Review: One More Hour

[BryanHansel]

[dantai]

One More Hour

REVIEWER NAME: Joe J Prince

1) CREATIVE AND EFFECTIVE INCORPORATION OF RULES (1-10): 2
Feedback: Doesn't last exactly 8 hours. Only team seems used well.

2) CLARITY (1-10): 8
Feedback: Easy to follow, a couple more examples wouldn’t hurt though.

3) COMPLETENESS (1-10): 8
Feedback: all it needs is a little polish.

4) ESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS IN PLAY (1-10): 7
Feedback: You can play entirely from pawn stance, but I idn see any major crunch flaws.

5) SWING VOTE (1-10) : 8
Final Feedback: Lots of innovation and a strong central idea. I’d just want to eat all the minutes though!

TOTAL SCORE (add items 1 through 5, above): 33

cheers
Joe

[Graham Walmsley]

[Shreyas Sampat]

1) CREATIVE AND EFFECTIVE INCORPORATION OF RULES (1-10): 4
Feedback: The Time theme was incorporated in a creative way, but one irrelevant to the contest requirements; there was no mechanism that supported the claim that it adhered to the "8 hours" ingredient. The terms 'steel' and 'glass' were present but their relevance to the rules they involved, opaque or absent. The mechanics fail to meaningfully address "team," though the term is given lip service.

2) CLARITY (1-10): 6
Feedback: It was fiendishly difficult teasing out the importance of specialties from the text, which, as it seems so prominent to the system, was rather a turnoff. I am also not sure who has the authority to choose the relevance of specialties; it appears that in the rules-as-written, I should always choose my best specialty. The others serve no purpose.

3) COMPLETENESS (1-10): 5
Feedback: The situation of this game apparently depends on another of Mendel's games, which I did not review. I presume that this external game provides various components that were missing from this game; particularly, I don't understand how the players interact with one another in this game, nor the fictional meaning of obstacles. The obligations seem like they are hollow; they arise from nothing if this game is played by itself, and I am not sure that this is best.

4) ESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS IN PLAY (1-10): 3
Feedback: Based on the way I play games, I don't expect this game to create tension or involvement, which appear to be the intent of the game. Rather, I predict a fairly cookie-cutter pattern of a universal rush to resolve obligations, followed by a matter-of-fact cutting down of the various obstacles generated. The lack of rules that permit players to interact with each other mechanically means that we will have no incentive to remain engaged when another character is on centre stage.

5) SWING VOTE (1-10): 2
Final Feedback: This does appear to have potential, but its linkage to other games and consequent incompleteness are seppuku for the design; I would have expected a linked series of games to mechanically interface with one another, or to stand on their own. This does neither.

TOTAL SCORE (add items 1 through 5, above): 20