In the Pipes of Bureaucracy: Postmortem
Thanks to everyone who played my game! This one turned out a bit more complicated than I'd liked, but I hope it was fun, and I enjoyed making it.Fundamentally, I wanted to create a game where you have to move documents around but they interfere with each other, so you have to do it carefully. The main mechanic for this was the merging mechanism: some documents could be worth merging, while others not so much. There were several ways I tried to make merging a more strategic component: having documents with the same requirements appear together, requiring at least one merge to gain an ability, and having the abilities affect merging only. My hope was that the player would have to make interesting decisions when deciding whether to merge and what abilities to use in that process, but there was definitely room for refinement. In particular, due to the complexity of the rules and because merging feels more like an obstacle, I'm not sure how clear it was for players to realize when merging could be beneficial, especially with the right ability. For example, the ability to remove a random requirement can knock off a pair of documents that have the same single requirement left without having to get there, and it will give you an ability back for completing the merged document.
One of the trickiest parts design-wise was the incoming documents that could randomly mess up your plans. Unfortunately I only realized they were an issue very late in development, so I decided to implement a quick reroll. I could have the incoming documents not merge, but for technical reasons it'd take more time to implement than the reroll, and I thought that rerolling was actually adding a little bit of fun, so I just did that.
Congratulations to the winners and everyone else who finished a game!