A Drink in the Ruins of Heaven (The Queens' Palace)

INTRODUCTION

You are alchemixologists - experts of cocktail-making, and drink related magic. You can extract tastes and aromas from ingredients, and combine them into liquid masterpieces.

Servants of Uriel, Asmodea, and Titania - the three queens that rule the worlds - you partake in a competition to brew drinks that will please them the most.

OVERVIEW

Explore the mortal realms to gather ingredients, use your laboratory to add them to your drink, and obtain tastes, aromas, colors and qualities from them. At the end of each round, you will choose a queen to taste your cocktail, and gain points from how much she liked it, then reset your drink. The game ends after the third round.

MECHANICS

This is a heavy eurogame, with tableau building and engine building elements. It's based around a kind of weird twist on tableau building, where the ingredient cards cover each others, and only the uncovered ones are "active", while they also double as a timer for the end of the round; and since they're ingredients, they disappear at the end of each round the cocktail has been drunk. I've found this topology to be interesting in playtests, and I want to develop it further.

DISCLAIMER

This game was made in a week-end, in december 2020. This is the second version of it, reworked over the course of a week in march 2021, to implement all of the ideas I had in my initial vision, and see how they play together for playtesting purposes.

• This is a fully playable prototype. However, although I've found it to be promising and give way to many crunchy, interesting decisions, it might not provide a great play experience yet.
• The leaves type ingredients are missing. They were not required for me to test the core gameplay. If you do try to playtest this and see leaves icons, please discard them.
• This game is in no way final. Many numbers are obviously off, and the game will be massively overhauled in the next edition anyway. Although the game is already pretty complex, this is mostly to try out mechanical elements and systems, and get a feel for how they fit together and the decision space their interplay builds. I wanted to test out the game's cognitive load, and how interesting and satisfying the decision space is to navigate.
• Rules are not yet properly typeset. Since the game is going to change a lot throughout the coming weeks/months, it seems like a waste of efforts at this point in time. If you do print out the game, and want to try and play it, I'll voice chat with you to explain and honor your madness.

ROADMAP

The next version of the game will be heavily reworked to take into account the findings from the recent playtesting sessions. Once I manage to nail a satisfying core gameplay, I'll work into the game more asymetrical elements, like variable player powers and player boards. 

I'll keep this page updated with my devlogs and successive prototypes.

Coming next prototype:

• Streamlining of the resources/drink properties system
• Overhaul of the card design, notably the recipes which make the access to delight a little too restrictive
• Drafting elements to avoid snowballing with the powerful direction-giving celestial ingredients, which can lead to very one-sided games with one player running away with crazy powerful interactions
• Overhaul of the cost repartition space to avoid feeling stuck, and creation of a world map to restrict access to cards, on which the players will move. Intended to add flavor and an interesting topology to the decision space while also restricting currently accessible options to reduce cognitive load/analysis paralysis
• Overhaul of the lab actions to make the lab upgrades more interesting and less static, and avoid use of the same action over and over. Might merge the lab upgrades system with the enchantment system.
• Overhaul of the liquors to make them similar to variable player powers.

CREDITS AND FINAL WORDS

Thanks to my mom for the playtests and feedback. Thanks to my friends for the support and enthusiasm. Other thanks will appear as appropriate throughout development.

Many icons from game-icons.net. A small number from flaticon.com. Do check out both websites, they're great and wonderful treasure troves.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.