TGV Connections: le Sud Ouest Express

Lovely art (I love limited pallettes), it feels like one of those paper placemats you get as a kid at some restaurants :-) The presentation in general is quite nice. (Some imporvements you could make is the audio balance and the music loop being slightly too short … but that's normal for jam-games.)

The game itself feels frantic enough to be a score attack, but I don't feel I have enough control over the situation: I can't rotate any of the cards, or keep them in reserve, so that it becomes just the luck of the draw. (You can't really strategize that much, since the options are limited to 3 and you don't know what's next.) Perhaps there is something I missed?

You also get dealt new cards sometimes, which is vital, as you can only get rid of a card by playing it otherwise. This also creates a problem in that the moment the cards are swapped isn't very clear. (It seemed random at first, but I now think it has to do with the train entering a new square?) Leading to situations where you click on a card just when it's about to swap out for another one.

Don't worry too much about the (lack of) drag/drop: Once I got the hang of it, it felt natural.

Contre la privatisation de la SNCF.

'We' privatized our NS (Dutch railways) years ago. Results: Train-lines to less popular stations get culled or sold off, train length optimized so it's always full, no actual 'competition' on a national level. The privatization of hospitals caused a capacity problem during the current crisis and some of the patients had to be moved to Germany.

Hey there, that's a nice little game! It probably has the best visuals I saw in the submissions so far!
I managed to make a loop of the entire map, but missed some stations xD
Sometimes the draw you get feels frustrating, because for a long time you don't get what you need, but I guess you just need a little bit of extra time to polish such things.
Good job overall!

nice, nice game. Awsome gameplay. Sometimes random generator don't give fine track card.

Those graphics are absolutely lovely! I dig the subdued colour scheme. The music and sound effects are charming too.

The game was pretty difficult for me though. This is mostly due to the randomness: you can connect a new piece in only one place, and it frequently happens that none of the cards fit there and you just have to wait. You could improve this by just having, say, 5 cards instead of 3, or (more fun) by adding a way to pick up and "park" cards that you might want to use later. (Right now you can drop them on the board but they disappear too quickly.)

It's also not entirely clear where you need to go to connect to a city. A more explicitly drawn grid would help here, but of course it should be kept subtle so it doesn't detract from the wonderful graphics and animations.

But overall, great game, very impressive!

Pipe dream with collectibles and less control over the building action? That second part should be replaced with something more compelling. What to replace it with then? Let's go back to basics.

In Pipe dream each pipe needs to be put on the board somewhere. The player can see the next n pipes in advance, so planning is possible. Forcing the player to build around the map reduces the randomness, yet makes it quite tricky to get everywhere as old tracks often turn into obstacles in the future.

Pushing the player to take risks is another fine idea. For instance, the collectibles could appear over time and/or have a limited duration which is displayed as a number on the GUI (indicating the amount of tracks the train can move before the item disappears). It requires quick thinking to come up with a new plan, if the player chooses to go for the collectible.

Additionally, special items, such as bombs to destroy tracks, or tunnels to go under other tracks would be great too!

In conclusion, the challenge is too random to be worth much. The other aspects help, yet do pay more attention to interaction design next time. It is in the end the most vital part of any jam project.

Overall: Average (5.0)
Graphics: Good (7.0)
Audio: Good (7.0)
Gameplay: Terrible (2.0)
Originality: Below Average (4.0)
Theme: Good (7.0)

Cute graphics and audio. The rng screwed me over time after time, but the pleasant feel of the game had me trying again.
It's a fun game that I think could be even better with a bit of tuning.

Nice game, but the randomness of the card droppings is jarring, as it makes the harder than it should be.
The graphics are great though!

Awesome game and cool graphics, but as others have said, it's a bit too reliant on RNG

The retro feeling of this titlescreen is just perfect. This is also a very specific subject for a jam game :) I love it. Playing the game was a bit hard at first, because the fact that a card stay in place when you miss ( not good connexion, or too far ) is very confusing. You should just force it back to the player hand ( with a tweening animation if possible ). For the gameplay itself, I think I would have prefer being able to place tiles on the grid even if they dont connect, so I can plan ahead and not being stuck waiting for a specific card to popup.

Really interesting game, it gets challenging and have to keep an eye on the tracks constantly to see where to go and not lock yourself.
Nice concept for the theme and interesting mix of cards and puzzle game.
Nice entry.

Really loved the art, it feels like a tourist brochure of some kind :)
The gameplay suffer from being a bit too random, but there's a lot of things you can do post jam to improve this. I think making it turn-based can even be worth considering.
The audio is nice, and you put a subtil political twist to the theme.
From a former Sud-Ouest habitant, I enjoyed the experience ;p Well done

The art is amazing! So charming and cute! Like others said, it was a bit too random. What would have really helped is having some pieces have more than one connection, for example a fork in the road. That would let you have more freedom with how to place the tiles and could build multiple tracks at once.

That was a fun idea and I like the flat colours. I spent a lot of time not being able to do anything because none of my pieces would connect to the last rail. Maybe making sure you have at least one valid connection will let the player keep playing but still force them in a random direction.