Capital Playtesting

Yesterday I took a second trip to London for the monthly Sunday meetup organised by Playtest UK.  The travel this time wasn't so smooth.  I hadn't checked that rail services were running as usual, so when I got to Didcot to find that a huge section of train track was closed, meaning a ride on a replacement bus service to Reading, then a train from there to Paddington (moving more slowly than usual due to other work on the way).  Then, in London, the Circle Line was closed so I had to make a change in my trip to Victoria.  Ah well, I had allowed plenty of time and was still able to grab a coffee and lunch before going to the pub.

I took Boogie Knights with me again, and got to watch version 0.6 played by four players (one of whom had played an earlier version) as part of the first session of testing.  I was trying out the new rules and cards, with a target of 10 points for the win, which made the game run a little too long -- I'll be revising this number down a bit in future, and this is actually a parameter that can be easily tweaked any time to help hit my target play time of 15 to 20 minutes.

Aside from observations about game length, I made a few more notes and took down plenty of comments and suggestions from the players.  Possibly the biggest issue this group was feeding back was that they felt that there was not enough to do each turn, and there was a general feeling that they were looking for a little more complexity and depth.  I think this is the first time I have had that particular line of feedback, but it did come after I had cut a fair bit out of the game, so they may be on to something.  Or it might just be that this was the feeling after the game ran a bit long.  Or maybe this is just an out-lier result.

You see, this is one of those things about playtesting, and something I am only now really starting to appreciate as Boogie Knights has had a fair bit more playtesting with other people than any of my other games so far: feedback from one group may mean nothing, or it may mean everything, and it probably means something different to what they are actually saying.  One playtest just gives a data point, and that needs to be compared with others to figure out how it all fits together.  Sometimes (as with my previous couple of sessions), the message is clear quite quickly, but other times you just need to plug along and get more data.

Fortunately, I think this version is looking stable enough that it could stand a few more rounds of playtesting to help find what needs to happen next.

Of course, I played a load of other games at various stages of development: steampunk airships travelling through a portal in time and space to hunt dinosaurs; a team game where one member of each team is colour-blinded with red-lensed glasses and has to be guided to identify tokens of their team colour in a game of What's My Line? meets Guess Who; a boules-like game of frisbeeing beer mats; and a "saga-driven" game set in a battle for a Helms Deep style megafortress, where players are trying to earn their places in heroic songs, which could be by being involved in a tragic love affair just as much as by feats of heroic derring-do.

I totally love all this playing of prototypes.  Just being exposed to all that creativity is kinda intimidating, but it is also inspiring, and the level of mutual support being shared around is amazing.  Now, when can I get down there again...?