Major Update

Hey there!  Been a while since I've updated this print and play, and several changes have been made!  

Ships have sailed

Ships have been removed, and in their place trucks and mills have been buffed to take their place.  Ships had always held a unique space in the game, where they were in equal parts incredibly vital for cooperation and for hostile theft.  The significance of trucks and mills fell by the way side to them, even if they were both critical for getting bread on the table in the first place.

So trucks have taken their place in the most direct way, in that now trucks allow you to take cards from anyone, not just the deck.  The idea of separating all the players by an ocean felt like an uninteresting obstacle to the abstract player interaction I was interested in, so I decided trucks would just be dual purpose, drawing from the deck or taking from others.  However, I decided that when trucks take, they can only place cards into a player's hand.  The idea being that by harvesting built infrastructure, you're really just gathering and transferring the raw materials required to build a new one.

The change to mills is a little more subtle, instead of just building to your own tableau, you can now build to anyone's tableau.  This abstraction makes a bit less sense, but it was a bit critical for the very basic potential for cooperation to work.  However, this also gives them a very subtle way of dealing with trouble makers when used in conjunction with this next change.

Blockades

While I loved the coercion mechanic, it was largely an afterthought to deal with the inevitable hostile game play strategies.  But it is incredibly messy, and in a way that people could potentially argue over at the table.  There were a lot of edge cases, it was just a mess.  However, the game doesn't really function if the players have no means of dealing with thieving neighbors.  I introduced walls to be that new component.  The way walls work is that they each prevent a truck transfer or a mill build action, but only with other players.  But also critically, they work both ways.  If you have walls in your tableau, they also make it harder to steal or give to other players.  In conjunction with being able to place cards in your tableau face down, this introduces a way to deal with people trying to steal, and in conjunction with the mills change, it gives you a way of walling off a singular hostile actor without blocking off your allies.

Hangry Fire

One last change I decided to make was to introduce events, in the form of hangry fire and a tumble weed.  The thing about requiring 3 bread when the deck ran out was that it created situations where it was really obvious that a player was not going to win.  It also created this strategy where players would try to hoard bread into their hands and build it all at the last second.  So now, you only need one bread in your tableau at the end to win.  However, there are fire cards in the deck with a unique back, and when they're revealed, the active player has to give them to someone.  Fire must be dealt with before you can win, and you deal with it by feeding it bread.  If it's not dealt with, you burn an extra card at the beginning of your turn for each one.

This helped with a few problems.  Firstly, it was a bit odd that you didn't really need a steady flow of bread over the course of the game.  Even in a fully cooperative game, it was common to just, suddenly build all your bread right at the end.  Like, what, did everyone only get hungry at the end of this time period?  So the steady flow of fire represents moments of famine, when you need to provide bread or else deal with destructive backlash.  Secondly, by having the active player distribute it, it provides a means for a player to deliver some retributive justice in case they're getting bullied.  Lastly, by it causing players to burn through the deck faster, it means non-cooperative hostile game will end faster, as players build up fire that they cannot put out if people are stealing bread, as your bread has to be in your tableau at the beginning of your turn to deal with it.

The tumble weed card serves a single purpose, and that's to end the game.  When the game ended upon deck out, players would suddenly start making very divergent decisions to try to draw out those last moments and slide in some bread.  The tumbleweed is shuffled into the bottom 9-10 cards of the deck, so players won't know for certain when the game ends.  Sure the final moments of the game will still suffer from that divergent play issue, but to some extent that is normal and expected given the theme.  It just won't be so pronounced since players can potentially take a risk and go through those last cards.  It also means you can't so deterministically end the game when you want to.

No Playing Cards

So unfortunately this change necessitates more cards than are available in a standard 52 deck of playing cards, so it doesn't quite work with that anymore.  However, since the game is nolonger dependent on the numbers of the cards, it is possible to play the game with a tarot deck instead by assigning the suits to each icon, and then using the major arcana cards for the fire.  You would just need to shuffle in the major arcana cards face up since they are supposed to have a different back, and you'd have to choose a specific major arcana card to be the tumble weed.  I've suggested the following substitutions:

🚚 (Cups)
🏭 (Wands)
🧱️ (Swords)
🍞 (Pentacles)

The Print and Play

This game was designed to fit in a mint tin, so the print and play has full sized mint tin cards sized 2.05" x 3.43" and micro cards sized 1.25" x 1.75".  I'd recommend printing on card stock if possible, and using a corner cutter on the full sized cards so it'll fit a bit better.  I apologize as I understand this will make it a bit harder to print since these are not quite standard sizes for sleeving.

Thank you!

I'm quite happy with the state of the game design wise, but would like to do some development testing and work with the game to get it over the finish line.  I'm not 100% sure what that will look like, but I'll let you know when I do.  And that's everything!  Thank you for following my work, and I hope you enjoy!