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(+2)

You've got something interesting here and there's a lot of potential, although right now the end state is always a fail so to me it's very loosely connected to the jam theme. Since you can't "win" this game and make a functioning home I would suggest rather a series of challenges for various mini communities that want to prioritise specific resources, with some sort of limit imposed such as a max number of moves or tiles filled. Right now I'm not really building a home (as per the jam theme), I'm just looking at minus stats and trying to figure out what card will fix it and I don't care what it is. (In the first game I played I tried to "build" a community visually that looked nice and kept certain types of tiles away from others but after that game I realised it was pointless. Here, too, others' suggestion of tiles next to each other giving special boosts (and/or perhaps the opposite) is a really good idea. (I think you said somewhere that you had it in your list, as well as random events - also a cool idea by the way.) As a player you don't really have a lot of agency in this game and are really at the mercy of the RNG.)

Pure random number generation never works properly (I know this from one of my own games, as well as Fallen London, where it's an ongoing joke among both the developers and the community) and certain probabilities tend to get "stuck". In all the games I played certain cards would end up repeating frequently (different ones every game), while others I would rarely or never see, so I would suggest some more advanced programming where you evaluate what's going on and nudge things a little here and there to compensate. Possibly as a result of this I would also find that one stat would be stratospheric while I had no way to fix one - sometimes two - other stat(s) that was tanking, tanking, tanking but I had no options to do anything about it. I played around six times and it was the same pattern every time, culminating in me failing after between ~19 and ~22 moves.

I love the 2D art and the music. I'm ambivalent about the 3D art, though not specifically the art itself but rather that it stylistically doesn't mesh with the 2D art.

Overall, though, as I said, you've got something here and I think you should work on it further once the jam results have been announced. Iterate, get community feedback on itch, repeat, and see if there's ongoing interest (if not, move on). There's a game called Backpack Hero that did that after appearing in the 2022 Finally Finish Something jam and now it's a full game that released on Steam etc etc etc. (Don't get your expectations too high because Steam success is very difficult to achieve but if you can build a game that really has depth and long playthroughs that's the Steam audience.) (I'd also recommend looking at a game called The Final Earth 2 for ideas of how buildings next to each other influence each other.)


Other advanced mechanic ideas:

• As mentioned by @Ed_Sforzati, a way to augment placed cards but I'd also suggest a way to remove buildings (at a cost, of course), which would also require the ability for you to see how a building is influencing the stats.

• Perhaps a way to reduce the new-round cost increase on a specific stat? (Using a specific card or an augmentation or if you group three hexes that are the same together or whatever.) You might not need this if you change the game to having specific goals, rather than being "endless" play.


Finally, some usability notes:

• I would prefer if the values are on the cards rather than on the side so I can see all three options at the same time instead of constantly having to roll back and forth over them to try and figure out what to do.

• I was playing at 1920x1080 and the font size for the explanatory/flavour text is way too small. Similarly the font that you use for the title as well as in a few other places looks really good when it's large but it can be hard to read when it isn't (in particular, the "2" looks like an "8").

• The info box top left has the icons in a different order to how they appear on the cards.