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MechJam IV

Hosted by dungeon · #mechjam
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A jam submission

MAHOU DRAGON MEKH WARRIORSView project page

Magical dragon-girls pilot mechs in this card-based open drafting 1v1 strategy boardgame.
Submitted by fae.exe (@fae_exe) — 5 hours, 36 minutes before the deadline
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MAHOU DRAGON MEKH WARRIORS's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Originality#932.5005.000
Overall#1072.0004.000
Fun Factor#1091.7503.500
Visuals#1201.5003.000
Audio#1310.5001.000

Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Is your game a video game or a physical game?
Physical game

Was your game made solo or in a team?
Solo

Did you use any third party assets, if yes what assets did you use?
Icons from game-icons & the noun project

Did you choose from one (or more) of the optional secondary themes?
Kinda but you can't see it in the final game, so no.

Does your game contain 18+ content (Nudity, Gore, Language)?
Nope

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Comments

Roxy S.Submitted285 days ago(+1)

I'll admit that I haven't been able to get someone else together to play this with, so I can't fairly give it a rating *just* yet, but what's here looks wonderful. It's clear you've put a lot of thought into this, the flavor of it all is amazing, as Drexler mentioned. The rulebook is really easy to parse, and even without playing I have a great idea of how the game plays.

I mostly wanted to comment cause I know physical games tend to get a bit overlooked during Jams like this, and I always found that pretty unfair. I always found games like this really interesting, and I'm always excited to see making them, yknow? I'll try to get someone together to play this by the end of the night, and I'll rate it then; thank you and great job for making this. 

Submitted
Mémoire 0079
Reply
fae.exeDeveloper285 days ago(+1)

Thank you so much, you are very kind, and I feel very touched by your words after playing your incredible game. I didn't have that much time to play and rate games for this jam because game design is keeping me extremely busy, but it was my tabletop offering for this year. I hope next year I'll make something even better.

It's got nothing to do with anything but I need to find a way to make it text in my game that my pilots are extremely gay. I'll put it on the rulebook's cover or something I think.

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pDrexlerSubmitted286 days ago(+1)

Played this with a friend in the table top simulator port I made from your rulebooks, and we both thought it had some excellent potential!

We tried organize our feedback in "positives", "negatives","confusings", so hopefully it reads ok, and you'll be able to use it to iterate on this project. 

Positives

- fantastic flavor: names of weapons, mechs, pilots carry immense depth

- conceptually drawing: mechs charging attacks, flying around

- keywords appropriate and inform mechanical function in the game

- rules pretty well written, just needs an index of all the symbols and keywords in one place to make reading abilities more convenient

- mechs are very readable and the ability to iterate/create new mechs (would love to see new mechs and pilots!)

Confusing

- most symbols/icons were clear, but some only appeared in a few places (purple lightning card icon on revelator (and its big black arrow) AND the shock condition end of turn)

- order of operations when multiple effects could trigger that would those other triggers (for example, when hit, pull, does the fencing when hit at distance 0 go first or after?)

- how are keywords linked? Close X means "Move X in a direction," but does that trigger a "When you move action"? what pull, which is also "Move opponent X in a direction"

Negatives

- loading feels too slow and punishing because you need to find, collect, AND load all the cards (taking about 5 turns), and only as long as you haven't messed and need to spend more turns correcting a mistake, do you get to fire a decent shot. The alternative wasting cards to refresh your armaments to then start the whole process over for a different attack that you then need to find, collect, and load cards. (we played without pilots, and it does appear they have some additional features to solve these pacing problems, at the cost of greater complexity)

- I wish you only needed to dump the required cards from your armaments in order to fire (keeping some leftover for another attack next turn), OR that only the required number of cards need to be "=color/=straight/=value" and the rest that are being dumped don't need to satisfy the requirements

Overall, there's a great amount of complexity that's resolved by some clever iconography and flavor. 

ps: You might like Mechabellum!

Submitted
BonkEmDonkEmRobits
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fae.exeDeveloper286 days ago

Thank you so so so much for playing my game!!!!! I'm so glad you enjoyed it!!!

On the parts you found confusing:

- You're right! I need a symbol index and reminder cards and to be more consistent with my symbol usage. (The arrow means "load into [] from []", but I need to either use it everywhere and explain it or spell it out fully there instead to be consistent.)

