Double Trouble in London

It's that time of month when I take a trip to London to playtest with a group of other game designers, something that I continue to be enthusiastic about and thoroughly enjoy every time.  The form of these events is basically that there are usually three or four "slots", generally running for about 90 minutes each, and in each of these three or four tables are running with a game and an appropriate number of players.  Sometimes the times vary, and if there are short games to be played, sometimes they share a slot, but it generally works out that everyone who wants to will get the opportunity to test one of their prototypes.  I was fortunate this time in that I was able to run two of my games.

Looks a bit of a mess, but I'm working on it...!

First up we had a slightly shorter than usual slot, in which we played the latest iteration of my Shooting Party game.  I'm still a way off being done with this one, but managed to harvest a lot of valuable feedback from the three awesome testers I had at the table.  Part of the problems that we had would have been fixed by a rule that I had planned to use but had forgotten to add to the player aid cards or explain to the players, a rule that allows players to discard cards to gain extra actions -- I have only myself to blame here and have already updated the player aids for this.  Other than that the main result is that I need to simplify way more than I have already and stop trying to be clever with the way monsters behave.

The next slot had me testing someone else's design, which was a fast moving card game which included a lot of terrible cat puns.  This is a game that I really enjoyed as it is, and look forward to seeing how it develops.

Finally we got to play Giftmas, which I am currently overhauling with a view to a new version.  The main change I have made is to streamline scoring, and I wanted to see how that panned out after my initial testing had suggested that it looked OK.  The game went down well, but we found a few details that didn't quite fit right.  A little discussion after a few hands of play yielded some tweaks to try out, which we did for the rest of the game and this certainly helped a fair bit.  Some more discussion after that and my players asked to play again (always a good sign), and the game totally fell together and had bluffing, trash talk, furrowed brows, and plenty of laughter.  Of course, one great game doesn't mean we're done, and more testing is needed, but it does suggest we're getting there.  Thanks to this set of intrepid testers too.

So, Shooting Party will be getting another overhaul, this time mostly involving removing stuff, and Giftmas just needs more testing for now in the hope of shaking out any other issues with it.  Get to it, Rob...