Looks like the conversation has been filled between the time I read this on my phone and the time I got to a keyboard. Here’s my thoughts anyway:
Theme
First off, don’t go back to a default theme. I love that they are doing something new here. But you’ve got to tighten it up. Let’s compare to Apiary. What’s Apiary about? SPACE BEES. Ok, got it. What are they doing? COLONIZING SPACE. OK, I’m in.
Here: It’s foxes, but they are flying. And they are fighting merchants (…what?) Flying merchants. The foxes don’t like the merchants. Oh, they also don’t like each other, forgot to mention that.
What are they doing?
Oh, right. So the merchants took over fox land. It doesn’t have a name. And the foxes went away. But now they’re BACK. And they’re fighting the merchants off to take back their land.
Their air?
Oh yeah, they’re all flying.
The point can be made most effectively by the fact that I probably got some of that wrong and missed other parts. Tighten it up, I’m already tired before I even finish the setting.
Gameplay
Here’s the bigger nail in the coffin - I don’t want to play. And I think there’s two reasons for that - the fiddly in to game out ratio looks unfavorable, and I don’t know what the game’s hook is.
First on rules. Here is what I got: I’m going to have 6 options on where to place a fox. I’ll have to cross reference dice and board to identify those 6 spaces, and then try to remember them as I evaluate them against fox strength, fox abilities, and space characteristics. Depending on what the space is, I might get a merchant ship, or ??? … there were other implications and scoring. And then we end up at some kind of point salad where you have points for cities, ships, area control? At this point I stopped, I’m seeing a lot of mental friction figuring out where I can and want to put a fox, and after that friction, I end up immediately at scoring. This feeds into…
The hook. Coup - you have two cards. You take money and then spend money to force others to flip a card. Your cards give you special abilities for taking money or flipping opponents cards. Oh, and your cards are face down and you can lie about what abilities you have access to. Boom, I want to try that.
Race for the Galaxy - you draw cards. Discard to add cards to your tableau. Use cards to make and consume “goods” for points. And every card you add to your tableau grants you a rule-breaking bonus for hte rest of the game. Oh, and you can also copy everyone else’s actions for free if you can guess what they are going to do.
Just well known examples. I didn’t see any hook, at all. I assume it’s there?
I don’t mind the lack of a rulebook, they tell me how to play the game in the campaign. However, by doing so, they got too much into the weeds and lost the essence of the game.
So, what’s the setting? Tighten that up to one sentence, or even a few words.
What’s the hook? They need a 15-second elevator pitch on what is the beating heart of this game, and that needs to be front and center. Simplify the rules to give me the spine of the game, and emphasize the hook, without all the details. Draft rulebook for the details if someone has questions. A good example would be the cloud tokens - all the campaign needs is “weaker foxes provide cloud tokens that let you manipulate the dice or move your foxes already on the board,” instead of the full paragraph of mechanics they put in.
Minor, but as others have said, “What players are saying: RAVE! RAVE! RAVE!” rather than “Rave! - demo playtester.”
Final tangential note:
I’m reading the tea leaves here. But what I see is a long development, but you never saw it. Full campaign, but you never reviewed it. Confident the campaign will fail before it even launches (insulating against failure). You’ve got someone here who is unable to separate themself from the product. Their identity is quite likely (and unhealthily, but also all too normally) bound up with this game and campaign. That’s the reason people usually hide their work, it’s too vulnerable and personal to have it prodded, edited, and evolved.
So (likely) a part of them wants to know how to succeed. A part of them just wants no one to touch it, because their identity will be devastated in the exchange.
Err on the side of caution, enter gently, figure out how to pose everything as a “try it this way instead” rather than “this part is wrong.” And have a separate meta-conversation about the importance of separating their work from their self and the value of critique, and how good it feels when their thing gets better. No one does it alone. Revision is harder, longer, and more important than creation. Yadda yadda yadda. They might get more value from that than specifics on this page they’ve put together.
