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Oh hah I think you found a bug lol (or a feature?)

I'm new to writing game AI so you can just chalk it up to that :) I added a line to make the CPU favor quicker "checkmates" if it found multiple so my guess is it saw both outcomes and went with the quicker one. That's really funny to me that it just yeeted its own forgekeeper.

Ah good question. The tiles on the board are face-down. When you mine a tile, it gets added to your hand and its type is revealed. Similar to a card game, you can see what's in your hand, but you can't see what's in your opponent's hand (only how many tiles your opponent has).

Stone tile	Rune tile

I'll update the description with that info.

Also, as far as the distribution, Rune tiles have the same probability of finding a face card in a standard deck of cards (Stone tiles = 2-10). I tried to make it so you could theoretically play this game with a standard deck of cards and a set of chess pieces (you'd need something for a 7th piece though since chess only has 6).

I'm not sure I understand your question about the AI killing its own Forgekeeper.

Thanks so much for writing this up! Very thorough and exactly correct and the kind of thing I wish I included in the original submission :D

I've gotten a lot of great advice from you and others on how to make the game easier to figure out. I'm hoping to keep working on it and incorporate those ideas. One of the biggest lessons I think I learned from this jam is realizing how much and what information in particular needs to be communicated. This write-up is invaluable in that regard 🙏

Great feedback! Thank you so much!

Regarding "the deck resets after each battle?", the short version is it doesn't. Played cards go to the bottom of the deck, and new cards are drawn from the top. I DEFINITELY should've telegraphed that better (or at all). I wanted to add animations so you could see what each card did and where it went, but I had to cut that for time.

That's an interesting idea about trick-taking. I hadn't considered that. I had an inkling the player should have more control over what gets put into play, but I couldn't think of an elegant way to do it. It's nice to have that assumption validated, and that sounds like a good thread for me to pull on. It might also work well with some other risk/reward stuff I wanted to implement but didn't get around to.

Thank you again!

Short but good. You did a great job teaching the mechanics through the level design.

Took me a bit to realize you could jump with the spacebar since the instructions don't mention it.

Styling and audio is noticeably absent, which doesn't bother me if the bones are good and it's just a proof of concept. I think this idea definitely has legs, and I'd totally want to play a fleshed out version.

This is great feedback! Thank you so much!