Hunt the Jugged Hare

This weekend marked my sorta-anniversary with Playtest UK, as it was the January London weekend meetup last year that was the first I went to, taking an old version of Boogie Knights along.  And I was back for my first meetup of the year, taking along my new Shooting Party game.

As usual I forgot to take a photo, so here's a totally authentic reconstruction.
(Luckily you probably don't know enough about the game to notice I forgot to add counters for this shot.)

As usual there was a good crowd in with a wide variety of games.  I kicked off with playing a game about stealing treasure from a volcano-dwelling dragon, followed by a game about TV game shows, and then one about making and decorating Chinese pots, before getting to try my own design and then finishing off with a game about getting drunk by drinking unknown liquids.

I was trying out a bunch of changes for Shooting Party, and was pleased to find that the bits that I had changed definitely improved things.  There were still plenty of things wrong with the game, though.  Many of the problems are basically balance issues (card A is too powerful, card B is pointless) but I'm not worried about those at the moment.  Yes, it's good to identify this sort of thing and start improving, but right now I want to get the general flow of the game good, after which I can do things like balancing up the cards (though some imbalance is appropriate in a light, fast game, as I want this to turn out) and adding some more interesting features.

The flow, however, was definitely being hindered, mostly by two elements:

• Reloading of weapons was clumsy, unintuitive, and un-fun.  Sure, it was OK from a thematic point of view, but it keeps players from having fun, so it'll have to change.  I have in mind a vastly simplified system to drop in and try out instead, and I feel confident it will make things work better.
• If a player starts with a poor hand of cards and is unlucky with draws, they can end up being left behind and have a boring game.  I have a plan to deal with this involving a stack of starter cards, and I want to playtest whether to just deal these out or have a quick round of drafting to ensure everyone has some control over their start hand.

In general, I think a playtest has been successful if it allows you to identify problems with a prototype.  It's even better if you can identify possible solutions to at least some of those problems.  As a result, this was another very successful playtest.