Making Tracks in London

Having missed a month due to reasons of having a family and a life with them, I got back to the London Sunday playtest meetup this weekend, and this time took along my game, Corlea, inspired by an iron age wooden road through a section of bog in County Longford in Ireland. I first did a little race game based on this site a couple of years ago, and then last year added this Euro-style game to my pile of works in progress, and came back to play with it some more this year. (Click on the "Corlea" label below to find the various posts.)

Anyway, this was the first time I had playtested the game with anyone other than one of my local friends, so I was hoping to learn some new things about the game. I knew already that the game end was woolly, balance was poor, and pacing was uncertain, but what else...?

About mid-game, with most of the worker cubes on the board,
and some very fine elbow modeling from the testers.

We had a three-player game, taking only about half an hour, which was something of a surprise: all the tests I had run of this over the last few months have been solo, so I really had no idea of how long it would take with real players.  This is a fine example of how, while solo testing is a really useful approach for getting rough assessments of progress, you really do need other people to know what is what.

Overall I think the game was less dull than I had feared, but was very much underwhelming -- though, given its early stage of development, I'm not going to beat myself up over that.  Some of the key observations we had were:

• The trackway got completed rather quickly, with chieftains (player pieces) still only half way along.
• Once a load of worker cubes had been placed, competition for the various action/scoring spots pretty much stopped.
• The dice for scoring and action difficulty were reasonably popular, but seemed too chaotic in the way they are being used.
• The various types of card are probably the key to the game, but at the moment they don't quite get there, and the incentive to acquire them might not be enough as yet.
• There was a feeling that the game is entirely tactical, and you can't really make any strategic plans.

There were a load more comments, which I have noted in my logbook, but I think these are the main ones I want to address in the short term.  My plan for the next iteration is to remove cubes from action spaces every time an action is completed, and to try a different way of handling the scoring dice to make them more predictable.  I also need to work out a smarter end to the game.  From then on, we'll see...

This was, of course, an afternoon that was not all about my game, and I was able to test and give feedback on several other prototypes.  This time we had a clever auction game, a sneaky negotiation and voting game, a tense cooperative alien hunt, and a frantic real-time dice game, and missed some other great stuff at other tables.  Looking forward to next month already...

Participating in War

Today I attended the Colours wargame show in the next town southish from where I live. This is my second time, and while I am not what anyone would describe as a wargamer (particularly when the focus in this context is on miniatures games), I have enjoyed both of my trips there, partly from browsing the trade hall and looking at the various games being run, and partly from joining in a couple of the participation games that take up most of the top floor of the show.

I only have very limited experience with these participation games, but I suspect there is something I can learn from them. They contrast quite a lot with demo games at a boardgame event, which would generally be done by, or on behalf of, a publisher or designer, where the aim is, when it gets right down to it, to sell you something.  What I have seen of participation games at wargame shows, while some are put on by publishers, most of them are actually run by wargame clubs and they are presented both as a service and as a way for the members of a club to show off what they can do -- and have fun doing it.

This picture brought to you by BlurryVision™
If it was clearer you would see a bunch of Jeeps driving around blowing stuff up.

Across the show there were games varying from very quick skirmishes up to epic battles with many hundreds (possibly even thousands in a couple of cases) of miniatures arrayed across a vast battlefield.  They are invariably presented beautifully, with great attention paid to the layout and scenery.  Some are designed to be quick to teach and playable in a manageable amount of time by casual players, and these are the only ones I actually have experience of, but I understand some of the bigger games just run through the day and allow players to turn up and take over a unit command for part of the time.

The games I have played (those more casual ones) seem to have been either simplified versions of published rulesets, or custom built.  These latter are probably closely based on something else, and even if they are not consciously, the general pattern of roll-to-hit, possibly followed by roll-to-defend, and/or roll-for-damage, is a familiar one that turns up in so many games that it doesn't require a big investment of time to set up.

Something I wish I'd asked was whether clubs take the same game around to multiple shows, or build something afresh each time.  I suspect there is something of a mixture in this.

What I really like about these games is that they were constructed with a particular audience in mind. The games I have played were targeted as people like me, who aren't deep into the wargaming world, and don't want to spend ages learning intricate rules. They provide an excellent window for me to see some of what there is out there.  I like also that they tend to focus clearly on one thing and, while they may have some wobbles about them, they generally do that one thing well.  This year I played one game where we cooperated to blow stuff up against an enemy controlled by a member of the club running the game, and another where we were tank commanders trying to be the one to kill an enemy tank, again controlled by an expert. Last year one game involved battling for treasure at the bottom of the sea -- with Lego! All of these felt clear, simple, and enjoyable.

I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with all this, or what it is I can learn here, but maybe it is just a general reminder that visuals matter, focus matters, context matters, and knowing your intended audience matters.

If anyone reading this has any experience playing or running a participation game at a wargame show, I'd love to hear from you in the comments. :)

The Proof of the Reading

As you may be aware I have, over the last few years, occasionally helped out with proof reading and editing game rulebooks on a volunteer basis, and even got myself a few printed credits for the work. This is something I quite enjoy doing, and I feel is an important thing to do to try to help raise standards within the hobby. I don't feel I'm particularly good at it though.

So, I have found out about the Society for Editors and Proofreaders thanks to Rachael Mortimer (give her a shout for experienced, professional proofreading of game rulebooks), and after reading around their website and discussing with Rachael, I decided to join.

The membership pack, it has arrived!

Membership benefits include discounts from their suite of training courses, so I figured that if I wanted to do some of their courses, the membership worked out as effectively being free.  Why not give it a punt?

As of this evening, I have joined the organisation and signed up for the entry-level proofreading course as a taster.  I will be working through that over the next few weeks and then we'll see how things go. If all goes well, this may be a new string to my bow.

Craghold: Kinda Failed, Kinda Succeeded

If you've been reading this blog over the last few months, you're probably aware that I have been working, on and off, on a game for the Board Game Geek Print and Play Wargame contest, and made some decent progress, ending up with a game that is playable, but a little wobbly in some areas and has some serious balance issues.  I feel it's OK for my first attempt at a wargame, even though it needs a load more work to be considered "done".

Well, I kinda lost track of dates and deadlines, and a couple of days ago I checked the contest details and, to my horror, I found I was a day away from the submission deadline rather than having several weeks as I thought.  I don't know why I got mixed up about this, but I clearly fell foul of the cardinal sin of not putting important dates and deadlines into my calendar.

The end state of a recent playtest where the defenders got a far-too-comfortable victory.

So this left me with a decision to make: do I throw in the towel and maybe submit a more thoroughly developed game next year, or do I just go for it and submit what I have?

I decided to make a few corrections to the rulebook that I had discovered recently, and then go for it.  This being effectively an incomplete game, I am pretty much throwing away any realistic chance of winning in any of the contest categories, unless it turns out that I am the only entry in one of them! I am OK with this though. As with the regular 24 hour contests, I'm taking the main benefit as being an incentive to make something that I probably wouldn't have done otherwise, and learn something from the process. 

If you fancy checking out the entries for the contest (and maybe voting when the voting page comes up in November), here's the contest thread.