Pandemia

neat game, I didn't understoud at first how to validate my choice.

This game was fun and had an amazing style to the game, The sound was really well designed. The only problem I found was that the AI was very difficult and not forgiving.

I loved this! It felt like a super polished retro game. The ability to play co-op was a huge plus. Great job!

Art is very cute, and looks really polished! I also loved the music and sounds. It's great that you have options for both an AI and human player.

It was a bit hard to get into and understand what you were doing right away, especially if you have never played the origianl game, but after we experimented a bit we had a really good time! Overall, I loved it.

I love the style of those PICO-8 games, so great job here man.

This seemingly simple game hides a really complex and tactical gameplay…with such a limited ammount of space and time to make it, I'm impressed.

However, I got rekt by the AI. I'd need to play a lot to get really good at it!

This is brilliant. It's like those color-selecting casual games meets go. Brilliant work, I really mean that.

Amazing job! The retro look and feel is excellent, the game mechanic is quite fun and easy to get. Great work with coding a working and challenging AI !

Excellent! When I saw your in-progress screenshot I didn't expect such a depth of gameplay.

I also have to say the game was very intuitive to me, I didn't read the description at all before firing up the game and it all quickly made sense. By the 2nd game I could start planning strategies… not that it led me to easy success! My first two games were 53% & 51% wins, while the third was a terrible 37%. I'm quite impressed with the AI and am curious how advanced its implementation is.

The balance between randomness and tactic is quite interesting, and a mechanic I find super clever is the whole automatic toggling between "spreading x" and "infect a new x": finding yourself kinda stuck gives you opportunities to infect the other side of the map and possibly completely reverse a situation (which the AI already pulled off…)

Otherwise the art and sound effects show once again your awesome Pico-8 skills, in particular with those polished menus. The whole thing has a good arcade feel!

How can you make this in just 48 hours!? This is incredibly well polished not just in visual & audio aspect but in the gameplay. I do feel the game is actually quite easy for AI for taking an optimal strategy, beating humans. Did you use min-max or something?

Very nice! The AI is kicking my ass fairly consistently, but I find myself going back for more. I find the patterns of colours easier to pick out than the animals, so I may be missing a lot there. Aside from that though, this is a really well thought out and elegant game.

Pretty great, It didn't take me too long to understand what was going on, I got thrown at the beginning because I was confusing squirrels and dogs. Played twice and the AI kicked my ass both times, maybe a bit of a problem of strategy games that its easy for an AI to be too good, against another human would probably be more fun. I was thinking maybe if there were variations in the shape of the board, so there were unplayable tiles without creatures, maybe somewhat mirroring continents or something that would add to the strategy and fun too, just a thought. Great work, always love the pico-8 style also.

The design is great! I braced myself for a mere match-3 while hastily looking at the gif and reading through the needlessly complicated instructions text. I was pleasantly surprised that this has nothing to do with match-3 and, in fact, you managed to squeeze in two different modes: a single player puzzle and a multiplayer tactics competition!

The competition is really compelling. 1vs 1 the IA AI is pretty easy to defeat after learning the mechanics, but with more opponents there is just enough randomness to keep each match interesting. The limited pool of one-use actions divided to infecting new hosts, spreading the disease and drawing more actions is a very effective framework for decision making. Clever design all around.

The puzzle is less compelling. Good for learning the rules I reckon. It lacks the excitement of the competition, but then again puzzles are deductive logic challenges so that makes sense.

A few niggles with the user interface:

• PICO doesn't support the mouse, yet that would have certainly been an intuitive input device.
• When choosing an animal to infect the cursor helpfully jumps into the first fitting host, but after that I need to move around in the grid. It would be nice of it simply cycled through all possible hosts, or just highlighted them for me to make selection faster.
• In the competition mode the action bar disappears when infecting a new host. This does not happen in the puzzle mode. I'd rather not have to memorize the colors before hand.
• The single player highscore indicator does not work.

The audio-visuals are in a consistent style. Points for that. No points for the low-fi pixel style itself though. I've grown tired of it by now!

Good work in all. PICO's limitations are a hindrance for certain types of media, mind you.

Overall: Good (7)
Graphics: Above average (6)
Audio: Above average (6)
Gameplay: Great (8)
Originality: Great (8)
Theme: Great (8)

PS.
I'm guessing the AI chooses the action with the biggest benefit at the moment and draws more cards when it cannot do anything else… Is it that simple?