itch.io

Oh nice. Hope your daughter enjoys the new set!

Awesome! Hope you enjoy it!

Heh. This comment made my day. I hope you enjoy it!

Awesome, glad you and your wife are enjoying it!

Tried it out. Nice little deckbuilder.

I liked the progression mechanic, but the four-cost cards might be too powerful. Once you get a couple of them in your deck, it quickly becomes trivial to make quota and churn a lot of coin.  But it was certainly fun getting to that point, and the little puzzle of how to get over that hump was enjoyable.

I'd love to see this with more art on the cards, more cards to buy, etc., but maybe that's beyond the scope of what you're trying to accomplish here. Either way, I sure liked what was here, and had some fun with it. Great work!

Okay, I see where the confusion is.

Your point #5 is not what I intended for the rules.  The intent is that you only remove dice if two or more dice show the same top value. You don't just remove all dice that aren't the top value – you only do it if there's a "tie".  The rule says:

First, if two or more dice show the “top value”, remove all dice that do not show that value.

In other words, if there is a tie for the highest value (across all four dice), then you eliminate anything that wasn't part of that tie.  If there was only one die with the highest value (which will fairly often be the case), you don't remove anything.

Sorry for the confusion!  That rule as written might be a little too terse, making it easy to miss the nuance there, so I'm going to add some clarifying language to that section in the rules and release a new version soon that might help me convey the rule better for future players.  

Thanks for taking the time to talk about this with me – if you got caught by my description of the rules, it's pretty likely others have, too, but never spoke up about it, so I appreciate it.  This will help me clarify the rules not just for you but for other players as well!

Hmm. I might need to go look at how I described things, but no, crits should still be rare as the system should be largely unchanged from 1e.

My intent was that you still take the top value across all dice, just as in 1e, so crits would only happen if one side rolls doubles that are higher than both the other side’s dice. If that’s not clear, or if a strict reading of the rules doesn’t support that, I might need to tweak the 2e explanation. I’ll try to take a look at that today.

Thanks for asking. It’s difficult to detect points of confusion in the rules when you’re the one who wrote it!

Yeah that could work too, but might also require some enemy adjustments. You’d have more powerful characters but fewer actions a turn and more concentrated damage targeting each character because it wouldn’t be “spread out”.

If you try this route I would be curious to hear how it goes!

I would only recommend one or two players, honestly. It gets pretty crowded even at three.

If you decide to go to three or four players, you might consider running a two player game and splitting up the heroes and companions among the players to control. That keeps the model count manageable and the combats quicker.

If you do decide to do a full game with 3+ players, I would recommend adding at least one more dungeon tile to generated rooms, too, just to give a little elbow room.

Okay, glad you got it sorted.  I hope you enjoy the game!

Well, I tried multiple times and it seemed to get through the ordering process fine for me.  I didn't go all the way to actually pressing "place order" – where did it fail in the process for you?

I did get hit by that captcha thing that cloudflare does  once. Maybe it failed for you there because it erroneously thought you weren't a human for some reason?

Hmm.  Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Let me look into it!

Love it.

Okay, I set aside some time to check it out and watched it. Great work! I posted some thoughts on the actual video, but overall very happy to see this. You did a great job bringing the story to life and showcasing the mechanics clearly. Thanks for taking the time to make the video!

Oh cool I will check it out! Glad you liked the game!

Okay, it sounds like they're in the process of moving a lot of their PNP games over to itch (yay!), but as they have literally hundreds of games, it's going to take a while. Subscribe to me to be notified when they go live – I'll post a devlog when they're available.

...that is a very good question.

I'll ask and let you know.

The hard part would be getting to that from this point, because green balls fired by the bishop do not gain the damage multiplier bonus for some reason, so I'd be downgrading while working up to that. Green balls are like plain balls if you don't have any actual attack panels.

I was thinking about just going all-in on healing only (with no other panel types) paired with the bishop to see how it goes, making every panel eligible for a crit. It might work because with all panels healing, you'd likely gain ~40 max HP and heal ~336 HP per spin (before any multipliers from the balls).

Nice little cozy game. I decided to give up once I hit wave 110 and had all gold balls, 2860 health, and 2320 max shield. Still had a few shields that weren't at full 20, but it wasn't making that much of a difference.

I do recommend revisiting the layout and UI.  The coins on the left and the store descriptions on the right get cut off, and all the text is uncomfortably small, especially the health and armor readout.

