Five (plus one) go playtesting

Achievement unlocked! I have finally done something that I have been talking about for over a year but never quite got around to organising: I hosted a playtesting evening, having somehow managed to persuade a group of friends to come round for the evening to try playing incomplete game designs in return for tea and biscuits.

In the end we had five volunteers turning up, which made for six of us crammed into my little games room, and we tried out Boogie Knights (which is in a very playable state but has a lot of rough edges to work on) and El Tiddly (which is more of a test-of-concept than actual game right now).

The most professional looking board for one of my prototypes so far.

Boogie Knights went pretty well.  One major thing I wanted to see was how well it works with five players, as it sucks with two, so the hope is to be able to claim that it works as three-to-five, and I also needed to know if more cards would be needed.  The good news is that five players seems fine; we only needed one reshuffle of the deck (the same as I had seen in three and four players) and the game finished in half an hour - with some of that taken up with discussions of matters arising and making adjustments on the fly, so we could expect the play time to actually be a load shorter.

There was loads of good general feedback too.  The "magic" equipment that got introduced in version 0.2 is really not working, but some discussion got us ideas for replacement cards/rules (potions or magic scrolls that allow some mischievous moving around of equipment) that should meet the intent of the magic kit (mostly to add a little disruptive fun) in a way that fits the game better.  We also found a few other bits of tuning to do.

So, I know what I need to do for version 0.3, so I'd better get on with it.

El Tiddly really didn't work well.  For a start, we didn't get enough counters onto the board to make for real competition, and the fact that I had cards allowing people to remove counters (without possibility of failure) meant that the board stayed sparsely populated.  There was also a feeling that the tiddlywinks were just too difficult to control (it should be noted that "proper" tiddlywinks has a cup for a target, so the winks don't generally slide on out after hitting the target), and access to different sides of the table to make shots can be a bit of a pain.  Apart from that, there was general agreement that there was a lot of downtime between turns (particularly with five players) and what was going on on other people's turns wasn't really fun enough to make up for that.

Overall, then, I think El Tiddly is getting shelved.  There were, however, loads of ideas being thrown around as to how it might be possible to make a game like this actually work (from cutting it down to a two-player duelling game to having a contoured board), so I may get back to it at some time.  I need a lot of sleeps first, though, and in the meantime I have plenty of other projects to be focusing on.

Thanks again to the fine individuals who came to help with the playtesting.