The Undead Herd
A downloadable game
My contribution to root jam 2024 (my first root jam and 2nd fan faction) : the Undead Herd !
These damned goats are hard to kill. When they are removed in battle you place a horned skull token and if these aren't removed, you can put your warrior back during birdsong ! These skull token will also be needed to construct your pens , and that's why you will need to sacrifice warriors in battle to take control of the salted clearing. Holy Salt is salt + holy water , works well against your goats, however as you are a goat, you will still try to go for these clearing even though you will take higher losses. Each pen in the salted clearings give VP (these color changes each turn) and protect your goats from vanishing due to holy salt. Your actions basically consist in charging towards salted clearing. plus recruiting and a bit of flexibility with the card in your hand, as well as a cool assault weapon : the ram (constructed by sacrificing one of your warrior of course, because we need his skull)
I hope you enjoy this one, English is not my native tongue so I apologize for any wordings mistakes. Not sure about the balance either but we have to start somewhere, and the deadline is coming !
PS : if someone wants to do a meeple, he is welcome as I'm very bad for this^^
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I think you've crafted a really interesting risk / reward balance here with this faction. You actively are seeking out salted clearings, but in doing so you actively are putting yourself in danger.
But even THEN you have a unique comeback mechanic where foes must remove the token to avoid your warriors simply returning to the board, albeit with no point from the token!
Your ram tokens (nice pun and tie in) is also quite fun in concept, where simply moving WITH it into a clearing affects each opponent there with a building, nice flavour to it!
Only criticisms I have right now (your English is great by the way) is I'm a little worried about how competitive they'd be scoring wise. They focus a lot of their turn on their scoring mechanic (so not a lot of spare battles), but since it's tied to salted clearings of a certain suit, I believe they can only score up to 4 points a turn this way? They're crafting ability might not be able to make up this point gap either.
I would also move the point about placing rams away from your crafting step, since I missed that mechanic on my read through!
Even still great faction and concept, I've reached out to you with a meeple! :)
Thank you for your feedback !
I will put the point about placing rams in its own category bacause if you missed it, other will ^^
Concerning their scoring ability, this will be playtested but I think you are also right and there are a few ways to change this, I'm not sure yet which one I will go for :
- allow them to build more than one pen in each clearing
- allow them to build more than one pen in each clearing but only once per clearing per day
- Raising the vp award for having a pen in a salted clearing (something like 1-2-4-6 or 1-3-5-7)
- Adding VP on 2 or 3 pen in the track that would be also scored at the end of the turn if visible regardless of salted clearing
Also I would like to thank you for the meeple, it is amazing !!