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Wow, that's amazing to hear, thanks for using it! I feel honored.

Thanks! Do I know you?

Great game, really good looking character sprites. It was cute. My friends came over to play Christmas games, and in the middle of this one, their butts got tired of sitting in chairs, and we walked in the snow. It was way too cold. Then I took them home and when I came back I beat the game. They demanded I report to them whether Santa and Krampus are sleeping together or not.

Thanks for the feedback! You're right, the way the game should work is if you roll above the next stage it will still unlock. 

This text is still in the current rules in the horror turn section: "If the die face doesn’t match or unlock a stage, then unlock the next stage card but place no fragments this turn. No scene occurs, and the Horror turn is over." 

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I'm looking at the current rules and it is there. I'm sorry if you missed that part of the rules and your experience suffered from it. 

Definitely works with kids. Thanks so much, hope you get to play it soon!

Thanks so much for the feedback, I really appreciate it! It's always interesting to see where people take the setting whenever I run this and that openness is a huge part of the fun. I also love drawing in games, and having those artifacts left over as a sort of memorabilia of the story we made.

The fun of treasure should be in describing the non living aspects of the world, they are in charge of describing and answering questions about buildings, locations, and scenery. Also making up items and treasure can be fun. I have seen people struggle with the role and it might not be for everyone, but once you get the hang of it, interjecting description of objects and location in the middle of a scene can really help build atmosphere and immersion, even affect and inform the choices characters are making. Sensory description can also help (you smell burning, you feel the cold prickle of snowflakes landing on your nose, and so forth). 

In battle scenes the strong move for treasure is to give the players something to interact with, some sort of action set piece, like a forbidden temple with strange trap mechanisms, a steep hill full of loose boulders over a deep chasm, or a damaged airship losing altitude. Ideally asking of questions should drive a lot of this, so The Warrior might ask Treasure, "What's the fastest way out of here?" and Treasure could respond "You see a rope tied to giant chandelier, you could cut the rope and swing on it."

There's also a rules variant on page 20 for a three player game, where treasure and allies are controlled by the same player. But I'd be interested in seeing if your hack works better, letting people take on treasure as needed might be an improvement.

 I do sometimes feel like dropping some of the pretense of trying to emulate a videogame RPG would make this game work more smoothly, by further simplifying some of the crunch and making it more purely narrative focused, so I feel you there. Maybe some later version of it will end up going in that direction, if I get around to revising it and doing another printing... 

Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to read and give me some feedback. If you run the game I'd love to hear how it goes. You're the best!

Stories about dragons are much improved with romance, and stories about romance are much improved with dragons. If you ever wanted to make out with a dragon, but you were worried your grandmother would not approve, but then you thought you could get away with it if the dragon was a shapeshifter and turned into a highly evolved primate, this is the game for you.  Dragons are people too.  

Also if you want to have surreal, prophetic dreams about the mysterious requirements to fulfill your destiny, attain totality, and control the eclipse ritual in order to reshape reality, this game might be for you.

I feel a bit late to the party, but I would love to submit my tabletop rpg Dragon and Warrior as a donation to the bundle! https://orioncanning.itch.io/dragon-and-warrior

I would also be happy to include Vessel of The Garbage God though it is already free https://orioncanning.itch.io/garbage-god

I spent all last week creating this new game with the help of one of my favorite game designers Jason Morningstar (creator of Fiasco), with art from my brother Jeremy Canning, editing by Robert Bruce, and inspired by the work of Just Housing Olympia.

It's a game about helping the houseless with their trash, and elder dragon-Gods of garbage. It's not a videogame, it's just a PDF rules document. It's not really a game I imagine many people will be playing during the pandemic. Some of you might not really consider it a game, in some ways a call to action or a larp, in others it's a story, a guided session of make believe, or a thought experiment. It's really whatever you want to make of it.

It's pay what you want, but also consider donating to JHO. And I could really use your help sharing the game! Most of all I just want people to play it and hear what people think about it.

https://orioncanning.itch.io/garbage-god

I also did a big write up on the process of making of the game and the concepts behind it, which you can read here: https://orioncanning.itch.io/garbage-god/devlog/132233/vessel-of-the-garbage-god-release-notes

Thanks for the kind words and advice! I wrote the game in a great rush on the evenings of the last two days of the jam. I didn't think I would have time because I was working on finishing an episode of a podcast about storygame design called All My Ideas Are Bad. But then at the last minute I decided to try anyways, because I already had come up with the idea in my head.  

I agree about the interview, I can work that into character creation more, I think it could be very effective. As far as the  different portions of the map belonging to different ages, my interpretation of that wasn't completely literal. What I came up with was the idea of the known explored path, and the unexplored world, which aren't actually of different times necessarily, but would feel that way to explorers. It might actually become explicit in the story if the explorers come across ruins from another age. I may not have made that intention very clear.

 As for the randomizers, I'm not sure what to think, I thought it might be interesting to  have the cards both a measure of supplies and and a randomizer for obstacles and their difficulty, and a separate randomizer for success, but there probably could be a more elegant way to only use cards. I'll think about how to do that for my next revision.

