So I just finished going through the instructions for Fracture / Mortals / Berry / Bomb Brigade.
First off, for the most part I found the instructions very good, explanations simple, perfect for my intended audience.
One sort of high-level thing I noticed is that with Fracture, when you’re starting the game, you change the color by double-clicking, where Mortals, you change it by a long press, and double-clicking starts the game. I’ll probably remember them at this point, but, especially if blinks do well, and a lot more games get made – it seems like some kind of standardized interface would be good, although this is really a nitpick.
The Fracture / Berry instructions made perfect sense, couldn’t find anything I’d change in them at all (aside from possible standardization as above.)
The mortals instructions didn’t show a starting arrangement for more than 6 – I did the obvious (making triangles of 6 and having them touch at one point), and it worked – I’m guessing it just needs to be symmetrical for fairness (or perhaps asymmetrical to give a handicap to a newer player?).
Bomb Brigade felt a bit slow when I first tried it, but I think that is mostly because I chose a single bomb surrounded by blinks – It wasn’t obvious from reading the instructions that this would result in a very slow game. It was also not obvious from the instructions that if the bomb went off when it was facing no blink at all, that you lose. It is implicit in the “If the Bomb explodes on a face with no Shield”, since a space without a blink obviously has no shield, but I didn’t make that connection at first – maybe if it said “no blink or no shield” instead of just “no Shield”. Also I think if it mentioned something like “Bombs with fewer shields attached make for much shorter games.” Or something.
I say all that because I think Bomb Brigade has potential to be a lot of fun, but I almost wrote it off as one I wouldn’t play at first, simply because I chose a poor starting configuration, and spent a lot of time clicking the thing to bring down a bunch of shields before anything happened.
I’m looking forward to my game night tomorrow night – would love to see any instructions for other games you’ve got as soon as they’re available 8]