- When several triggers go off at the same time, first the active player (player whose turn it is) chooses the order in which they'll resolve their triggers; then the non-active player (player whose turn it is NOT) chooses the order for their own triggers, then the non-active player resolves all their triggers (in the chosen order), then the active player resolves their triggers in the chosen order. Conditions that are part of effects are checked at resolution, so the distance 0 from Chevalière d'Aphrodite's Rapière is checked at resolution. 

BUT the rapière's trigger should be WHEN YOU PILOT, it's an upgrade to the basic action, not to the whole movement mechanic for Chevalière d'Aphrodite (it would be too powerful otherwise I think, but I have no idea whether the two mechs are currently even remotely balanced after the latest batch of unplaytested changes lmao)

- Close would indeed trigger WHEN YOU MOVE keywords, because it makes you move. Pull makes the opponent move, so it would not trigger WHEN YOU MOVE triggers for the opponent because they wouldn't be the one doing the move action (because it's not the opponent doing the moving with pull, it's you moving the opponent.) I need a big FAQ and breakdowns for individual mech pieces to clarify all of that.

On the negative parts, I'll need to do more playtesting. You might be right about the pacing, but I didn't find problems with it while playtesting on my end so I'll need more data about that by testing it with more people and seeing how they play and how they feel after further plays, with and without the pilots. But I'll keep your feedback in mind, and I might tweak some stuff about it in the future. Did you play with a 4-card "market" next to the magic deck? It makes collecting cards harder if you miss that part of the rules, and I didn't make any global visual overview of the setup so it's easy to miss I think. Also, I personally like the tension of having to commit to attacks that you're not sure you'll be able to pull off, and needing to re-evaluate your strategy when the right cards don't come out and settle for a smaller attack. It's okay to make attacks without fully loading your armaments, and using the Bardiche Accelerator and the Revelator on the 97-BEASTKNIGHT accelerates that gameplay a bit and seems somewhat important to me? Maybe I need to give the BEASTKNIGHT a few more tools to feed their REAKTOR instead of trying to solve the pacing issues globally. (I feel like I've given a lot of loading tools to Chevalière d'Aphrodite already, I need to playtest that because the latest batch of changes is untested on my end.)

Once again, thank you so so so so much for playing!! I might release more mechs, pilots and additional game modes in the future, so I'd love to hear your (and your friend's) thoughts on them then!

Reply
pDrexlerSubmitted286 days ago(+1)

That's how we interpreted the arrow, so I'm glad I played the mech closer to how it was designed! follow up question: can all my other reactor actions trigger off the same discard? aka can I both load AND gain hp from the card I use to gain height and ascent?

We ordered the triggers pretty true to they way you just described, active then inactive response -- dealers choice on order, but there was some confusion on "do I get my on-hit triggers from my attack before my opponent gets there when-you're-hit triggers," since they seemed like different trigger types, and from context the "when you fire" is on the decision to fire, rather than the resolution of firing.

That makes a lot more sense for the rapière. We interpreted it as "well it says 'move' in the definition for all these other keywords... so I guess you gain X!" (we felt the 30hp mech was very powerful... but then again I also think my friend didn't use radiance or fencing to his full advantage!)

That would be a great distinction to make in the index: when you move, vs an opponent moves you!

My friend and I were very thorough to setup the board and read the rules as exactly as we could.
The market and height slots made finding what we needed decently fast (reminds me of Ticket to Ride!), and the types of cards we needed are very clear on our mechs, but the issue of loading them into our mechs was where I felt the pacing slow down a bit.

You have a really good system to balance out the game per mech. I'm excited to see what you come up with! :)

Reply
fae.exeDeveloper285 days ago(+1)

Oh! Oh my, I'm glad you ask this about the discard conditions, I didn't even realize there could be confusion about that!!!

So, the discard conditions, like the healing bonus when discard sword elements on the SerapHeal Engine 7SW, only works for cards discarded through activating that specific module. So you get that bonus when you activate the SerapHeal BY DISCARDING A SWORD CARD, and not by discarding a sword card to pay any module activation (even if it is another REAKTOR ACTION.) Although that seems rather interesting, but no. You pay one card from the reaktor to power up one module, but you can activate any number of modules any number of times when you ACT, as long as you have cards to discard to pay for them. The Universal Convertor, Reaktor-to-Armaments REVELATOR 40 by Silber Chordata does allow you to discard cards from anywhere to activate its effect, be it from your armaments, your reaktor or even your support systems (which is represented by cards in your hand), but that's still a Reaktor action, you can still only use it when you act, and the discard condition still only applies to cards used to power this specific module. I don't know if I managed to clear this up a bit?

