Mutant Pizza

Hi there, Otherworldly Beings,

I’ve started work on an 18 card game idea I’ve been slow-cooking for a while. Called Existentialitis (an inflammation of the existence), this game has one-to-four players work as facets of one person who is facing an existential crisis. My goals with this game are to have a dynamic “puzzle” that players work together to solve, but for that puzzle to drive players to write a narrative about the person and their crisis.

Right now, I’m focusing heavily on the puzzle aspect of the game. So far, I’ve made a prototype and playtested it once. Let me explain the game and then I’ll get into my playtest findings.

Existentialitis is about healing

When you face a crisis, it’s important to take the right steps to heal yourself and be able to move forward, right? That’s the concept we’re exploring in Existentialitis.

Players are dealt a row of cards, visible to everyone, that they must rotate, flip, or reorder to make sure the leftmost card they play is one that helps resolve a portion of the crisis.

A crisis is made up of a string of activity types and reflections. Eventually, there will be a mechanism to generate the game’s crisis at random, but for the sake of getting the foundations of this game constructed, I’m testing against this static crisis.

Players will get a row of cards…

And on their turn, they have a limited capacity to rotate, reorder, or flip these cards to ensure that by the end of their turn, the leftmost card in their row is one they’ll want to play toward the crisis.

Each card has an Activity side, which can be played toward a matching activity to the crisis or rotated to use that activity’s ability, and a Reflection side, which has a good reflection or bad reflection—depending on its orientation.

Players must work together to play the right activity type toward the crisis from left to right, stopping to play a good reflection after correctly playing two activities.

Play a wrong activity type or reflection, and players must start over at that portion of the crisis. Play three bad reflections and players lose.

That’s the gist of it. Now let’s get down to the solo playtest feedback.

The puzzle is difficult to solve

One element of good puzzle solving is allowing players the ability to strategize and prepare for any randomness to occur. I believe that by the nature of how cards are dealt and the linear design of the crisis, it’s difficult to strategize and mitigate randomness. In other words, you have to draw the right cards and you don’t have enough power to force the right cards into the leftmost position when you need them.

Activity powers are far better than playing the activity type

Due to the linear nature of the puzzle, it’s almost always better to use the activity card powers to solve the puzzle. They allow for things like flipping or rotating multiple cards, solving portions of the puzzle out of order, and even removing a bad reflection.

The game doesn’t allow rotating bad reflections to the good side

This is the most punishing part of the game. In solo play, my row of cards is six. There was a time when I got four bad reflections on the first draw and there are no easy to access mechanics to rotate those to the good side. I just had to hope for a specific card to come my way that allowed me to erase a bad reflection, flip the card, or rotate the card.

Resolving the crisis of the game about resolving a crisis

I have a lot to think about with Existentialitis. I’m wondering if puzzle solving is even the way to go or if this game would benefit better from a form of playing on suits (match 2, match 3, etc), push your luck, or some other mechanic.

I also think the activity powers are anticlimatic, as they just pop up and little is done to “earn” the use of them. Furthermore, these powers are so situational that only one-in-six, if that, are desireable. Broadening the scope of the powers or allowing players to play combos of cards to activate a small set list of powers might be the better way to go.

Lastly, there’s the matter of players’ limited actions during their turn. I refrained from mentioning specifics on this but I’ll share now: players can only rotate an Activity card or reorder a Reflection card on their turn. That’s it. Players need to be able to do more to successfully play their desired card, but in a way that still feels challenging.

Time to ponder and redesign. Until next time, Otherworldly beings…