Play game
The Brambleberry Communion's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Clarity of Rules/Mechanics | #4 | 3.889 | 3.889 |
| Use of This Year's Theme | #7 | 4.222 | 4.222 |
| Creativity/Uniqueness | #9 | 4.111 | 4.111 |
Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Includes Law of Root?
No
Includes PnP?
Yes
Includes TTS files?
No
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Your artwork and storytelling behind this is so genuinely fun, and because you've been so on the ball with responding to everyone's comments... And questions I had have sorta been answered.
Genuinely you did a great job, and I'd even like to see you make more root art!
Thanks for the kind words! Credit for the art and some of the design goes to my brother @Mattko!
Love the art! I was a little confused by the berry track. Is it one big track that fills in from the right or is it two different tracks?
But all in all I think it's a fun idea of getting the Brute to move around eating berries.
It is one (1) track. Whenever you are prompted to place a berry on the hunger track, you should place the berry on the rightmost empty berry slot. If the "hungry" side of the track does not contain 3 berries (so contains any empty slots) the bear is considered hungry and the listed effect applies.
Clarification for the order of operations when the Brute gets moved: if the Brute is hungry, first remove the bramble warriors, then place berries on the hunger track.
ok cool! That makes sense
I played this faction along with other Rootjam submissions and it was really fun ! Art is really cute and the gameplay loop really clever.
I love how you push your opponents to fight the bear. You have the carrot of offering victory points when you move the bear to the berries and the stick of really not wanting to attack the hedgehogs directly because of their spikes.
The scoring feels a bit clanky and I'm not sure what's the math and the strategy you should have around it. If you want to score 3 points, you need to feed 3 berries and have 5 left every turn, seems reallly tricky given that you don't choose how many berries the bear eats when he enters a clearing.
Other than that the faction is very intuitive and fun to play, great work :)
Im glad to hear that the core mechanics are working for you! we are indeed still actively figuring out what scoring mechanisms suits these little hedgehogs best and we are already experimenting with some other versions of scoring. Thanks for the playtest!
Very cute faction! I would definitely not want to attack those spiky hedgehogs. Then again, I'm not sure if I want a bear whacking me either!
I am curious how you've found the generation of blackberry tokens. It makes thematic sense that they grow where other blackberries are, but if the bear had a sudden surge of hunger and was able to gobble up multiple clearings in between your turns, does it become difficult to get grew new berries?
For now it seems to work reasonably well, if the bear had this surge of hunger and eat so many berries, then it would be very well fed. So the brambleberries can spend an entire turn (maybe even 2) not feeding the bear and making sure the bear is as far away from them as possible. Focusing on cultivating berries only. We are still playing around with the timing of cultivating: when can the communion spend a card to place a berry in a clearing? We noticed that it introduces quite some mental load to have to do it in birdsong, as you have to plan out your entire turn up ahead. Now we are playtesting doing this step in evening, but that makes it a lot more telegraphed how much the faction scores... Work in progress!
Thanks for the explanation! Good luck with your continued playtesting!
Hey I like what you did and the simplicity of it !
I wonder how this would play, and if you will usually do few or many actions with the bear during your turn
Maybe i would suggest that for the 2nd Berry the bear is moved by your opponents only if they ambush or deal hit while attacking. Else i feel like you would not really want to attack with the bear as it would go away very often
thanks for the input!
In earlier versions the bear required 2+ hits in battle to be moved. We had changed it to 1 just to see what would happen. Were still actively testing so we might very well change it back to 2 again to make the bear more "stubborn". In that case there is only a 25℅ chance that the opponent gets to move the Brute when youre attacking. That would definitely boost the destructive ability of the Brute in a clearing...
Only 1 way to find the right number -> more playtesting! :)