notes on Sunderfolk
I played the first three hours of Sunderfolk today. I was impressed by it overall - it presents a compelling case that its phone-as-controller model can be a powerful way to facilitate couch co-op. Here are some notes on how it works.
Classes are made up of one passive, and up to 3 abilities at a time. Abilities can be played every turn but conditionally have large differences in value based on what is true in nearby tiles to you, buff/debuff status, and relative position of allies and enemies. Leveling up earns more ability cards, but you still only have 3 active at a time for any given fight, so each turn is 3-choose-1 for the most part. These parts combine to make for fairly simple / straightforward classes, but with enough depth and variance to be interesting for each combat, and with novelty coming from new ability cards as you level up.
Leveling up happens every 2 combats. No granular XP points, no particular in-game actions accented with XP gain, just Do Two Fights, Get A Level. I was unable to discern exactly how monsters scale with player levels in these first three hours, but it seemed like generally difficulty was pretty consistent fight-over-fight.
Attack outcomes are driven from a "fate" deck of outcomes like Gloomhaven's. It's forced to be 3 positive cards, 3 negative cards, and 4 neutral cards - so skewing your deck from neutral towards positive is not part of the growth curve or skill tested. However the player still unlocks new fate cards which can be more expected value per card than the basic cards in each category, which gives them a reason to noodle with which 10 fate cards are in their deck if they want to. Sunderfolk does not have a critical miss or critical hit outcome for players, so variance is lower than Gloomhaven. After your first set of Fate card unlocks, I believe your average outcome is slightly higher than positive, meaning you will feel "slightly lucky" even while (correctly) expecting +0 to be the most common draw. The moment of outcome resolution when you draw a Fate card to see how well your attack hits has a good amount of weight to it, providing an enjoyable moment of tension as an attack heads at its target.
Turn Order is relatively simply constructed, though requires some thinking. First all the players go in whatever order they want to go in, then all the enemies go. Comparing this to Gloomhaven's initiative system, turns are more Solvable generally in Sunderfolk, and that can lead to a little more backseat driving - but by the same token, turns are much quicker and less cognitively taxing. Gloomhaven creates a slight mental fog of war around the likely outcomes of your inputs every turn, by making it "fuzzier" what the board state will be at the time you try to play your ability. Sunderfolk in stark contrast just lets you go first if you have something you think is essential to do immediately.
Using an Ability determines almost all the elements of a unit's turn. You do not have basic movement or basic attacks. The only additional non-ability value you might have is from Trinket equipment, which is unlocked early on and gives you additional actions you can take. Because these trinket actions do not consume action economy that Abilities do, they are left to be relatively small - for instance, your starting Trinket can heal for 2 health, while an Ability might deal 5 damage and allow you to move 3 spaces.
Hex-based movement and splat-targeting is mostly clear. Some players make mistakes with some targeting times, for example a long straight line of hexes, because they might be wanting to attack a unit within the range of the line, but not have a straight line from their character to the target, and not realize that until they're halfway through their action trying to line up the attack.
In-mission Rewards are a de-frictionized version of Gloomhaven. Enemies drop treasure, treasure chests exist, and loot goes to whomever picks it up, not to a collective pool. However, unlike Gloomhaven, players have a mechanic in town that lets them share stuff - so if your buddy picks up two treasure chests, they can be shamed/guilted into sharing after the battle.
The overall campaign structure is an alternation between missions and town activities, with the town growing alongside your characters. While this is broadly the same structure Gloomhaven used, the specifics differ. First, players decide what mission to set out on from a list of available options. Side missions are interspersed between Main Story missions with an explicit structure, rather than the rewards of a side mission drawing you away from main story progress. Where Gloomhaven has Town and Road events that might have negative or positive outcomes, Sunderfolk instead has each player pick three characters to talk to each time they come back from a mission. You get a bit of narrative from them, and may get dialogue choices that allow you to make friends or rivals with the townsfolk, which in turn can cause them to give you things or open up other dialogues down the road.
All voice acting is done by one person so far, who presents herself as the Narrator at the beginning of the game. She uses different voices for each character, the same way a great Dungeon Master might. This choice means the writing can include as many characters as Anjali can do the voices of without worrying about bloating cost - given that the game isn't shooting for top tier production values, this seems like it will have given them a lot of bang for their buck, as well as making the game feel more like a tabletop session.
These are all just notes on how they've mechanically constructed their game, and the consequences of the mechanics / how these mechanics compare to other well-known ones. Presentation, tone, affordance etc. is not reflected here but generally it's just a very well-put-together game. Looking forward to playing more of it.