Power Struggle by skyr
Power Struggle is a digital board game for one to four players.
You play as the lord of a medieval family trying to gain more power over the neighboring families. The goal of the game is to gain the most power while sabotaging your opponents.
At the home screen select which houses are controlled by a player and which by the computer and press Start. Each player takes a turn and after all players are done you move to the next round. The game is over after 20 rounds or if only one player is left with power above zero.
Each turn the player rolls the dice and then distributes them on the resources by dragging the dice. After all the dice are placed the player selects Apply to end the turn.
There are 4 different resources to distribure your dice. Each resource has value, cost, power and a total. - Value: The total amount of the dice values assigned. - Cost: The amount required for a unit of this resource. - Power: It is multiplied by the value to calculate the amount of power gained. - Total: The amount of units gained.
The resources are: - Approval: Only used for gaining power. - Military: Each military unit gained lowers the cost of the saboteurs. - Food: Each food unit increases the power gain of approval. - Saboteurs: Lowers the power of an opponent. You must select the target player from the red box.
This is my first game created with the Godot Engine. For the graphics I used Inkscape and to record the audio effects Audacity.
Download at itch.io: https://spyrosgames.itch.io/power-struggle
Sources at github: https://github.com/SpyrosKyriazos/ludumdare39
(Note that the macOS and linux versions are not tested)
| Source code | https://github.com/SpyrosKyriazos/ludum_dare_39 |
| Windows | https://spyrosgames.itch.io/power-struggle |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-struggle-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 198th | 3.526⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 148th | 3.526⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 112th | 3.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 171th | 3.789⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 467th | 2.842⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 395th | 2.588⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 481th | 1.667⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 216th | 3.235⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 6🗨️ |
The graphics are simple, but they work. Audio is... well, it's dice rolling. So not much to say there.
The gameplay is not bad, but I feel like it has too much of a 'solve this equation' problem. There is often a 'best' solution, so there's not really much to decide. I think the effects need a bit of work to make the game less 'mathy'.
Overall it's a cool game though. Good work.
If this game gets better graphics and audio, and the gameplay is developed a bit, I could see it doing very well
Is it possible to end a game versus computer controlled players, as sabotaging does not remove a lot of power and it is quite easy to get a lot more power by funding the other resources.
Seems there's a bug if you set Player 1 to a computer, that when the game starts, you get to play his first turn! Worked fine after that. In my first game, player 4 had a big advantage (since everyone was at the same high power, and everyone would saboteur the lead, whoever went last just won).
I love the choice of font =). Moving dice around got a little annoying. Though I liked the feel of a board game, when my strategy was always "put 10 or 20 into food", it was a lot of boring dragging around, so some UI could be improved there - drag a couple dice, and then just clicking on a box assigns all remaining dice or something.
Here are some of the small issues I found:
1. Dice don't snap to grid in either the Resources box or when you move them back to the Results box
2. Computer player's dice are overlapping when placed
3. You shouldn't be able to select yourself in the red box
Other then those items, the game was delightful to play. Oh and I liked that you used power is a different way than most people, including me, interpreted the theme. Well done!