Spilled Mushrooms
Spilled Mushrooms sits comfortably next to Hand of the Divine on the list of “Playdate games you could play 20 minutes a day for the rest of your life.” It also feels like something that can and should be played by elementary school kids in math class to teach them math and complex cognitive skills (complimentary).
The premise of the game is that you spilled your mushrooms and have to send out animals to gather them up. Each run lasts less than five minutes and has plenty of randomness to it. It’s technically a card game, and each run lasts seven days (turns). The top of the screen has the three locations from which you need to gather a set number of mushrooms each, and the bottom gives you a choice of one of two animals to send out each turn. Each animal has a gathering and a time stat, and most also have a special ability. Collect all the mushrooms from all three locations before the seven days are up to win.
The big strategy of the game is how every card interacts with every other one. There are tons of different abilities on each animal and most of the lands, and they all affect one another. Have you ever played the real-life card game Fluxx? It’s a game that has very simple rules at the beginning, but each turn is an opportunity to add another wrinkle to the ruleset, so by turn 10 you’ll have a completely different game and victory condition. There are a ton of licensed versions of Fluxx, but I personally am a fan of the Batman and Star Trek varieties.
The simplest way to approach a round of Spilled Mushrooms is to focus on the most difficult land first. Maybe one will have nearly 20 mushrooms to collect instead of a more manageable 11, or you can only use animals with a gathering stat of no more than 2. Those are the ones that’ll take the longest to collect all the mushrooms, so they should be your first focus.
The animals are their own whole thing. They have two numbers on their card: one will determine how many mushrooms they can collect per day, and the other will determine how many days they will be out collecting. So if your moose is 1/4, then it will collect one mushroom a day for four consecutive days before disappearing from the playfield. But that’s not the only thing to consider. The moose card also has the “inspiring” ability, which will increase the gathering stat by 1 for any other animals that share its land. So, it’s best to place the moose on a land that already has another creature to give it the gathering bonus. It will still gather up to four mushrooms given enough time, though, at a rate of one per day, regardless of whether or not he’s a lone moose or has friends.
The abilities are what really change this game from something straightforward into something that will take your full brain. A 1/4 moose will gather 1x4=4 mushrooms (if there are enough days left in the week!), but what if the land has an ability that changes this by decreasing the time it’s out, or another creature buffs the amount of mushrooms the moose can gather each day? The web of interactions between all the cards elevates this from “just another card game on the Playdate” into an actual work of art.
Each run is procedurally generated, so you’ll find some very easy to solve while others will take many tries. The game also keeps track of your statistics so you can see which puzzles you managed, and how many tries it took, and how long, and if you used any hints. There are a variety of trophies (many secret!) to earn, as well as a series of additional unlockable animals and lands. Spilled Mushrooms takes a few minutes to figure out, but you might join the squad of people that haven’t stopped playing it since launch!
(Released September 24, 2024, on Catalog. Sideload a free demo from Itch. Copy provided by developer.)