I was really impressed by the layout and work put into Endtime, I  think it definitely surpasses mine, which is actually more effort than I normally put into graphic design. It's not really my area of expertise but I tried my best with the time I had. I spent a lot of time looking at old paintings. I should also say that I actually had a hand in Fall of Magic as an early and frequent playtester and the designer of The Lost Island of Stillheart Landing. I also made videos for the crowdfunding campaigns for Fall of Magic and for The Quiet Year. So these games that are the prizes and maybe inspiration for the jam are close to my heart. Ross runs a meetup group here and I'd like to bring your game to run, I'm sure he'd like it.

This game is very interesting, I see how you combined the concept of a time and place, the road itself as a timeline. I have myself thought of ways to hack the rules of Microscope and create something altogether different. But making the timeline physical never occurred to me. It is nice that it is short, I have not tried it yet, but I could see it going either way. It is the sort of game that some people may struggle with, and others might have a great time playing. I did find the rules confusing at first due simply to the number of terms I was learning, but on rereading it became clear. I wonder what stories The Highway will tell!

Not all games have to be about telling a story, of course, though I did get the impression this game jam wanted games of that kind. I think the most helpful way to help players create story is to give them a something to base their characters off of, and something to help them decide what their relationships to other characters are. These are usually the first choices you make in a game and it's a lot harder to make something up from a void than it is with a seed, a prompt or idea to inspire you. This can often be as simple as a list of evocative words or phrases to choose from.  Many of the events in your game could serve as prompts to build scenes or narration from with a little more guidance, likewise so could the stats and type of country be a basis for character creation. 

Sometimes you make the mechanics for a game first, and figure out what kind of story they create, and sometimes you come up with what kind of story you want to tell and make mechanics that do that. Nothing wrong with the former.

I like the idea of this game, building up countries and seeing how they fare over time, but I see a lot of room for improvement. I would like to see more player interaction, as the only choice you really get to make is which stats to put points in and the rest is random. It doesn't seem like there is much room for strategy, and there aren't any instructions for how to tell a story. The order of the cards mostly decides how it goes. That could be fun, but I think it would be more interesting if you had more choices of actions and ways to interact with the other countries or players. Either in a strategic way or in a way that creates interesting characters and stories (maybe both). Also more interaction with the map would be nice, reasons to draw and add things to the map for example.

Regardless it feels like a good start for a game, something you could build from if you had more time.  I hope that's constructive and you continue to make games and improve on your designs!

A Lovely short, 1 page game, about making up a hometown we (the players) grew up in, and how it has changed since we were young.

Such a cool game! The graphic design of the rules, map, and play materials are all excellent. Using photographs for locations is a great touch. I like how it reverses the usual progression of post apocalyptic stories, by being about people returning to dangerous cities from a place of safety. It actually has some very similar elements to my game, both are about exploring, traveling into increasing danger, where people in the group can die and be mourned. I can definitely see the influence of Fall of Magic!

"Uploads are temporarily disabled because voting for Mapemounde is in progress. You'll be able to make changes after the jam is over."

*shrug* I'll upload it after the jam, for now it's linked to on google drive on the game page.

I wrote a little review, maybe it's a lot of review, hope you like it.

This game is funny, cute, charming, and good. I have not played it yet, so this is review is based on reading the rules alone. It reminds me of Sword Loser, which is similar in a few ways, except that you draw swords instead of landmarks, and it's not a linear journey like this is.

The theme is well represented. It's a game about maps, bad ones! The Goal not so much, it does not seem there are parts of the map from different ages. I mean I guess players could make up a story where that is true, but it's not implicit. So 3 stars there.

How strongly are maps integrated? The idea that the maps are bad is clever, since not everyone will have drawing ability and this makes the game stress free and inclusive. You are basically meant to spend the whole game doodling landmarks, and then charting a path between them, so that seems well integrated to me. It's a bit simple, but simple can be good! I give it 4 out of 5.

I do believe it is elegant in a way. Not in the way that blows one away with inventiveness or emergent storytelling arising from the mechanics, but from the simplicity. As I said simplicity can be good, and simplicity is part of elegance. In my definition the other part is complexity coming from simple rules. I don't know if that's entirely the nature of this game, the complexity of the experience feels relatively straightforward. But I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I am curious about the horses. They have names and a weapon of choice. Do they talk? I hope they talk. Can I be lead horse instead of lead knight? If that's what I'm meant to do, it was communicated very elegantly. 4 out of 5.

The tone of the game may be it's best quality, playful, a bit silly, fun and accessible. And you get to be silly knights! I could easily see a story similar to Monty Python and The Holy Grail coming out of this, which is definitely a good thing. Perhaps it was an inspiration. 4 out of 5

(I'm clearly having difficulty handing out 5 star ratings. I guess I am reserving that for "the best possible", whatever that means. Ratings are subjective and a bit arbitrary. I'm not looking for perfection to earn a 5, but a sense of really nailing that category, blowing it out of the water, while a four is a solid well done. Don't read too much into it.)

Oh look here, the rules are extremely easy to understand. After only a few minutes reading I feel like I could play this game from memory (though I wouldn't because I'd be depriving my players of some quality humor). 5 out of 5!

20 out of 25 overall. That's very good. This is my first review, I don't know what I'm doing really, but that's a respectable score. Well done!

Could anyone let me know if my submission is still valid?

This was my first Itch.io game jam. I was trying to upload my game at the last minute and there was an error. My game was submitted but with no file uploaded. I wasn't sure what to do so I put it in a google drive link in the description. But I think I made a cool thing.

So stressful >_<