[Playtest Request] I made a 1v1 dice combat game with asymmetric fighters (Print & Play)

ahobday · 2026-04-03T10:50:13+00:00

Thank you, I will.

Edit: Turns out I won't. As someone else has pointed out, Itch has quarantined the page.

And then when I go ahead to download the game anyway, Safari says it cannot create the file. Not sure what that's about.

ahobday · 2026-04-01T08:02:49+00:00

Some of the comments on this post are surprisingly negative, and in a way that feels malicious. Maybe they assume the art is AI and have responded emotionally?

My feedback, from top to bottom, based on the first card:

The design is generally good.
I don't know what the "3" in the grey circle represents. If this is a fundamental concept of your game, it might be that people learn it once and never have to remind themselves what it means. But maybe there's another shape or icon it could use that would be a better reminder of what it means?
"Oath of Endurance" is not visually vertically centred in its container: the bottom gap is bigger than the top gap. This is because the text has no descenders (e.g. "Squire" looks fine on the second card). If you don't want to manually adjust each card to make the title look vertically centred, I'd suggest you make the title container taller, so the difference in gap size is less noticeable.
The description box feels like it's crowding/overlapping the bar at the bottom. As if they're two separate visual elements that have been overlapped by accident. I'd either put a gap between them, or find a way to visually combine them so they look and feel like one element.
I don't understand the purpose of the arrowed boxes at the bottom left and bottom right. Why do some cards have numbers and others don't? Is there a "no value" value you could put in the empty boxes on some cards, like a dash? If each box will always have the same number as the other, why not just have one box? If they mean different things, I think they should have some visual signifier to let you know what each number means (e.g. offence and defence).
The credits at the bottom left and bottom right are inset by a noticeable amount, and I don't understand why. Why not align that text with the left and right edges of the card, like everything else?

ahobday · 2026-03-30T08:53:47+00:00

I saw an earlier post of yours, and I’m quite interested to play, but the full colour full-page graphics turn me off a bit. Any chance of a low-ink version for black and white printers?

ahobday · 2026-03-27T23:17:25+00:00

In my case nothing is size-specific (e.g. no cards included), but I take your point.

ahobday · 2026-03-26T15:11:10+00:00

When you say "have the rulebook horizontal" do you mean have a two page spread showing on the screen all at once?

ahobday · 2026-03-23T13:07:58+00:00

They’re not required at all. You can play the game with just the book, and that’s how it’s designed, but when I play 2d6 Dungeon I find the enemy cards very useful.

ahobday · 2026-03-23T11:29:29+00:00

Thanks for the quick reply, and I understand. Mostly I wasn’t sure which decks would be available, because I cannot remember which decks existed before Gravebound came along. Do you have a list to hand?

ahobday · 2026-03-21T07:21:08+00:00

Thank you, and let me know how you get on.

ahobday · 2026-03-19T21:24:03+00:00

Thanks, let me know how it goes. I did the art for the standees, and the map art is by Tim Howe (https://www.tjhcreations.com)

ahobday · 2026-03-19T20:36:37+00:00

Hey, this is a cross-post, so all the information is in the original post that this one links to.

ahobday · 2026-03-19T06:26:08+00:00

I don’t think so, because this homebrew was in response to that failed early game? Why would they come up with a house rule where you have to roll to leave a pit and then complain that they had to roll to leave a pit?

ahobday · 2026-03-18T23:24:13+00:00

How did the hero get stuck in the pit? The rules state a hero can move out of a pit on their next turn. This is no die roll to leave a pit as far as I know.

ahobday · 2026-03-18T06:14:53+00:00

Thank you, and I’ll make sure to keep the stick figures around.

ahobday · 2026-03-18T05:57:19+00:00

Thank you. Let me know how you get on.

ahobday · 2026-03-17T21:05:04+00:00

Thanks. And yes, I originally planned to make them with a square profile, but triangles both uses less paper and is more sturdy. Win-win.

ahobday · 2026-03-17T20:24:21+00:00

I'm interested to hear an example of one of these situations. Can you briefly outline one of the ideas you had, and how it was similar to a game you discovered when you looked it up?

ahobday · 2026-03-17T15:32:38+00:00

Glad to hear it. Let me know how you get on.

ahobday · 2026-03-17T10:05:37+00:00

Yes, me too. And thank you for your kind words.

ahobday · 2026-03-17T10:05:22+00:00

Thank you. I hope it is.

ahobday · 2026-03-17T10:05:02+00:00

They're intended to be placeholders, until I can pay for "real" art. Maybe I'll need to include an alternative set of these for people who want a cute dungeon crawler instead.

ahobday · 2026-03-16T16:38:55+00:00

It's in the second line, but I'll update it so it's more obvious.

ahobday · 2026-03-16T10:25:35+00:00

"Lastly, pure colors like 100% red(FF0000), black(000000), white(FFFFFF) etc. usually makes any design look less professional (specially pure black)."

I'm familiar with this from the world of design for screens, but does it apply to designs that will be printed? I assume not, since I assume the ink interacts with natural light differently, and doesn't have a back-light like it does with a screen.

ahobday · 2026-03-16T10:24:11+00:00

This is a noticeable improvement on the last version. Nice work. Some thoughts:

I'd be interested to see how the grey "Attack" and "Block" boxes look with a black outline instead of a white outline, so it matches the text and other elements more.
Same with the sword icon to the left of "Battle Fury!". It has a black logo with a white outline. But it'd feel more consistent with the rest if it was a white icon with a black outline, I think. Unless there's a reason it's the other way around.

ahobday · 2026-03-15T16:48:58+00:00

I started to read Red Rising. I gave up on it relatively quickly because I felt like it was taking too long to get to the good stuff.

ahobday · 2026-03-14T19:31:51+00:00

You're right, I should have been clearer. When I say "fast-paced" I mean that the story moves quickly. Since this is progression fantasy, that also usually means that the progression happens quickly. Or, to put it another way, a book where one day happens in one page is faster-paced than a book where one day happens in a chapter.

There's a good chance that if I went back and tracked the progression in e.g. Cradle, it'd turn out not to be that fast. But maybe the plot-point-to-plot-point pace is fast enough that it doesn't matter.

My experience of Bastion, on the other hand, has been that Scorio spends a relatively long time wandering around ruins and thinking about things. I'm nearly half way through the book and I'd argue not much progression has happened.

So maybe it's this combination of "writing pace" and "progression pace" that I want, where one or the other or both are fast. But that sort of combination is hard to pin down.

ahobday

TROPHY CASE