ON HIT triggers have the exact same timing as WHEN YOU HIT. The reason they are worded differently is because WHEN YOU triggers proc whenever that action happens from any module. Weapons are a special kind of modules: ON HIT refers to WHEN YOU HIT from the activation of that specific module. Otherwise, you'd trigger every effects from every weapons every time you hit with one of them, if they all had WHEN YOU HIT triggers. It's not the most elegant design, but I really embraced the american boardgame design aesthetic with this one. Since I made a very euro-style game last week, I thought it was fine and a nice change of pace.

I might have nerfed the Chevalière d'Aphrodite a little much pre-emptively after the round of buff I gave it (but I also buffed the Vanguard a little); it used to have 20 HP but I healed about 15 in the game I played with it and I didn't want it to be too tanky, and since I had patched up what I felt were its main weaknesses/awkwardness... But I did nerf its access to radiance so I might have to boost its health back up a bit. (It's hard to do balancing without extensive playtest data...)

Thank you so much! I do feel like I have MANY design knobs to turn and a LOT of design space to explore, it's very exciting! I'll see what I can do for the pacing when iterating on the game further! Thank you again for all your very kind and useful comments and for making a TTS mod, you've been very nice and helpful!

Reply
pDrexlerSubmitted284 days ago

Ah then perhaps THAT's what the Vanguard felt so much more powerful: we were playing it as though reactor modules were being used *in response* to our other reactor actions, e.g. starting a chain reaction from 1 card triggering the Argent Host, moving that card to the Armaments using the UC-RTA, AND gaining +1 hp from the SeapHeal engine.

Now I feel like we didn't even play the same game!! lol

So, to clarify, long version: let's say I had 1 card in hand and 3 cards in my Reaktor (hand=3, armaments=4,5,6, all of Swords) and used each of them to power a single module during ACT==> discard 3 from hand to move my 6 to the armaments, discard 6 to gain 1 height and 1 ascent, and discard 5 to gain +2 hp (?) 

Short version: 1 card powers 1 reaktor module during ACT XD

I think the ON HIT triggers are clear enough, referring to the weapon you are using to hit. It was just the confusion of "do I hit you first? or are you hit by me first?", and I think you clarified that well enough with the distinction between active and inactive player actions!
((Although I suppose leave it to American design where I hit with 1 weapon I get to hit with all!))

The TTS file isn't perfect, but I'm hoping it'll be a good starting point to help with future testing across the internet :)

Thank you! Can't wait to see what you do next!

Reply
pDrexlerSubmitted286 days ago(+1)

I made a Table Top Simulator save file importing your assets for the cards and rules and game boards: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aw1g9FEqQOe0sK5RDI6pZE0zgQHwzTPv?usp=dri...

This may be helpful for people trying to test this game out... I'm gonna be trying it out tonight (just in time for the deadline!) 

Let me know if you have any issues with the save file. I'm hoping I did the cloud uploading correctly!

Submitted
BonkEmDonkEmRobits
Reply
JetDungeonDragonSubmitted287 days ago

I'm having issues trying to figure out how a deck is built. I saw 60 cards, but I don't know if I'm missing something else.

Submitted
Minerva
Reply
fae.exeDeveloper287 days ago (2 edits)

Have you read the rules?

There are indeed 60 cards, which are called magic cards (I think i need to change the name). You shuffle them together to form the magic deck. You'll use only this one deck for the entire game! There is no deckbuilding in this game ^^ 

Reply
JetDungeonDragonSubmitted288 days ago(+1)

Is there supposed to be a download that comes with this? Otherwise, I'm having a difficult time trying to figure out how to play this just from the one image posted.

Submitted
Minerva
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fae.exeDeveloper288 days ago

Oh my god i forgot to upload the fucking files jesus fucking christ lmao

Reply
fae.exeDeveloper288 days ago (1 edit)

I was working on an update for this thing for like the remainder of the week, because there was only 1 mech, no pilots, and I had forgotten the rules for the condition things, and like a bunch of stuff was kinda scuffed! Thank god you told me or I'd never have noticed, I can't believe this

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JetDungeonDragonSubmitted288 days ago(+1)

PianoRose pointed out a similar problem I had on my own game today.

Reply
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