Praise for Outwitters design

[garcia1000]

Hey guys. As a professional designer, I want to say that Outwitters design concept is amazing! It is by far the most elegant turn-based combat I have seen so far and its depth is really high.

What do I mean by elegance? Elegance means that it accomplishes its goal with the minimum of superfluousness. Here are some ways that it achieves this:

1) No abilities. The five core units do not have any special abilities. It would be really easy to give every unit an ability (which most similar games do), but the Outwitters designer resisted this temptation.
2) Similar units. Each team differs only in its special unit. All the core units have the same stats.
3) No terrain. They just totally said screw that, we are manly and do not need puny terrain modifiers.

And the biggest one of all is: wits!

Wits are used for:
- attacking
- moving
- spawning units

Now the first thing I thought is that the wit resource is overloaded. That means that it performs too many functions, and it's too interconnected. Changing one small thing about wits changes the entire game system in unintended ways. But somehow, it still works.

These are all indications of a very elegant game. Great job!

Just being elegant is easy if you sacrifice depth. BUT this game also has a large amount of depth! And incredibly, it manages this without randomness. Usually, it's easy to increase design space and depth by adding randomness, such as a to-hit chance, range of damage, and so on.

However, Outwitters only uses fog of war (i.e. hidden information) to increase depth by a lot. Players always feel they are in control of their actions, which makes losses feel more fair and wins feel more satisfying.

It is extremely hard to design a game with both depth and elegance. I approve 10/10