to keep things a bit tighter in terms of storytelling, and create the tangled webs of secrets and relations that you see in spy novels. We picked cards because we felt they fit the aesthetic more than tokens, because they're common in almost all households, because you can refer individual cards to map elements... and ultimately, because we like cards. There's a version of this game in our heads where secrets are created and revealed by essentially playing blackjack, but the maths for that are convoluted and we didn't think we could figure out something playable by the jam's time frame. 

- We didn't want to put a hard time limit on vignettes, despite the need to keep them brief; but we've included a Question that other players can ask to signal "get to a point". 

- I agree that some of these interactions are a bit difficult to visualise from just the text. It was certainly difficult to find ways to explain them in writing! Hopefully they'll still be pretty intuitive at the table. I think  for a future version I want to write in examples for each procedure, and sharpen the language. Maybe put in some charts. 

Thanks again!