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Cardinals of the Red Ink (RootJam 2026)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity/Uniqueness | #8 | 4.316 | 4.316 |
| Use of This Year's Theme | #11 | 4.105 | 4.105 |
| Clarity of Rules/Mechanics | #11 | 3.474 | 3.474 |
Ranked from 19 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
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Comments
Oh my gosh I understand and appreciate this faction so much more with the write-up. And I already loved the artwork but then I scrolled to the right and SAW the art for the actual card you based your whole faction around. Truly I love it all so much. I'll always be a sucker for great art and story and your faction has both in spades. Really really lovely stuff and please share more artwork even in the future! So creative
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it, glad you like the art - I'm still working on this faction right now, I'm changing quite a few things and will tweak some of the artwork as well, though I think I'll keep my sad looking cat hahah
I'll definitely share some more updates on Discord soon ;)
Looking forward to it!
Great concept and great execution ! You really managed to create a faction that pushes other players to do correct threat assessment, because ignoring or abusing the contract could both be punishable.
About the Shrines, is it correct that you can place more than one in a clearing ? And once it's on its awakened side, it never returns on its dormant side ?
My only concern would be that the faction might be a bit passive. Wether your opponent has the contract or not, you can score VP no matter your board state. You may want to just defend one clearing with your shrines and nothing else. There are 6 possible ways to score VP, maybe there are a bit too much fail-safes ?
Oh and of course the artworks is incredible, you didn't stop at only one cardinal, instead you've drawn a whole flock !x)
Thank you so much for the kind words :)
You've definitely identified some of the issues that came up during play testing. The shrines indeed come alive and never flip back which is one of the many problems - also it should have been clearer that it's 1 shrine per clearing max, my bad. And yes play-testing did reveal that playing this was too boring unfortunately.
The whole process was fascinating, in hindsight I wish I'd done things very differently and instead started with play-testing immediately, before committing to something. Now I'm working on version 3 which fixes many issues but is also different in some ways, I'll post on the discord once I feel I'm close to something more balanced and playable. Which won't be very long now I, fingers crossed :)
This is great. I really like the ledger idea. As it builds it would provide a lot of tension. Playing the lizards it could be a powerful way to get back online and score back those precious points.
Thanks :) Yes I'm really hoping that this can create some spicy tension around the table with these factions, could be that this is too game-changing though so it will require some thorough play-testing!
I really like this faction! The Contract is definitely a VIP. At first, I thought the Contract seemed like a really powerful card, but then I saw the cost and had to think twice! I also like that it's something that the whole table can interact with it, and not just a VIP that belongs to you.
The ability "Binding Pact" seems like it could be quite penalizing. If I was the Eyrie and got to the end of my turn with outstanding debt, does that mean I would score 0 points for my roosts and the Cardinals would score those points instead (potentially 3-4 points)? But it would only pay off 1 debt? Guess I better settle my accounts!
Ah thanks for the kind words, glad you like it! And to answer your questions, that's my bad for not making the text clearer, what I meant was: if the player would score points and the debt is not zero, decrease the debt by that amount and score these points instead.
So in your example with the Eyrie, say your debt is 3 and you're about to score your 4VP : the cardinals score 3, debt goes down to 0 and you score the remaining 1VP. Otherwise yeah it would probably be too OP with the interests on top of it ;)