Hi,

I checked out your entry to the Jam and here are my thoughts. I used my personal AMUSE rating system; there are five categories, and the game can gain 0 to 2 points in each. Please, note that these my are initial thoughts after reading your game rules and even some of them may seem a bit harsh, I wrote those notes mainly to highlight the strong and weak spots of your design, hopefuly leaving some suggestions for you to adapt or ignore. Your choice.

Aesthetics 1/2

The game is provided in the pamphlet format, which I personally like. The game is both portable and well structured, uses both column and row distinction to visually divide various content. I'd prefer more illustrations in the style of the cover, as now it looks like you found only single image and used it to both, the cover and background of the rules.

Mechanics 1/2

The game does not spare any time explaining what is this all about, as it is asumed the reader knows what they downloaded. I am okay with that.

The rules are written in quite a board-gamy way - there are multipe steps to build the island, the play itself has defined structure. That's why some ambiguities pop-up. The island is built also with cards touching only by the corner. The movement is though limited to the adjacent card - some readers could interpret that the movement is possible only in orthogonal directions, making some diagonal cards unreachable.

Some rules could use a streamlining/rewording. Sentences like:

Characters traveling together are a Party; they share a token. Everyone moves at the same time.

are bit confusing and unclear, E.g., why is the Player Token explained only after its third mention, and not right at the beginning?

I really don't understand, how the Champion Challenges work. Even after two re-reads, I don't know, how the injuries are distributed during failed champion challenges, and what happens with stolen items.

Universe 0/2

The game feels undecided in this category as well. There are rather strict limitations of what each suit represents, yet the basic movitation and quest is left completely for the players to decide. The game itself is filled with speciffic names associated to various card suits and ranks, as well as the items characters may find during their journey. 

Supplements 2/2

I really appreciate the overwork done by providing the item cards. The mechanics do not limit the amount of each of those items in the world though, so I am affraid their presence may backfire. The chance to find each type of item is only 1 to 6, so duplicities may happen.

I also appreciate the presence of the card-like character sheets. They could be illustrated from both sides though, to provide some space for notes, or inventory itself, leaving more space for tiny injury/treasure/supply checkboxes. It's a nice touch to provide spare checkboxes that become available after certain actions, or obtaining speciffic item.

This is strongly personal opinion, but I really don't like using the cards from the standard deck and needing a pairing table for each suit and value, especially when the relation to the suit/rank is not tight and there are really loose assotiations (such as King-ranked cards). However, this is a pretty common mechanic for (solo) games and lots of people do not mind doing those inner translations, so I don't tear down any points for this.

Experience 1/2

I cannot get rid of the feeling that I am looking at card version of Talisman. Loose rules, highly speciffic items and locations, simple rules, both of those games provide space for role-playing. I really cannot find any mechanics that would actively support roleplaying aspect of the game except defining own quests, naming the city and island, and creating every enemy that players stumble upon. The game is really focused on a table presence, which helps it to differentiate from the lots of other game entries, but at the end it still leaves me with a feeling that the game is incomplete and cuts were made because of the rule-size limitation. The game is written in a way that I would expect to have monster tables or generators, as well as list of some random quests - only then I could take the sentence from the cover (_GMless Exploration Roleplaying Game_) seriously.

Total AMUSE score: 5/10