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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 / Maps

I liked how you approached the theme by using past and present maps. This is one idea I thought about exploring, but decided it would be too hard to implement! I think you tackled it well. I like the idea of simultaneously discovering past and present as you play. There is very clear use of maps in the mechanics.

Tone and style

I thought this game was clear and well-written, but it felt a bit dry? I feel like you have a solid theme and could go a bit further with it in the text. I suppose if you want it to be setting/genre neutral that makes it harder. That said, I really liked the character archetypes and questions. I would call attention to that content a bit earlier - I was having trouble thinking what kind of scenes and narrative would work well until I saw those questions. Those are central! Maybe introduce the actual text for them earlier on? Just an idea.

Elegant

The amount of rolling/discovery feels high, but I can see it opens up options. The one thing I'm not sure about is the Treasure or Tension rolls. It seems like mixed outcomes don’t make sense mechanically even if they do fictionally. The example on page 6 feels like it should increase tension because Carl isn’t happy, but it doesn’t. I feel like that limits the narrative. This is somewhat dealt with by the players by including it in the follow-up tension results, but still. That didn't feel quite right to me.

I also agree with @Saddy4 that some rules around scene-setting could help with that issue.

Easy to understand

I thought the game was pretty clear. 


Overall, I liked it! I would like to play it. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks a lot for your comments!

Regarding tone/style, do you mean more setting-y content? If so, that's indeed on purpose because I wanted to make it setting-neutral (most of my games are). Good idea about introducing the questions earlier, you're absolutely right! They are indeed pretty central to the feel of the game, and that's not really evident until you read the whole text _and_ the questions at the very end! I even considered making extra sets of questions for a different, maybe lighter/more adventure feel... but never got around to it, didn't have enough time.

Regarding tension and such, I wonder if "tension" was a bad name. I considered "luck" but didn't want to have one increasing score and one decreasing score. I also considered "doom" but it felt maybe a bit too dark. I'm not sure it will be limiting in practice, though, as I don't think the players will feel that Carl cannot get angry only because the "tension" score hasn't increased (is that what you meant?). The idea of the tension score is to act as a time limit, so that the game isn't simply waiting until the 10th treasure and to introduce a failure condition. I had also considered counting the number of hexagon moves, or the number of explored hexagons, or whatever, but felt very awkward, very easy to lose count of, and very hard to come up with a good target number.

I'll try to find something for the scene setting, thanks!