I've read through this and I'm finding it very compelling! The flavor is well-written and the bones of the game are clearly excellent.
Unfortunately, I'm finding actually playing it to be an exercise in frustration. It feels like every time I turn around, I have a question that either isn't answered by the text, isn't answered in the place I expect it, or has to be divined from implication by reading tangentially-related bits.
One of my first questions was "what is the value of a face card?" I assumed the answer was zero, causing some parts early in the game to be quite (enjoyably) tricky, but then I read the unicorn event, which says that the unicorn can give you "a Face Value reagent" -- so maybe J/Q/K are worth 11/12/13?
Some other questions were:
- Why would I ever make a potion wrong/design it to have too much poison? (There are consequences for this, but no discernable path to it since it seems to be worse to do these things than to just let the patient go entirely untreated and keep any reagents I've gathered.)
- How often do you harvest garden plots and how/when do you plant in them?
- How do I know what my Independant familiar finds? (it says to draw a card, but also says they don't trigger events, but the only other thing there seems to be to find is reagents, but those don't necessarily map cleanly to card values...)
- Do I have Forage points, a Forage value, or a Forage track? All of these terms are used -- are they interchangeable?
- The Museum of Magic event tells me to "tick the M box" whenever I send a reagent to the Museum. 😭 The what?
- Why is "rat spit" the reagent that gets a comment for its grossness when it's directly opposite from literal poop? (I appreciate the commitment to nonviolence but frankly I'd find it less offensive to just eat the frog!)
I found some of the gameplay a bit clunky -- shifting from the journal to scrap paper and back again, flipping back and forth through the book to find things, having to stop constantly early in the game to make up a character from nothing. While the game was incredibly fun once I got immersed into the story, the stop-and-start of it made it quite difficult to get to that flow state.
On a more "personal preference" note, I feel like the entire card-drawing mechanic is a bit underutilized. For example, most draws only care about the card's value (why prompt the player to flip a coin when you could reference the suit of the drawn card instead?) and there's no clear indication of when to shuffle the deck.
I also would have preferred a more discrete "setup" phase to the game -- perhaps being walked through a small introduction, with prompts to help create some villagers that we can use in ailments later.
Overall, a very worthwhile game to play, enjoy, and learn from, but if you ever consider a second edition, it could use some more thorough playtesting.



