Your legacy continued

After a long wait, the app for My Father’s Work is finally out, so we could give the game a real try after testing it with the web-based alpha version.

With two full games under our belt we are really torn about this game.😕 On one side the theme is really awesome and makes you wonder why no one has done it before. A macabre victorian-era gothic horror where you play as 3 generations of mad scientists trying to create crazy inventions - with your offspring inheriting your manor house and journal every time. The gameplay would be fun with several unique mechanics, the production quality is also amazing. However... We are still not convinced.

🃏 Random experiment cards: Although there are multiple ways to redraw them, it’s nearly not as ‘easy’ to do as it should be, and you often could get ‘bad’ ones.

🃏 Random compulsion cards: they are actually a clever mechanic. You get these tasks as your insanity goes up - complete them for VP or get penalties at the end of the generation. But again, sometimes you just draw tasks that you were going to do anyway so it is free points for you, sometimes you have to go out of your way to do them. 🤷

🎲 Random events: I would love these normally, but coupled with the tightness some events could completely screw up your carefully laid plans.

⛓️ Tightness: This game is not forgiving at all. If your plans are busted, pivoting is really hard as you are stuck with the cards you have. Getting new experiment cards cost actions. At the end of a generation you lose all of your resources and it can be very punishing.

📱 App: Unfortunately it is nearly not as good as advertised. The user experience is not the best, and the narration is barely there. In our two games maybe 5-10% of the text had narration. ☹️

The tiny flaws and some otherwise awesome innovative mechanics of the game work in tandem to amplify each other. You could feel like you are losing early on with some bad luck, and it’s especially bad with the long playtime of this game. To us it was at least 3-4 hours (though some of that is due to our analysis paralysis) - which makes it hard to give more tries to the game when so many others work perfectly out of the box.