Happy holidays guys. I think for A model conversion to something festive, maybe take a UCM New Orleans dropship and turn it into some kind Orbital Sleigh, with present-laden drop ships.

Regarding play-testing, I had the very good fortune to attend a workshop at PAX: Unplugged on this topic. Ignacy Trzewiczek, designer of Robinson Crusoe and Imperial Settlers gave an overview of his process and a bunch of very useful tips. He had someone filming it, so possibly the actual talk is out there in internet land somewhere.

Some things he said though that I felt were very worth remembering. Obviously, this is just one point of view and I don’t 100% subscribe to all these ideas, but I think they are worth thinking about. Certainly helped me when play-testing my game Deneb.

There are a number of different play-testers that you need at different points in the project.

– 1st Phase: The silent playtester: These are basically human automatons who will say nothing during the testing process, it’s about the only time you will be playing whilst play-testing. It’s about having someone to pick-up tokens when they’re told, move pieces around when they’re told, and just let you tweak with the game until you have the basic foundation of what you are wanting to do. Much like Ignacy, my wife has been a great help to me in this area, in being very patient with me whilst I try and put ideas together in my head and put them on paper.

– 2nd Phase: The creative play-testers: These are the guys who will spew out ideas continuously during play-testing. Too early and these guys will mess with your foundation, you’ll end up with their game, not yours. Too late, and you won’t be able to incorporate the many good ideas these guys will produce. At this point, you want to be doing “proper play-testing” (more on that below). A couple of friends from my local gaming group did a great job at this stage for Deneb.

– 3rd Phase: The crazy play-testers: These are the guys who always think some silly, weird, crazy strategy that is clearly against the intention of the game will work. Hopefully these ideas will fail, but now and again one might prove to be an unintended perfect strategy, and it might undermine the game as a whole. These guys are good to basically sanity check the game is what you think it should be near the end. I took a prototype of Deneb to an old friend on the other side of the country, who I knew had this exact skill, it was illuminating as I had expected!

– 4th Phase: There were two more testing scenarios described. Can’t quite recall which was officially fourth, but let’s call them A and B.

A: Focus Group: Basically people you meet at a board gaming convention, ask some strangers to play your game. Not only is this hugely educational on how easy it is to play your game, it contains the acid test for if it’s fun. Your friends are great at being supportive, and even professional play-testers will sometimes struggle to be as critical with you as they should because that is human nature. A random group of strangers you meet in a gaming hall at a convention, they will give you some of the best critical feedback. Crucially, do they want to play the game again after there first go? You are some random guy they met at a conference, they might never see this game again, this might be there only chance at a second game. Ignacy made a very good point, that this might seem like a high bar, but think of all the great games you have ever played, and the first time you played it, did you immediately want to play it again?

B: Euro-gamers who love a spreadsheet: Ignacy view was that very late on in a games development, almost the last thing, is to do the fine balancing. Not the core strategies, but adjusting numbers basically. You probably know some guys who love to crunch numbers, get them to help out at that final stage of making sure the game is balanced. I was surprised how little emphasis Ignacy put on this, I think he felt it was easy if you had the skill, and not where the real work or development occurs.

Also, good general tip, try and cycle to new waves of play-testers when possible because old play-testers will have both prior knowledge of the game, and baggage from earlier iterations that you will cloud things. So when you can (easier said than done) you want to get fresh sets of play-testers.

Ok, so what is “real” play-testing. Play-testing is only real if the following things are true.

– You (the game designer) is observing the entire time and not playing, others are playing.
– You start a playtesting session with a question, and at the end of the session, you have an answer to that question (or at least new questions). E.g. Is hoarding money and just spending it right at the end of the game a viable strategy for victory Yes/No.
– You make notes during the session and specify the question you are trying to answer, and the result.
– You do not change the game during the play-testing session, and when you do make changes to the game between sessions, you only change one thing at a time. Otherwise when you ask your question in the next session to see if something if fixed, you won’t know what fixed it.

I would say these rules aren’t 100% hard and fast, I worked in the computer games industry for years, and a lot of the same principles apply in game testing, but there is some flexibility here. e.g. Sometime’s it’s just not practical to only change the one thing.

Some other points of interest from the talk

– Ideas are good, but really they aren’t where the work is. It’s 1% inspiration 99% perspiration.
– Don’t start by thinking “I am making a skirmish game” or “I am making a deck builder”, think about the emotions you want a player to feel “Players should feel like a pirate out for adventure and excitement on the high seas” and you might end up making a deck-building game in the final analysis, but stick to the player emotions as your guiding start point.

One thing I slightly disagree with Ignacy on (though I totally saw where he was coming from) was never doing good art for prototypes. I know you need to not be attached, and you should be ready to throw stuff away right up until the game is set. That all makes sense, but I find when working on a miniatures game (like Deneb) the art did a lot to inspire me, to give a creative sense of who/what a unit was. Sometimes I have tweaked unit’s slightly based on the artwork that got created for them, because it was just so cool in a certain way. So I think that might be a difference between perhaps more pure board-gaming experiences vs miniature gaming.