I’m still hacking away at Packer’s Last Resort, but if you’ve got a stomach for games that are lumpy, uncooked messes… you can hack away at it too.
I’ve uploaded the latest iteration of the game as an ugly, crudely-done print-and-play file. The file includes a version of the rules and cards so new, I haven’t technically even played with them yet myself. But it’s an improvement over the previous iteration, which wasn’t horrible, so this one should be no worse than simply bad. Downloading it and looking it over probably won’t give you eye-cancer.
A couple notes:
- This iteration is focused on food, and keeping it scarce enough that players are desperate enough to turn to in-game violence and cannibalism. The previous version had too much food. Does this one have too little? Still too much? Guess we’ll find out.
- The game also includes a “stress” resource which mostly doesn’t do anything at the moment. Oh, it might make you freak out and attack another player, but that mechanic feels a bit shallow. The whole “stress” thing isn’t pulling its own weight, and I intend to fix (or cut!) it once I’ve got this “food balance” bit figured out.
- I feel it’s worth reiterating that this is not a good game. It’s not even a done game. It’s the second of what might be dozens of iterations, the merest seed of what might some day grow up to be a good game.
So why bother sharing it, if it’s barely even playable? Partially to gain any initial feedback you fine folks may have, and partially to simply share the game-design process. Some people aren’t content to just eat the sausage; they like to see how it’s made. If you’re one of them, please feel free to download the PnP file and let me know what you think.
