review: It’s Time To Plant The Beans

-

hello all! i wanted to review one of the games from a bundle i'm participating in, the Cozy TTRPGs Bundle (link). ahead of time, i wanna point out that this bundle is $164 worth of games for $20; it's a really good opportunity to sample a whole bunch of cozy creations and support their authors at the same time. so please check it out!

the game i'm going to be reviewing today is It's Time To Plant The Beans (link) by sprintingowldesigns (@sprintingowl), which is about planting beans to grow feline friends.

part of the reason It’s Time To Plant The Beans made me really excited to check it out was bc it was the first time i found smth that recognizes how fun it is just to play nonsense games with dice. it was part of what motivated my own game in the bundle, bovine borough: it’s fun to roll dice and ascribe fleeting meaning to it.

what It’s Time To Plant The Beans does is it uses dice as the primary, if not the only, medium of play. dice represent the progress of your cats growing from underneath the soil, but they also represent rainy days that help your crops grow, or the gusts of wind that tear your crops down. the physicality of the game makes it so fun and charming to play, and it makes the accomplishment of stacking a tower of seven dice all the more satisfying. and the versatility of it all! the different ways to use dice and interpret them! i love it.


i also wanted to take some time to gush over the layout and design of the game itself. look how cuuuute!!! the pleasant pastoral background and the cute little photos of cats just makes this book a pleasure to read through, beyond it being instructions for how to play. if i had a coffee table, i would love to have a book like this sitting on top of it. the vibes are just immaculate.

if you like to invent little dice games or to think about kittens and their little toe beans, you're going to love this game! it really made my day reading it the first time :)

there’s so many other cute and sweet games in this bundle! please check it out and support all these artists and writers, because it will also help us all to develop even more works.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plagiarism in Unconquered (2022)

-
Image
Ultimately [UVG2E], like UVG1E, are books [sic] that long to be cut to pieces, chopped & screwed and re-arranged and re-organized and repurposed into the collected loose-leaf notes of a GM binder, to be pulled out and smoothly interjected into a Something Else. Noora Rose, “ UVG, UVG2E, and Me ” (2023-06-30) I was originally going to put this post (at least, the commentary parts) through an AI Gary Gygax translator and publish it on a friend's burner blog. However, this is too serious to be treated like a joke, so here it is instead. Staking my name on it, lol. A Something Else Unconquered (2022) is an OSR-style science-fantasy adventure game and setting by Noora Rose of Monkey's Paw Games. Originally intended to have been based on Knave , according to the 2020 Kickstarter campaign , Rose refactored it to be based on Into the Odd instead—although with significant influence from Jared Sinclair's The Vanilla Game . I previously threw Unconquered into my big OSR
Read more

OSR Rules Families

-
Image
So, here’s the thing: originally I wrote this like a fucking research article with a hypothesis, a methodology, and all that stuff. I’m not even a scientific research person. That’s my partner’s job. Not mine. So, instead of walking you through every single step I took, I’m going to take the journalistic approach and start with the big picture before I zoom into it and tell you about the little details. I read, reviewed, and statistically organized 38 different rulebooks considered to be OSR or OSR-adjacent. These include four rulebooks from TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons , as well as ten rulebooks from the 2000s and 2010s. The remaining 24 rulebooks postdate the closure of G+ in early 2019. Please refer to the bibliography at the bottom of this post for more information. After having collected and organized a dataset with ~90 variables, I found the statistical similarity between each pair of rulebooks based on that data. Finally, I ran an algorithm to determine clusters of these bo
Read more

D&D Fifth Edition: Death & Rebirth

-
Image
Hashtag OSRisOverParty, Hashtag RIPBozo, etc etc. The initial… “edition” of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition tried to present itself as a reactionary return to some ideal past paradigm of D&D —be it Third Edition to win back territory lost prior to Paizo’s Pathfinder , or an even older Gygaxian edition to get in the pants of the sort-of nascent OSR. Practically, this resulted in a final product that was like a simple Third Edition with dogwhistle-like nods to OSR conventions (since the play-style’s influence in the end was tenuous at best and mostly abandoned after the public test phase). It’s maybe more succinctly described as a people-pleasing game, with the caveat that people-pleasers don’t please anyone. So, how did it become popular? And how does the new 2024 not-edition reflect major differences between then and now, in terms of how D&D is perceived and played? This is my ramble. Sent from iPhone. Fifth Edition: Born in 2014 Of course, nobody plays D&D as
Read more