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I was reading Spice and Wolf when Jam prompts were first announced. My initial concept of a game was for each player to represent a trade company, controlling four or so "traders" with rolled moves to distribute between them each turn. Lacking the real knowledge of trade and economics to form a skeleton I could attach mechanics to, however, I realized I couldn't pursue this design. In the end, my evergreen love of little things pursuing the impossible would be that skeleton instead.
Part of my goal was to hobble the option proliferation that bogged me down so badly in Clarity, my entry to the previous Jam. In Clarity, players had many ways to generate interactable objects and new perks, which, while fitting and giving the players much to explore, calls for a level of preparation I've not proven capable of even without that Jam's 24-hour deadline.
Previous abandoned projects make this quite clear; no me, no game. That in mind, this Jam was an exercise in paring options down to a level I can sustain. An unusual extreme of this is the restrictive movement rules, which are such that I usually know where a player is going to arrive at turn end just by looking at their token. I've attempted to balance these constraints with interactables whose interlocking mechanics help get around them or give meaning to players' limited agency. It's been much more manageable so far. We'll see how that holds. I'll be relying on the Defiance counter to set a limit on the game, as it's tied to mechanics that allows players to more quickly enter phases of the game that I may not have the wherewithal to manage. If the players learn to manage Defiance well in pursuit of their goals, I can only hope I learn as quickly as they.
Thanks for joining, players, and don't hold back on my account.
