Wurzelwerk

You are a young tree, freshly grown out of a seed. You’re still small and vulnerable – it’s time to change. Branch by branch you’re building a network of roots by placing hexagonal tiles, reaching out for different sources of nutritions. How far will you extend your branch? How much energy will you save up for reaching into other directions? Will you try to prepare for the dangerous route to the bigger nutrition caches deep underneath or do you spread your network wide and shallow? How your tree changes depends on the decisions you take in the magical underworld of Wurzelwerk.

How to play:

- At the top of the screen you can see your tile selection – consisting of six tiles. To build a branch, drag one of the tiles on a spot connecting to your existing branches – in a way that connects your roots to the new tile. You can rotate the tiles with the rotation button.

- Every connecting edge of two placed tiles have to be of the same type: Branches have to connect to branches, stones-halfes have to touch stones-halfes. 

- You always concentrate on a single branch – You can finish building it at any time, but you won’t be able to grow this branch further afterwards. 

- After finishing a branch, you keep every tile you didn’t use in your selection. If you have some unused nutrition, you draw additional tiles until you have up to six tiles in your selection.  You can see your current nutrition value at the top right.

- But how to get nutrition: Hidden in the underground are caches of nutrition (blue tiles). If you can built your roots through one of those spots, you get additional nutrition. This nutrition allows you to draw new tiles after finishing a branch – and to evolve your tree further. Nutrition caches far away from your tree tend to be more valuable – but it will be a challange to reach them. 

- You can get a better overview of the realm of the underground by scrolling with the right mouse button. 

- The growing season and the game end if you’ve spent all your nutrition and all tiles in your selection.

Leon Matthes - Art

Fabian Ferley - Game Design and Art

Niaz Faridani-Rad - Programming

Robin Hentschel - Programming

Richard Webb - Sound Design

Marius Mülhaupt - Game Design

DOOMTOALL - Writing and Voice Over

This game was made in 48 hours as part of the Global Game Jam 2023.