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A jam submission

RootJam 2024 - Sable ShogunateView project page

Ettrian's faction submission for RootJam 2024
Submitted by Ettrian — 7 days, 12 hours before the deadline
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RootJam 2024 - Sable Shogunate's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Creativity/Uniqueness#64.0534.053
Use of this year's theme#202.8422.842
Clarity of Rules/Mechanics#222.6322.632

Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Includes Law of Root?

No

Includes PnP?

Yes

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Comments

Submitted

Really love the flavour of this faction, and thank you for introducing me to the Sable with so many cute images ♥

Interesting twist in making multi-suited clearings! Does this effect other factions too, who might be sharing a space with you? If so, it's like a mini Lost City!

I really do enjoy the random aspect of the Orders Deck, you have some control but it's down to fate how your actual turn will play out - it feels like a more dynamic Eyrie Decree in a way.

Fantastic building effects too, I find the Mouse Tower especially compelling, but all very flavourful in how they get their end effect. It's also fun how building these is directly linked with the main mechanic of the Orders Deck :) Same with crafting, flavourfully dependant on the deck!

I will note that some of the wording causes me confusion, especially multiple mentions of Dishonour specific to a clan (e.g. "When a building is removed, its Clan gains 2 Dishonour"). From what I can tell on first look, honour/dishonour seems to be a universal and not clan-related mechanic, but perhaps something is lost on me.

So yeah, lots of fun ideas and mechanics in a nice thematic bundle! Some rough edges sure, the other comments below make some good points themselves, but I look forward to any refinement you might choose to make ^^

Developer(+1)

Thank you for your interest in the faction! I apologize for the confusion about clan dishonor, it is alluded to in the faciton abilities, and functionally serves the sole purpose of giving you the opportunity to sacrifice clan troops to mitigate it. While the honor mechanic as a whole is likely to either change dramatically or be removed altogether in future versions, I agree that it could be explained more clearly and concisely on the board. Best of luck in the contest!!

Submitted

Interesting ideas to have your entire action economy based on the deck, but I'm worried that you might simply get screwed over by not getting the actions you need and getting dishonor all over the place for not being able to do them.  That aside, as I really couldn't know how often that happens without playtesting, there are some problems with scoring potential specifically, as well as what you are incentivized to do as a faction by the mechanics. 

Scoring potential: You can't get points from killing buildings, which means that 100% of your vp comes from the glory step, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, except that you have a maximum number of vp you can get (as you can only have 6 honor in total), and then you become MUCH weaker next turn if you spend more than 3 or so, (as recruiting will be weaker). To win/be a good faction, getting an average of 4 vp per turn is a must, and there is no way to do that as this faction. Either the honor needs to be expanded to be like 8 total and make it a little easier to get honor so that you have consistent scoring, or the scoring itself needs to be easier, or the honor code needs to go. I think the easiest way to balance this without disrupting the overall balance is to change the vp system, the glory step to say "Gain 1 dishonor to score points equal to remaining honor", that way you are incentivized to get maximum honor, but not punished with a significantly weaker following turn by spending all your honor, while also making counterplay more clear (just give them as much dishonor as possible and deny them honor). This change is a MUST, not an option, or you need to change it in a different way.

What you are incentivized to do: bully the weakest faction. This is unhealthy. Glory gives you an honor if any faction has no warriors on the map. It makes sense thematically, but if you are incentivized to spawn camp a faction, that is not fun for that faction in any way. This rule needs to be straight up removed ASAP. You also get points for eliminating all enemy pieces from a clearing, which once again is thematic, but makes them matchup dependent. Imagine playing vs woodland alliance and farming their sympathy for free honor. The Warriors Pride section is confusing, so I would just simplify it to the first bit, gain honor whenever attacking a defended faction, as in they have warriors. Its the same effect, so long as you aren't bullying anyone. 

Setup for clarity: Just go ahead and start them off with 3 honor and 3 dishonor, so there's no 'adding to it' time, which will make their beginning turns a little stronger to make up for their still relatively weak scoring potential.

