Need Honest & Constructive Input

Gameplay:
Perhaps the reviewer was expecting something with more strategy or player decisions. Clearly, this is not a contender for strategy game of the year. But then it's a kid's game. Whether your gameplay hits the target market or not is something that only the target market can tell you. That is, you just have to get the game in front of a bunch of 8 year olds and watch them to see if they have fun.

From my reading of the rules, there's no in-game reason to throw food at any one particular player over another (since you don't know what defences they have in their hand), so the game has the potential to devolve into metagaming. That is, you stuck your tongue out at me yesterday so I'm going to throw all 4 pieces of food at you and knock you out of the game on the first turn. The one decision point in the game (who to throw food at) is a take-that mechanic (who can I disadvantage the most) rather than choosing the most advantage for myself. As such, the game encourages ganging up on the players who are losing to knock them out of the game.

Player elimination is often frowned upon by gamers these days, even for adults. If the game goes really fast (sub 10 minutes) then you should be fine, but be especially aware that your target market has short attention spans.

Those three factors (take-that mechanic, ganging up on the weakling, and player elimination) combined with the age of the target market all point towards the possibility of yelling, tantrums and/or sulking once the food hits the fan.

Artwork:
I give this feedback with the caveat that the artwork is better than what I could do. Nevertheless, my first impression is that the artwork is an average-to-poor match for the theme. The sepia colors of the background and border don't really do it for me, and the colors of the objects themselves are also muted.

As previously commented, most of the objects are static and don't really evoke the feeling of a food fight. The pie is a counter-example, which is drawn to indicate movement and action. If the attack cards were drawn with "action" poses it would help to differentiate them from the defensive cards which could be more static. There would also be the opportunity to visually distinguish the attack from defense cards using a different color background.

The black lines around the edges of the drawings are very thin. Generally cartoony pictures of this type have much stronger black lines and bold colors. Again I'm not an artist myself, but you could try experimenting with a few alternate versions of one of the cards (with thick black lines and a different color scheme) to see which is better.

Summary:
Don't put the prototype on hold. Prototyping/playtesting is exactly what you need. The best thing you can do with your game is to watch a bunch of 8 year olds playing it. Don't put any adults at the table, and don't intervene in any way. Just watch and take notes.

Regards,
kos

More personally:

Full disclosure, I disklike Poo the card game, and I probably wouldn't enjoy playing Splat for the same reasons. This game also encourages some behaviours you might not want in a game for kids - ganging up, playing favourites, and a randomised set of cards whose randomisation does little but distribute "power" unevenly. Choices don't come into play. Fairness doesn't either, but the hurt-feelings meta-game certainly could.

These games also don't do a great job of evoking the feeling of a messy food fight, either. Cleanliness points? Cards with text and numbers? Sitting in a circle around a table? All of the good parts of a food fight (the frenetic tossing of whatever you can get your hands on and dodging it at the same time, indiscriminate mess, the "who cares what mom will think" release) are gone. What remains are structured turns, picking on people, random feelings of alternating impotence or power based on your draw, and nothing you can do about any of it. No thanks.

Imagine a very different game, with stacks of large colourful tiles of food spread throughout the room. All players take one step at time. When they can reach a stack, they can grab tiles. You can hold one tile in each hand. If you can ever touch another player with your tile, they are "hit" by it and collect it in their pocket.

The game ends when first person can not take any more tiles because they are all taken from the stacks.

Players tally up the tiles they were hit with, and only then do the "tile effects" come into effect - not during the moving and hitting part. Some might be worth more; maybe there are other mechanics like "if you were hit by the MOST of a category, don't count those tiles." Doesn't matter; the game is over, now is when we score and can calm down to focus on it.

Player with the lowest score (cleanest) wins, or maybe gets in trouble the least.

I'd play that because it is, hopefully, more of the fun bits of a food fight, and less of the bad bits (eg, players that are ganged up on will probably have the most of a food category, and therefore not count those ones.)

My issue with the brick wall would be that it doesn't relate to your theme. You've got this great food-fight-free-for-all idea and the brick wall wouldn't help that message. But with a quick google image search I found images of close ups of spaghetti or piles of food. Take the image, fade it out and make it monochromatic and it could work as your background.

I also thought of Ascension, and I think they do this extremely well, too. The backgrounds for the four different classes of cards appear to be the same, just different colors - blue for enlightened, pink for void, grey for mechana, green for lifebound. Then they use the text for the title, but also to describe if it's a 'hero' or a 'construct'. Given your different types of cards, and how some of them overlap, I could see this working. Keep the symbols, but add that continuity with the background and then have your artwork have it's own background.

I know that's kind of abstract in description, but I can't think of anything specific that does it well. Check out the art for Killer Bunnies - just came to mind and, I never really played it but it looks like more of the idea. 7 Wonders does a good job with their colors and frames, as well...

I hope that helps - if I get a chance in the next few days, I'll try and mock something up for you as an example, if you want.

Hi Jon,

Read through the adjusted rules - lots of changes!

I may not have clearly understood the table for "blocked" cards. Is blocking the same as "defending?" Is it showing, for instance, that a Solid Food card blocks solids, dual-foods, OR allows me to defensively move/reassign a tossed food? Or does it mean it blocks solids, dual-foods, or can be used to stop someone I'm attacking from moving/reassigning?

Now that there is a rule that "cards left in hand are negative points" and each food you toss at others is a point, I'm curious how the end-game will run. Particularly because of these new rules:

Getting cards when you are Attacked by More Then 1 Opponent (3+ Player Game): Draw 1 card for each card beyond the first card in font of you (even if blocked).

Or you are Attacking all opponents on your turn (3+ Player Games): Draw 1 card per player successfully attacked.

This tells me that you will be regularly drawing more and more cards, which in turn you will want to get rid of as soon as possible by using them for defense/attacks on others. Could be really interesting, or really disastrous! Hope it works out!