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Game Play (10)Rules Clarity (10)Play Time (5)Replayability (5)Art / Graphic Design (5)Innovation (5)
FINAL SCORE!
What we lovedWhat we felt needed improvement
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Zombomination1010554438Every time we go this game out around family and friends a crowd would form. The rapid play meant that lots of people jumped in and had their hand at the game. It is one of our favorite real time games and really fits the feel of running from the Zombies. The panic is real and feels so thematic. It takes a few tries to get your head around the options so you can move fast, but the games are so fast this is not a problem.

In our playtesting we felt that this game was the most consistent of the finalist in terms of appealing to audiences. It always left an impact on players asking to play more. Each game we observed players trying different approaches with glorious success and horrific failure. We never had a play test where players didn't want another round to redeem themselves.		The only thing lacking in the game is a changing story arch. But that is also kind of the beauty of the game. I can't help but think about The Walking Dead and how they say every adventure always ends in panic and running. Its like your pushed into that final terrible moment in every episode. So it lacks an arc, but the game fits in 2 pages with a small set of bits, so in this way it really stood out among the entries.

It is easy to see how the game could grow a bit and stand on its own (but this is true of basically every game in the contest). In this case, we felt that a slightly bigger map with some other special locations might add to the dynamics and give a solid game even more variety. Or even a changing map based on a set of cards that are turned out. For a bigger box version, what if the game was a series of these real time encounters with some overall or ongoing goal? So the full game is really a string of 4-6 real time encounters...The excellent core game has us talking about all the stuff that could be done on this foundation.

Mechanically there was nothing about the game that we felt failed or fell short of delivering a great expeirence.
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Mine Your Own Business9.59.5545437One of the most amazing thing about this game is the clever ways the systems interconnect. In many ways among the finalist this game really delivered the most complex, yet managable set of systems. The way you can manipulate mines, items in the market, value of gems at the end of the game, priority of colors and so on is just fantastic. As a more sophistiated gamer I really enjoyed this one. The theme and the art were really spot on and made the game very appealing. Finally, we loved the shift that happens where players go from building their golem engine to creating and polishing gems. This really let players set the tempo of the game and was really amazing to see in such a small package.While the systems are tightly buckled together and it functions extremly well the game feels like a fairly standard resource conversion game. We always had a good time playing it, but it wasn't the kind of game that had people talking about it later. "You converted things more effeciently than me, good job." I would 100% play this again, and would enjoy it, but it lacked that magical spark to really make it feel like something we had never expeirenced before.
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Pizza Pronto9.59.5445436The design of this game is beautiful, and the various systems within the game are very effectivly used. The theme really leaps out of this game and the mechanics strongly reinforce it. We kept joking that we were careless teens in the kitchen slapping together pizzas (hence all the mistakes). The combination of chaos you could control and chaos you could mitigate made the game a great success. Players consistently enjoyed the coop element, though it was very common to see one player quarter backig. It actually worked really well as a solo game. The game doesn't have meta data like play time or player counts! Our biggest complaint is that your doing exactly the same things, in exactly the same way, at exactly the same efficiency/power lever from the start to the end. The mid to late game starts to feel a bit like a drag. Some new element that creates a changing story arch is very much neeed. Like maybe you play over a weekend, with some sort of changing customer dynamic for friday vs saturday vs sunday. It needs that extra layer to really make it shine. To be fair, this is probably asking for more than can be packed into the 2 pages.
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Venari910444.5334.5Venari is super easy to teach and works exactly as you would expect it to. We never had a problem teaching it and players always had fun playing it. It's a great abstract game and is a perfect fit for the book. It's a fun game when time is limited and you just want to jump in and play. The game has a combination of Onitama and Chess in the way it works. The track for selecting your move distance is super clever and it's easy to understand. However, it really felt at some point mid game that it was terribly hard to really plan ahead and catch someone by being clever. It always felt like you lost because you made a mistake. Maybe chess is like that, but somehow Venari seems to highlight your failures as opposed to your opponents cleverness. Onlookers always wanted to give it a try, but we never had players return asking to play again.
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Double Docker8104.534332.5We really enjoyed the theory of mind element with this game. Trying to outthink your opponent is something we consistently enjoyed and really stood out with this simple game. This is another entry that is perfectly at home in this book and really shows how a simple game can still be a lot of fun. It reminds us a lot of a game we made (Dragons) and we loved seeing a different take on an idea that we had fun with.While the game is enjoyable it tended to grow somewhat stale the longer you played. It was fun to try and out smart your opponent, but with public scoring it became a bit demoralizing for those getting left behind. Even still, we would return to it again and have enjoyed sharing it with our friends.
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Summer Hustle7953.54.5231Summer Hustle was a big hit with younger players. It was super easy to teach and it was fun to include younger kids in the game. In that sense it was a real hit. The art is beautifully executed and overall fits really well in the book!While we enjoyed it with kids, as adults we kept wishing for some way to mitigate the dice rolls and have more agency. We also felt that the order of selecting your character had a big impact on things...with the player choosing last getting a significant advantage.
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I'm_In6.574.53.53428.5I was very optimistic about this game, and it delivers on exactly what I expected...a fresh and mixed up version of a clasic game. We enjoyed exploring it, and the setup with the vertical board was neat (though it would have woked a lot better as a hard board instead of a book). Please enjoyed the theme and felt it fit the mechanics wonderfully.Players were consistently overwhelmed...its like we always knew we had the information in front of us, but there was so much to process it became very hard to interpret what you know. Keeping everything straight was really hard and sadly detracted from the fun. I am not sure what would fix this, perhaps its a presentation issue? Simpler effects somehow? The core concept of the game is very neat and engaging, we just wanted game player to feel a bit smother.
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