Tabletop Tavern

Tabletop Tavern has an effective game play loop where it streamlines away a lot of the tedium commonly associated with Total War games. The rogue-like elements make for an entertaining combination that provides good pacing between the campaign (army, inventory & item management) and battles. Overall the game is fun when played in short bursts and does not require much time investment.

TLDR: This is clearly a passion project with a lot of heart that I'll still play but there are some design, balance and mechanics that may limit your fun or total time played. I genuinely look forward to seeing this game grow and will continue to revisit it but I've had more than one run fall short where I scrapped it before a determined loss. More Thoughts in my humble opinion: I want to love this game because I can see that there is some real passion that comes through in the design and mechanics, but I have to say there are some real friction points for me that cuts my time short in an otherwise fun game with a lot of heart and potential. Things that I personally find frustrating or confusing in a way that ruins the fun for me, - the balance of some units just don't make sense to me. There's uncommon units that are nearly identical to common ones and other units of higher to lower rarity. - Many units have abilities that aren't explained or shown, such as the purple archers for the elves faction, they get accuracy that doesn't show on their card but reflects in battle(as an enemy) - unit health and durability is skewed heavily, large multiple entities units tend to have the largest health pool by-and-far(such as 8 unit monsters or the trolls for example) but artillery has less than 1000 hp and gets obliterated in 2-3 volleys of arrows. - artillery almost feels like a requirement to completed sieges without mass casualties or outright overwhelming numbers, instead making sieges easier I just think some more options of counter play or ability to strategically deal with castles etc. would be awesome. - I'm sure more are coming but some variance to the mini game choices in the dice rolling gambling or the dice rolling for events would go a long way. It could even be dice but being able to roll more than one die without breaking/going over a certain number as a push your luck mechanic, or even a war-like card game or a 'war ships' type grid game. There's a lot of fairly simple in mechanical design mini games that could provide variety and drive engagement. - Although I appreciate RNG, it almost feels like it's so random that sometimes you weren't going to win regardless of which path you took because the AI army just dumpsters you - auto-battle has some strange interactions that seem out-of-balance from what a player may expect, (looking at you dwarfs vs undead... again) the ghost wraiths get dumpstered in auto-battle and almost unequivocally perform better in manual battle but that isn't the case for all units, like more than once I've had a battle that looked pretty tough where I questioned if I could manually win it but got an auto resolve win. Other times I've gotten an auto resolve that looks like a pretty easy fight so I figured I'd just auto to move to the next and my giant gets smoked like a cheap cigar and the rest of my army barely took damage (80% hp or more on most units remaining) and this has happened multiple times. Why does auto-battle think my giant just face tanks solo? - I don't particularly enjoy the way prestige is implemented for units, I do appreciate the concept of improving units but the stats that get improved per level don't promote keeping certain units while making some units so good they dumpster much higher quality units(the ghost wraiths for example) --This also discourages you from taking certain reward options because it's just flat out more economical to promote a unit if given the chance, its worth 2 units but only if the units scale with the couple stats that go up. So upgrading low level archers aren't really worth it because their range and accuracy go up but they still do almost no damage and just run out of ammo --The Prestige mechanic also makes it exponentially more expensive to upgrade high quality units since you have to essentially get 9, so you're almost always better served to just have them as individual units than combining 3 and use a potion to promote them to max rank and heal them. Curiosity thoughts: -Why aren't the heroes available in battle as a unit? even if it's a charact with guards to flesh out a full unit? -Why no siege equipment option to buy or build or convert unit in lieu of missing artillery? or some other means of tactic to engage with sieges? -Why can't we sell an item that we opened but don't want to take to replace existing items? Overall I actually like how the game can feel rather challenging and I think that's where the fun really lives here, so overall I just want the game to give me the ability to have choices that matter, the ability to build armies with units I like and feel unique from other factions and can find ways to overcome a challenging battle.