Talk:Who Made The Team
Add topicIGDC Judge Comments[edit source]
The rules as written were confusing I think. We played a couple of times and all were ties. I believe we were playing it wrong but we couldn't really tell from the rules.
Although we did not play this game, a read-through of the rules looks very promising.
I ended up not having a chance to try Who Made The Team. The other four had more intriguing rules and/or themes, so they got tried when playtesting opportunities arose. - DennisDuquette
Who Made The Team: This seemed like zany fun and certainly gets points for being a theme I wouldn't have expected, but we couldn't quite figure out how it was supposed to work, much less get through a complete game. If we'd given it another look we might have gotten further with it and therefore might have rated it higher, but after playing Apophis I'm afraid I wasn't interest in this anymore. I want Apophis to win.
I think Who Made The Team sounds like it has promise, but the rules were missing some key information, without which, we were simply unable to play the game. It's possible that with certain questions answered, it would turn out to be pretty good -- but who knows?
I couldn't figure out how to play this. The main problem was trying to figure out exactly how color mattered. The intuitive way contradicted the examples, and trying to play it any way seemed to make the game pretty useless (at least for 2 players). Besides clarifying the color thing, the rules need a lot of help.
Who Made The Team - 2.5 Presentation (2 max): Amusing theming, but rules are seemingly dumped in a rush of verbiage. Equipment, in particular, needs to be made into some kind of table or list. Diction, spelling, and punctuation problems throughout; and there is inconsistent use of basic terms (senior and junior flip-flopped or used synonymously). Artwork is merely passsable; and it is very oblique, as it does not have clear procedural text with each play stage. Takes too many read-throughs to figure out how to play--with al that art, why not illusttrate every move, including interesting side-effects and permutations (i.e. show as much as you can with one image: legal opening positions; a rule and its result; a full turn in which all three stages happen. (0.5)
Use Of Terms (2 max): Near-totally irrelevant. There's a pretty solid integration of the term "team" in that your "friends" (pieces) should work together to keep the Juniors on the board. But the fact that it's a "high" school cheerleading team that happens to try out at the "park" is a toss-out. In my opinion, only two of the terms were actually integrated into the theme, and poorly. (0.5)
Playability (3 max): Barely, in this form. Never could figure out if adjacency meant ONLY to friends, as the art shows the Captain value two different way (in one image, the blue Captain is at "1" adjacent to a blue and a green, while the green Captain is at a "2" while adjacent to... yep, a blue and a green. I guess any color is a friend (could be clarified), but do I care about my own, single color? Basically, I couldn't figure out how to play, with the rules as written, though I'd have liked to on principle: no randomness, pure strategy games are my favorites (lately). But, sadly... (0)
Fun Factor (3 max): Again, you suffer for lack of clarity--presentation is only 20% of my personal scoring methodology, but if it's so bad that it's incoherent or unclear or ambiguous, then I can't get at the Play, which means I can't get at tthe Fun. But ON SPEC, I'll gauge that it could be very fun as the board(s?) fill up and stunting the Captain becomes a delicate choice of min-maxing points and setting up (clear areas) for future stunts and points. I'll give ya a blind... (1.5)
Who Made The Team has atrociously written rules, and I'm tempted to just give it a 1 based on that, since we did not actually manage to play the game due to rules questions. But I have since figured out what the rules were probably meant to be, and it seems like a perfectly reasonable (if somewhat convoluted) two-player abstract strategy game. I suspect there would be strong kingmaker issues with more than two players, though. The solitaire game is an interesting little puzzle; the best I can do is 6 points, but I haven't tried very hard. I suspect it's not a very deep puzzle, though, and probably easily solvable. Anyway, with a total rules rewrite, I could see this being a 6 or maybe even a 7, but as it is I'm being somewhat generous with a 5.