I'd also strongly recommend a way to skip animations, say with a tap of the space bar, or a way to accelerate the animations. Once you get 15 balls going, it becomes a bit of a slog to wait for things.

There also seems to be a bug when you complete the game and go into endless mode – the registration of where the panels on the wheel are get offset (I think it's because the wheel is set to turning when you win), and you have to re-set the panels in the wheel manually to get them back into place.

Anyway, clever little design. Enjoyed it.

Love it. Well done. I'd love to see more of these.

Nice, glad to hear you enjoyed the first edition and are looking forward to the second edition.

To answer your questions:

Is the 2nd edition a completely analog game (without digital tools like 1e)?

Yes, 2e is completely analog, although nothing's stopping you from using the digital tools from 1e.  The missions from the 1e tools are balanced for just you and not you-with-companions, though, so I'd recommend upgrading the monsters you encounter one tier, as discussed in the 2e rules, if you decide to go that route.  I have not playtested this way of playing 2e, so YMMV. If you try it, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes.

Will the 1e online tool be available in the future or will it be phased out (or how about a downloadable version)?

I have no plans to phase out or remove the 1e tool, although it might get moved off of the front page of the web site to a sub-page now that there's a new edition and the site will have to support both editions.  My intention is to leave support up for 1e players rather than trying to force them over to 2e by withholding support for 1e. If someone prefers 1e to 2e, I'm happy to have them still play it.

I'm not ruling out a 2e online tool, but one of the design goals was to get rid of the dependency on the online tool, since I heard from a lot of people that they'd prefer analog options.  Obviously there's already a codebase I could draw upon to create a 2e online tool, so it's not too unrealistic a possibility, but right now, my focus is on developing a second realm for 2e.

I think you'll find that the 2e presentation of the dungeons will be fairly comparable to the 1e experience, just with "read paragraph #N" instead of "click this button" to get to the descriptive and mechanical elements.  And if you're using a device to read the realm's PDF, it will still be a digital companion for delivering the dungeon content, just with a different mechanism for calling up the game elements.

Either way, hope you enjoy your time with 2e!

Okay, I've uploaded a version of the game that fixes these issues. Thanks again for letting me know!

Ah thanks for taking the time to let me know. I’ll try to get an update out fixing these issues today.

Hope you’re enjoying the game!

I would love to share some!  I'm hoping to get some made for both this game and Sleuths, maybe over the holidays.

In the mean time, the videos on the first edition are still fairly applicable. The big change from what you see in the first edition game video  is that the new version removes the reliance on the web app to generate the missions; most of the underlying mechanics remain fairly similar, but the interaction with the dungeon environment has changed significantly as a result (for the better, in my opinion).

The video about assembling the papercraft is still entirely applicable with no changes.

I'm loving this advent deck you made, Shenbot! Super charming.

Nice!  Seems to be working now.

Sure!  See attached. 

Interesting idea for a puzzle game.  Unfortunately the text gets cut off for me down at the bottom.  Is there a way to scroll the text or make it smaller so it fits in that box?

Weird - I haven’t changed it in a long time and I know people successfully printed from that link. I’ll look into it - thanks for the heads up.

Well, I had several reasons:

•  Someone just stumbling onto the game on the Lulu store and buying it wouldn’t have (easy) access to the companion files like the downloadable character sheets and the other adventures. So I’d have to set up a way for them to get those files but in a way that doesn’t just make them freely available to people who haven’t bought the game at all.

• This way I can set the Lulu price at cost. If I made it so you could buy just the book I would have to raise the price of the physical book if I wanted to make a profit. But then that punishes people who want both because then I would be “double dipping” on them, which feels kinda smarmy. This way I make my profit on the digital version and people who want the physical version can get it at cost.

• As I release updates, people who buy the game on itch get those updates. AFAIK I don’t have an easy route for that for people who buy the print version. I’d have to set up some other avenue for them to receive that information. It’s cleaner this way.

So that was my thinking. It’s easier and simpler to manage and ensures (-ish) that people don’t get left without the support avenues for the game.

But if you really only want the physical book and not the companion PDF’s and updates, just reach out to me on Mastodon (@lonespelunker@mastodon.social) and I can send you  the link.

Well, the other way you can finish a hole is using the “putt” that allows you to just move one square without rolling. In that case the bonus is for not using that to end the hole (which can be tough).

Love it.  As usual, tight, easy mechanics with fun presentation.

