Grab Bag Hare

I haven't been to a 3rd Sunday playtest at the Jugged Hare in London for a couple of months, but finally managed to get myself in order for a trip last weekend, taking with me Grab Bag Zoo, my co-design with Mike Harrison-Wood, who managed to make the trip too, for our first face-to-face meet since we started working on the game.

There was a little uncertainty as to whether I would actually get into London as we had just been hit by the second big (by British standards) storm in two weeks, causing all sorts of problems for travel (not to mention people's houses getting flooded and property damaged) around the country. Checking the situation before I left home everything looked OK for my planned route, and the train was close to being on time, but we ended up being delayed by an hour en route due to a problem that emerged later. Unfortunately this meant I was not able to meet with Mike before the main meetup, but I managed to arrive comfortably before the playtesting started anyway.

Thanks to Mike Harrison-Wood for taking a much nicer photo than I managed to take!

While waiting for everyone to arrive, we had a quick play of Grab Bag Zoo for five players, including me, with Mike sitting out and taking notes. This worked pretty well, but the players fell massively short of winning. We suspect that the game is just too hard for larger player counts.

A little later, with the whole group assembled, we were able to get some more plays, this time for four players, this time including Mike while I observed.  One of the key things I learnt from this is that for a fast-moving, real-time game, it can be difficult to take meaningful notes about what is going on!

The group was enthusiastic overall and there was a lot of intense activity in the game, and they were keen to play a couple more times, meaning that we managed to try out all four of the zoo board sets that I had brought along between this session and the earlier game. The idea is that the game has a number of different sets of boards, each providing a different style or intensity of challenge, and this proved to be the case: the players took a different approach to each set of boards. The balancing of the board elements isn't right yet, but we are learning how the different options affect play.  However, we are also learning that some of the rules we have for the game are just too complicated and can easily get missed or wrongly applied.

So, I think that this was a really helpful testing session. We got feedback that the game is pretty compelling, but also identified a number of problems that need addressing, and we are getting to work on that.  I'm also discovering the fun of working on a very short game where you can easily just say, "Let's try that one more time, with this change..."

Of course, there were other games there, and it was fun to work through a few games designed by others: an interesting "short straw" game, a game about being a band, recording music and going on tour, and a nicely stripped back investment game. It's always good to get a look at some of the projects other folk are working on.