Of Dragons and Castles

On Saturday it was Dragonmeet, a one-day games convention in London, with a significant focus on roleplaying games, but also a lot of space given over to other forms of tabletop gaming, including board games, with a load of boardgame traders and publishers in the trade hall, and loads of demo games and open gaming space.  Playtest UK was, as usual, running an area of five tables for designers to test their prototypes, and I was along to test one of my games as well as to help out in the playtesting area as best I could.

Actually that helping out bit, while it involved a lot of standing and talking, and had me physically exhausted by the end, wasn't too difficult as a steady flow of interested people coming past meant that the designers never had very long to wait before they had volunteers to try out and give feedback on their games.

The Playtest Zone just getting up and running in the morning.
Thanks to Rob Harris of Playtest UK for the photo.

The game I took along to test was Castle War, which I was hoping to get a couple of plays of in the two hour testing session I had been allocated: I am aiming to make it playable within half an hour, with maybe five or ten minutes to teach, so allowing for it to overrun a bit and some time for feedback, I figured I had a chance.

In the event, it took almost exactly an hour to play with the two very fine volunteers who joined me.  OK, so they weren't hurried in their way of playing, but even so the game did go on a bit.  And adding in the teaching and feedback time, I decided to call it a day afterwards.

My testers were very helpful in their discussion, but as is usually the case, the real gold comes from watching what happens to the game state as we go along and how the players behave and interact with the components and each other.  Throughout the game the players seemed engaged and invested, and didn't seem to have a problem with the game taking longer than hoped for.  Sure, they had issues here and there, but were willing to roll with it, albeit pointing out the times when they had a terrible hand of cards or felt that their options had been reduced to the point of being frustrating.

About a third of the way through the game, brought to you in Blurryvision™.

Aside from the fact that my half-hour game took an hour, the issues I noted down included that using the "withdraw" tactic meant that you could end up with so many cards in hand that you lose control of conflict resolutions, all the event cards were drawn by one player, while the other had too many tactics, and the "1 Supply" cards were entirely redundant (I should have spotted that before play!).  The tricky issues to solve, I think, are the ones related to drawing a poor hand of cards, and I may need to find a way to mitigate this, but the rest are relatively easily addressable.

As it turns out I was able to try out some changes a couple of days later, but that is another story...