Some questions:

• If you move through the hole's square but still have movement left to do, do you sink the ball, or do you have to continue with the remaining movement?  The chip-in bonus seems to suggest you don't have to land it perfect to sink it (since you get a bonus if you get it perfectly – unless the intent is to get the bonus by rolling and not getting the bonus by "putting" with the single orthographic move).
• Similarly, do you pick up gems as you pass through them, or only if you land on them?
• Perfect shots can "travel through walls", but you can never end movement in a wall. What happens if a perfect shot movement would end on a wall?

You should have received two versions of the various pages as PDF's.  One of them is a series of pages that are "right side up", intended to be used in a digital reader.  This one isn't used to create the one-page foldable "zines".

You should also have received a version that has the eight-up layout with some "right side up" and some "upside down".   This is the one to print to make the "zines".

Picked up the full game on Steam thanks to the strength of this demo. Great work!

Ah, glad it helped.  Thanks for playing, even though it's not written in your first language. Hope it's accessible enough to still be fun!

Well, like any other challenge roll in the game, you imagine what your character is doing to handle the situation or how they are responding to it, and then you pick your traits that apply to roll.

Remember that if you don't have two, you can always imagine d4 traits on the fly.  So, if you are grappling with "Ale is consumed. Much ale." and you have literally nothing in your pre-selected traits to roll that applies, you can always imagine, say, "d4 Staggering through the headache" and "d4 Hair of the dog that bit ya" and roll those to see what comes out on top.

Have fun with it! If your character's traits just simply don't apply to the situation, that's not great for your die rolling, sure, but it's a fun creative opportunity. That's a situation where your character is really out of their element, so you can come up with weird responses, lucky coincidences, miraculous providence, sudden appearances of old friends or rivals, or obscure backstory to flesh out your character a bit. (And maybe that die will even come out on top!)

Also remember you're always responding to two challenge dice, so if you can't think of much that fits "Ale is consumed. Much ale.", you can simply lean into whatever the other challenge die is and respond to that, and if "Ale..." comes out on top, well, whatever you were trying to do was derailed because of your hangover. You didn't try to respond to it, nor did you have anything particularly able to counter it...and it got ya!

Bottom line: Just pick dice that will make for interesting story, whether they're dice your character already has or d4's to fill out what doesn't apply.

Awesome, thanks for taking the time to say so.  Hope you have a lot of fun with it!

Glad you like the game.  I think you're gonna enjoy the second edition! Make sure you follow me because I'll announce it here when it's ready!

Delightful. Solved the mystery, but some bad rolls (I believe?) made me miss the clue in the flower shop, so I ended up with 90/100.  Got the mystery correct on the first guess, though!

One thing I was impressed with: I am neither a theater nor a music person, personally, but the writing was accessible enough that it felt like my character was knowledgeable enough about high society theater and music to investigate the mystery even if I wasn't. There were a few terms, like the instrument names, that I ended up having to go back and remind myself which was which, but otherwise, I was able to follow along with those elements and their ramifications in the mystery despite not having the background. Well done on that.

The mystery itself felt like a good difficulty. It wasn't obvious, and the player has to pay attention to what the characters say, but the structure of how you made options for following up on specific items from interviews help the player to sift the wheat from the chaff in a way that makes it likely they will figure it out without the solution being handed to them. And the hypothesis system worked quite well as a way to establish a theory before making an accusation. Really nice mystery-solving design with some clever affordances to help the player succeed while still feeling like they're the ones solving the mystery.

I didn't read the game notes before playing, so I was a little surprised by the dating sim segment at the end. Once I realized what was going on, it was of course fine, but in the moment, it seemed odd because I expected the game to end when the mystery was solved and the perpetrators were brought to justice. In retrospect, it seems a lot more obvious that was what it was building up to, so this is probably more about my unfamiliarity with the conventions of dating sim games than any problem with the game itself. For example, I took the adjustments to the relationships as "willingness to divulge information relevant to the investigation or to step in if things go south with the villains", rather than "how into you they are". I now realize that was leading up to the dating portion, but when I was first playing the game, I thought those were investigation progress measures, not romantic measures. (A quick paragraph about what those bonuses mean might help orient people like me unfamiliar with dating sims, but honestly it's fine as is.)

Anyway, a solid offering. Engaging writing, a fun mystery, interesting characters, quick to play, easy to navigate, and no major frustrations. Great work.