Hi it’s Noé! Just documenting a small rule change and some re-wording to make the document more clear :)

CHANGES

• We’ve changed the number of points to win from 40 to 30! This is a pretty small change mostly because the point goal being 40 makes the first set mostly just a kinda “setup” phase where nothing really interesting can happen aside from one player getting a lead before the board state is reset for the second set. All of the interesting stuff happens around the last 15-20 points, so cutting out the first 10 points of fluff felt important to get to the more interesting plays sooner.

  • Also added a small example of calculating the overflow at the end of the winning section to make it more clear how that mechanic works.

• I’ve also updated the wording for most of the document, and switched from trying to communicate card stakes as being determined by cards being in either a “known” or “unknown” state for either player. This was super confusing and in practice it’s a lot more intuitive to just think of the stakes as being like 1 2 and 3 for the first closest row, second closest row, and third closest row with an exception for face up cards only having a single stake. This is just how we’ve ended up needing to describe it to everyone in person in practice.

• I removed the little blurb at the bottom of the winning section that says that you can play a shorter version of the game by playing for the highest score within a certain number of sets. It felt a bit like an Official House Rule to solve for potentially long games which is a goofy concept in hindsight. People can come up with their own shorter win conditions that feel satisfying to them and suit their constraints, and I shouldn’t pretend like there’s a single best way it should be played shorter because there isn’t.

• I’ve also removed the links to our twitters and replaced them with links to our itch pages cause who’s still on twitter lol.

IN OTHER NEWS

I’m still slowly working away at Demon’s Dozen (Digital) which is just a version of the game that can be played in browser and online vs a friend or against a bot. It’s taking its sweet time cause I have other brainworms and a job, but I’ve been wanting to make more progress on it cause I miss Plum and want to play our game together while we’re separated by borders and the government.

We’re also going to try and make a video of us playing a game of Demon’s Dozen to host on the itch page when we can see each other in person next! I think it’s nice and makes it more accessible to be able to watch someone else play to see how it works before trying to get into it yourself :)

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the game!