itch.io

Thanks for the feedback! That's a very interesting idea about hijacking enemy warriors to spread your spores for you, I really like that both thematically and gameplay wise! I'll definitely look into that.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah as I explained in another comment I made the Spores Chamber a track to be consistent with other factions and the Law of Root. However in retrospect as you say there's no gameplay functionality from it and it has probably just caused unnecessary confusion. I think I will update future versions to just have the Spore Chamber be a pool of tokens.

I somehow completely missed that aspect about how there's no reason for that 2nd Evening step since you can't use Spores between turns! I can see now exactly how that happened - the early versions of the faction didn't have a cap on the number of Spores you could store in the Spore Chamber so I added the "discard down to 3" to prevent players hoarding too many between turns. But then I never removed it after adding the cap in the Spore Chamber. Good spot!

Thanks for the feedback I really appreciate it! I never actually got the chance to test these guys out before the deadline so I'm not too surprised they need a few tweaks but I'm glad you still found them fun to play!

With regard to their scoring this is probably a case of me overcompensating. I thought that without the 2 or more spores per clearing restriction it might be too easy to score with this faction but it seems I was probably off the mark there. My other initial idea for the scoring was based on them scoring VP for the number of spore tokens left in the clearing after they remove it, but my thought was that would encourage turtling too much and Root is obviously at its most fun when everyone is fighting over territory!

For your example with Mushrooms, it might make sense to add a buff that when you build a Mushroom you get a free Warrior along with it to help with defending? I think as you say in your example you are most likely correct that it takes too many spores right now to get a basic setup with a defended Mushroom.

Regarding Death Burst that's very helpful insight - since you found their pieces were so valuable you never wanted to use the ability it might make more sense to change the ability to something passive more resembling the Lizard Cult's Revenge ability. Perhaps if any warriors were removed in Battle you gain 1 Spore to the Spore Chamber?

Thanks again for the detailed review it's super helpful and I wish you the best of luck in the jam!

Thanks for the feedback! 

Thanks for the feedback, glad you like them!

I love these guys! Very fun theming and the idea of mixing unique cards into the main deck is super cool. I also really like the idea of them building up a deck of actions throughout the game. Also your art is great!

I'm curious how much enemy factions will want to spend the propaganda cards given how much stronger it makes the Swarm deck for the Bearcats if they do? I might be off the mark on that though given the Riverfolk Company have something similar going on with their funds!

I am also little confused by some of the wording - I'm assuming the "action" of each propaganda card is the "Bearcat reveal this card to" section of each card but its a bit unclear as there's also the "Spend this card to" section. Perhaps it would have been clearer to label them "Bearcat Propaganda Actions" or something to that effect on the cards and faction board?

I also think "Shuffle your unsuited starting cards to form the Daily Swarm Draw Pile" in setup is a bit confusing as I thought it referred to your standard 3 cards you start with in Root regardless of faction but it actually means the "Propaganda cards labelled as Starter cards".

Very cool faction overall!

I love the sight token track and the way it scores, it's super creative! I've not seen anything like that before in a faction and it's very unique. My only suggestion is perhaps it might be worth considering adjusting it based on player count, maybe the lower sections of the track are only used in higher player counts to account for the fact there's more stuff to score from?

I'm not sure if it was intentional, but moving into clearing matching your revealed card is also kinda funky as typically factions like the Birds and Badgers tend to move out of clearings matching cards. I'd be curious how that would play out!

Something else I am curious about is there's no way to get rid of trash tokens currently other than hope other factions destroy them, which other factions might not want to do given how useful card draw is for the bees. Maybe could be something to look into?

Very cool faction thanks for submitting!

I love the unique theming and vibe of this faction!

I've not seen an ability like Public Support before it's a very cool idea - I do wonder about the balance since defenders already take the lower dice in battle it seems quite a high likelihood your temporary warrior might not make any difference as you won't get the hits needed for them to make an impact in the battle?

The way warriors "swarm" in I like a lot and the fact the trees become permanent with enough time is very interesting!

Other than that some of the layout of the board and wording of some things I personally found a bit unclear but that's a minor nitpick and definitely easily fixed. Thanks for including a Law of Root that for sure helped with my understanding!

Thanks for the feedback!

For the ordering of spores removing from/entering the spore chamber I was just trying to be consistent with the way other factions have "token tracks" that they place/remove from in order. See the Law of Root "2.5.3 Tokens. If you are prompted to place a token, take the leftmost token from its track, if any, or take it from your supply. If one of your tokens is removed, return it to the rightmost empty space of its track, if any, or to your supply."

You could achieve the exact same gameplay if it was just a big pool of tokens, the order is more just a way to help you keep track of how many you have and it also meant I could have the box which helps visually with how you discard down to 3 tokens during Evening.

Yeah I'd have to test the faction out for finding out about their comeback potential.

Glad you like the Mind Infection! I agree that it would be cool to see that aspect of the faction expanded out - I was tempted to make it replacing enemy warriors with your own or something but Lizard Cult already has that ability. Something to think about for sure!

Thanks for the great feedback! Yeah I'm quite happy with how this faction turned out, I often end up making relatively simple factions for these RootJams that start from picking one element of the "core" Root experience and thinking about how to expand or change it. For example in 2023 the idea was tokens you could upgrade and move around the map and last year my core idea was using cards as crafting materials. Though one day I do think it would be fun to come up with something completely off the wall!

The art is all by Kyle Ferrin and I sourced it all from the Leder Card Library. The mushrooms in the top left are from a card in Oath and the other fungal creatures are actually Blight from the Arcs: Blighted Reach expansion. 

I've not had much chance to test these guys out so I'm not too sure how well the balance between actions vs scoring will work in practice. I think getting Mushrooms out quickly is definitely going to be key for this faction earlygame. 

I was imagining the warriors were sort of sentient fungi, like how the Sylvari in Guild Wars 2 are sentient plants. In retrospect making the warriors be sentient mushrooms and calling the Mushroom buildings something else would also have been cool though!

Thanks for the feedback!

The inspiration for the Manufactory was the Cats' Keep token, in that it's the hub of your empire you expand out from and you have to be careful not to let it be destroyed as you can't get it back. I do think you are correct that they might be a bit too easy to stop right now since they start off a lot weaker than Cats.

In future versions I definitely would look into giving them a backup option for if their buildings get destroyed.

I really like your idea that the manufactory could be a wild crafting piece, that would definitely make it more interesting. Thanks for the feedback!

I've updated the itch.io game page with screenshots and made a post in the discord, both featuring images of everything!

Thanks, I'm glad you like them! Your suggestion of multiple of each token could bring a lot of interesting decisions to playing the faction, will definitely take that on board for the future!

Thanks for the feedback! Great minds think alike when it comes to abilities named House Edge I guess haha. Some incentive to place events where there are enemy warriors or other players would definitely be very cool! 

I love how hard you leaned into the betting theme! The House Edge coin idea is especially very cool and unique and requires you to think about whether it is worth it to use it. I do think balance-wise they seem a bit underpowered, betting seems to maybe help opponents more than it does the Dealers? The core idea is great though.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes you are correct the events move on their own without warriors after activation. Since this faction has no buildings and only 3 tokens total to defend, the idea is you can't just sit in a corner of the map with a pile of warriors on each event and have to plan to spread across the map.

Thanks for the feedback, we definitely would've liked to have explored the theme some more! We did realise before submitting that we had ended up drifting away from it a bit during development but it's our first time designing a fan faction so we've definitely learned a lot for the future.