Tend: My Favorite Mechanism

Hey, I'm Jamie from Stonemaier Games, and today I'm going to talk about my favorite mechanism in the roll and write game or kind of flip and write game Tend. Tend looks like this. Tend has a actually a small part of Tend looks like this. There is a lot going on in Tend. You have two giant sheets of paper.

It's a little bit like Hadrian's Wall. Um and yeah, so here we go. You have you have a giant sheet of paper right here, this one, and you also have this giant sheet of paper, and you have my favorite mechanism in the game I'm going to talk about in a second, the scratch-off card. One component highlight I wanted to briefly mention is that the markers in this game are really spectacular because they are not only markers, but they are also stamps.

One side of the of this this green pen is a marker, but the other side is a stamp that made to look like a leaf. I thought that was a really nice production detail from this game. But the other nice production detail that also ties to the mechanisms are these scratch-off cards. They're as far as I can tell, they are all unique and brilliantly I mean, I actually didn't know that you could make scratch-off material that is colorful opposed to the just plain silver scratch-off material, but they have printed a beautiful like mining landscape here and a forest landscape on the top that is all scratch-off material.

You can you can scratch off that material, and it even shows you on the right the types of things that you might find. You just don't know exactly where you'll find them. Um so what my favorite thing to do in this game when when when I in my first play was to go mining, and eventually I realized how much fun that was, and so I started cutting down trees as well to get things from the forest.

But it was just a delight to scratch off uh to scratch off these cards and find fun stuff while I was doing so. I I've heard that there was another designer, I can't remember their name offhand, but they've made a bunch of games that have scratch-off cards. And really I think it's a it's a other than the dust that you can you push onto your onto your table when you scratch off cards, other than that downside, it is a lot of fun to scratch stuff off cards and see what's underneath and have it tied to a specific mechanism.

Here you're largely just discovering stuff that you can use for other stuff. Um it's a it's actually an incredibly complex game in terms of what you do with the stuff. But being able to zero in and just scratch off a space on the card and see what you find underneath, that is that element of the game I thought was very cozy and very satisfying to do.

Um and so that's why I I I leaned deep into the mining and in the cutting in the game. That is my favorite component in the game other than the pen. The pens were really cool. And also my favorite mechanism in the game. Uh there's something about revealing it's the difference between like creating versus revealing because I think in a lot of games this would have been an element where you maybe roll a die and randomly discover something, but having it pre-printed feels like you have discovered something almost you've discovered something that they didn't want you to know about.

That you found a special rock or rare rock where you weren't expecting to find it. Um I thought that was really neat in in Tend. I'd love to hear your favorite mechanism in Tend if you've played it or if you can name another game uh that has scratch-off material. Charterstone is one. I've I've designed a game that has some scratch-off material.

It isn't used this way, but it it is in the game. But if you can name another of another game that uses scratch-off material, let me know about that in the comments below. Thanks.