Human Harvest

["feldermaus2001" <feldermaus2001@...>]

Thanks for taking the time to try Human Harvest and letting me
compete in this contest.  It was a very good experience porting
another game over from its original to the piecepack.

My feedback was:

---start---
10. Human Harvest, a port of Atta Ants, by Todd Krause. First,
I think the choice of game to port here is brilliant. Atta Ants
could have been an original piecepack game. The components map from
Atta Ants to the piecepack nicely: tiles to tiles, ants to coins,
and so on.

That said, the game doesn't really gel. In the original game, the
spiders move slower than the ants, so the ants can leave the nest and
go foraging without constantly getting gobbled by spiders. In Human
Harvest, the human militias (= spiders) move _faster_ than the cyborgs
(= ants), so the cyborgs are in a constant state of zugzwang
("Zugzwang means that one player is put at a disadvantage because he
has to make a move ? the player would like to pass and make no
move."--Wikipedia). In short, it's never to the advantage of the
cyborgs to leave the factory (= nest), and there is no rule (that we
could find) that says you have to. I actually suspect that the author
initially paraphrased the rules to Atta Ants and did a
search-and-replace on them, because there's one place where the word
"ant" is used instead of "cyborg".  Anyway, I suspect this is a
beginner effort, so please try again. Make the spiders slower! :-)
--end--

I'd like to comment on my experience with the piecepack set and the
contest.

I'm definately a beginner with piecepack games and game design and as
soon as I heard about the "open sourceness" of the set and that there
was a contest going on, how could I not become involved.  I set out
and created my piecepack set within days of finding the component
list and got to work on my entry.

Missing the "ant" reference is funny.  I had originally tried to
theme it using carpenter ants or something, I think I called it 'Leaf-
cutters', but decided that that was too close to the actual game 
theme and changed it mid-stream.  I guess I should have themed it
first before converting the rules.  Using a sci-fi theme, ala
Terminator/Matrix instead of ants, just seemed more entertaining to
me.  I must have reread the rules so many times, I just glossed over
that mistake!

Now that the contest is over I can start solicitating help in making
the rules much better and fixing those issues with the design.  It's
great to have an outside opinion on the rules and gameplay since the
person I playtested the game with probably didn't want to hurt my
feelings with negative constructive critism.  I can't wait for the
rest of the piecepack fans to give me help because it seems like
there is a great community here.

Thanks for the support in my first effort by giving it a chance and
know that I look forward to playing all the other games in the
contest and entering into the next contest with more experience under
my belt!

Todd