06/24/26
Monster Match has an adorable design that could lead to a great game. This, however, is the stickler. We have the cards, we have the mechanics, but the way we combined them into a game just didn’t work out. People loved the cute monsters, matching them, and the sem-roleplay mechanic added with your player abilities. What we found in play testing was 2 things: 1) it was confusing to play. Players would often get lost an be unsure the best way to move forward with their turn. 2) the game ended in a number crunch that didn’t feel like it had much to do with how you played during the game. The first issue is the thing we really wanted to focus on. Matching so many variations was a lot to take in and people ended up just wanting to match who was cutest. It also lead to som unfun metagaming where the most optimal path would bypass one of the most fun mechanics, the dating minigame. The ending also felt a bit long as people had their dates and didn’t seem to want to spend the effort to figure out who won. We want to rework the game entirely but to keep our adorable cards.
