The Perfect Laws is a game in which players attempt to write out the laws of the planet as it is about to be redesigned through awesome new technology. Players play one session setting up the rules and a second session living under the rules.
REVIEWER NAME: Joshua BishopRoby
1) CREATIVE AND EFFECTIVE INCORPORATION OF RULES (1-10): 7
Feedback: Law is easily the most prominent of the ingredients, and players are able to work together to pool credibility, so Team figures prominently, too. Steel is used as a physical in-game currency, although the reasoning behind it seems tacked on. The game is primed for utilizing the two-sessions-two-weeks-in-between time constraint.
2) CLARITY (1-10): 4
Feedback: I really had a lot of trouble reading through this design. There is little to no structure and a good number of homonym-typos and misplaced prepositions. The rules suffered from a lack of examples, as I have no good idea what a Law constitutes, exactly, or what kind of things the players are supposed to come up with for the brave new world they're constructing. This seems, on the whole, to be notes about a game design rather than the game design itself.
3) COMPLETENESS (1-10): 3
Feedback: While the first session seems pretty solid in terms of what the characters do, the second session leaves me really wondering what is supposed to take up the six hour time slot. The win condition is set up to be determined on the basis of steel pieces the characters end up with, but there is no provision for doing anything with the steel pieces in the second session, since there are no black boxes to use them in. I'm left with a very big sense of "Okay, what now?"
4) ESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS IN PLAY (1-10): 3
Feedback: I don't see this as a viable game yet, and I'm positive that players would not have enough to do to fill up the six hours.
5) SWING VOTE (1-10): 5
Final Feedback: The concept behind this game is intriguing -- remake the world -- but the proposition of living in that world afterwards seems kind of dead. If the goal is to create a world-spanning utopian society, where's the conflict once you live in it? Similarly, the godlike power that the players have in the first session sounds like fun to use, but I don't see that power being used to any specific purpose.
TOTAL SCORE (add items 1 through 5, above): 22