Angel and I played this together, and OMG we got SO close to winning. Angel would've won at the beginning of her next turn as the fire spread, and I would've (probably) won one turn later myself too.
I only have two issues here:
- The health track didn't matter at all. If we were in the space with the crew token, we always threw it overboard. Because that saves a whole invasion track icon filling in, it was the #1 priority for the whole game.
- The game became really repetitive about halfway through. Each turn I took was: roll dice, modify them to be the best they could be, run to wherever the crew token was, throw them overboard, then destroy one spot there and have one die remaining that was useless because I'd unlocked all the swamp mysteries.
With this said, what you made was really awesome! You pulled off making a roll and write game, with tokens and moving around, in 3 days!! 😮😮😮 And with some more balancing (which I'm legit excited to see), this could be a fantastic game of balancing your actions, plugging in dice where they should be used, and keeping up with the threats. The invasion track was a fantastic threat the entire game, for instance.
We're still rather new to playtesting and crafting tabletop games, so my suggestions might not be great, but I personally love random events. Maybe rolling two dice to get one at the beginning of each turn would help? Or giving players another action they can use each turn, since I almost always had a die (sometimes even a 6) left at the end of a turn? They were great for unlocking the swamp mysteries, but once those were all unlocked, bonus dice were useless.
And again, please know that this isn't meant as negative. You pulled off something awesome here, and playtesting a solo game is REALLY hard because you're basically competing with the game itself. Getting that right takes a lot of time and effort, which you just don't have in 72 hours. And you've got multiple systems here working together in unison, along with a cool theme.
Honestly, throwing the crew token off the ship also felt awesome every time lol, like buh-bye dude!
- ✨Beth