Clarity of rules: Clans: Make it so that each warrior can only be part of one clan by only allowing clan specific buildings to be built in that suit, which is a major nerf to flexibility, but that's the point isn't it? To work around inflexible rules or gain dishonor? To gain honor for doing certain things through tough inflexible actions? If a warrior can be part of more clans, thats both weird, hard to understand, and takes away from the theme. By doing different clans in any order of your choice, you can already transition warriors from one clan to another pretty easily to prepare for the next clan's turn.

Finally the good things: I like the recruit mechanic, it seems good and elegant and well thought out. I like the way the cards in general work, that people can see what options you have ahead of time. The only thing I would change here is to give every clan their random card, then assign the seen cards to each clan, so that you can mitigate the luck element there a little bit and plan better. 

Overall a cool mechanic with cards being your action economy, based on suit/clan, which is both thematic and interesting mechanically. The clans, glory step, and warriors pride mechanics need to be cleaned up and changed to be better thematically and stop encouraging bullying and spawn camping a weak faction. The scoring is currently extremely weak, so make the change I recommended or a similar change. I like the honor mechanic as a currency, with both give and takes for having more dishonor and honor.

Developer

Thank you for your feedback and your interest in the faction! I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to further iterate on the design. I've come to a similar conclusion as you, that the honor system, while flavorful, is not worth the added complexity and rules overhead, and I intend to phase it out in future versions of the faction. In exchange, I intend to make sacrificing clan warriors the consequence for dishonor, and retool recruiting accordingly. 

While I'm not 100% sure if I'm interpreting your statement about farming sympathy correctly (existing system you would only be rewarded the 1 Honor for removing the sympathy, 1 Honor if WA has no warriors end of turn, but not 1 Honor beyond that unless warriors were removed), it was not by design to encourage a strategic impetus to bully factions off the board and keep them there. That clause is included because I did not like the idea of a faction simply not having warriors on the board hamstring the main scoring mechanism on the faction board, but I agree that there are many ways that can be improved in future iterations.

Regarding the action deck, I have been pleased with the  outcomes of testing, samples I ran with the deck, and also with the spreadsheet version of the probabilities of any particular action or combination of actions. Naturally an intricately designed web of actions like that would always be subject to improvement over time, but I don't think that's too much of a priority at this time.

Regarding the clans, the puzzle of using flexible actions to prepare for the possibility of inflexible ones (the faction learning curve does expect, over time, the player to become familiar with all 12 cards and to track the odds of each appearing) by managing clearing suits via buildings, and also by strategically positioning warriors, is actually something I was pretty proud of in designing, so it is somewhat surprising to hear your distaste for that mechanic. I do intend to more clearly rules-out the functionality of the clan members taking actions, but I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts on the matter.

Thanks again for your effort, and best of luck to you in the contest!

Submitted

Love the animal choice! But FANTASTIC theme here, sacrifice being more of a sacrifice of honour is fantastic as a concept and sets these guys apart!

Also love how you incentivize vagabond hitting! 


I especially love the effect of the mouse clan battling in adjacent clearings to the tower! 


The balance of honour and dishonour to do things like recruit is super cool! You've also added a way to point shade in the honour system which is super fun. 


It'll be interesting to see how you'll balance the order cards since they're the meat of your actions, and since there's so many! But the way you activate these cards for each clan is great!


Only criticism I've got is to see if the rules can be made a little more clear, maybe even including a law page to describe what constitutes a clan, and clear up any interactions of interest that might happen with em. Just since I feel I'd make a lotta rules mistakes here!


Great submission!!

I love the idea of the faction, but it could definitely use some refinement in the core idea of the faction- the board is quite intimidating. The VP system is interesting but seems a little annoying to work with, could do well to streamline this. The clearing abilities are super cool! 

Developer

Thank you for your feedback! Ever since I submitted, I've had a nagging feeling I snuck too many mechanics in here, and thinking about it, I think that I really like the koikoi style order system and clan system, but the honor system is the weakest link (even though, ironically, it was the fundamental idea of the original faction)! I'm glad to hear your thoughts on it, I think that corroborates my suspicions.