Hi incorrigible! First off thank you SO MUCH for playing so many of these games and giving awesome thorough feedback. You seriously rock and I'm grateful for your presence here. And welcome to your first game jam!
This game was fun once we were finally able to start playing. In hindsight it would have been easier to print and cut the cards, but I just used a deck and had to search the 5 deck PDFs for each card. It was especially tedious because they weren't organized by suite or anything, but we got there eventually! This if anything made me want to quite (just a simple out-of-loop failure that would have been avoided altogether had we just printed to cards).
I played the 2 player one, and the instructions were unclear (?) at the onset so we ended up both picking a card and revealing it at the same time for the refrain. Our refrain was the very poetic "before through" 😂This made us both laugh and smile, a happy accident of the game. I honestly was impressed with the end result as well — I was a bit skeptical of a coherent poem forming, just because I felt like my hand was more nouns than verbs, but it came out pretty neat:
before through
gender, my mirror
wed honor as
success. object so
one solve(s) rapture
The companion pieces made this feel extremely fleshed out! Not only are they marvelously written, they add a narrative element to it that builds the world for me. I got pulled in. While I've never read Shadowgraphs, now I want to.
Overall I loved this as a poetic experience, and am very impressed by the ingenuity it must have taken to make. Very well done!
P.S. I don't think I have time to record myself playing the solo on today (before voting closes), but I'm going to try to do it next week, when I have more time!