Coronas, Crowns, Zooms, and Another 24 Hours

It has been an odd old month. Scary for many, confusing for some, disruptive to everyone, and it looks like we're only getting started. From a game design point of view, having the country largely locked down (for some definition of locked) means not getting to meet up for playtesting (or even playing), events like UK Games Expo postponed or cancelled, and meetings with publishers and other designers are having to be severely rethought.

On the other hand, this is an opportunity to rethink some of how we do things. For instance, last week I attended an online playtesting session with a group of folk who would otherwise have been having a meetup in London, made a couple of new friends, and learnt that some sorts of games (many "roll & write" -- and similar -- games, for instance) work pretty well remotely.

This week I decided to have a go at the 24 hour game design contest for the first time in... oh... far too long.  The "requirement" was "Crown", and I decided to try making a game that could be played remotely, with nothing more than an audio connection and some trust that your opponent won't cheat.

I ended up with something that works OK, I think, and is actually intended to be a 2-player only game, a race to be the first to complete two out of three scoring tracks but also doing it before enemies arrive to destroy your stronghold -- those enemies being controlled, at a very basic level, by your opponent.

What pleased me here, though, isn't the game itself but the fact that it had a couple of playtests with people who are not in my house. A shout out on Twitter resulted in a Zoom meeting with a fine volunteer (thanks Nik) over which we played the game a couple of times, the first of which revealing that, if my explanation is not sufficiently clear, the game can easily go off the rails in ways that I would easily spot if testing face to face. The second play went way better, and showed that the game basically worked. A couple of hours later I was at an online playtesting meetup with a couple of other designers (thanks Ellie and Bez), who had a play and helped find a few issues with the game, some of which I was able to address before my 24 hours was up.

As always, the aim of a 24 hour contest isn't to really to make a great, well tested game, but to get to a playable print & play game that could be taken forward from there.   I usually figure I have done pretty well if one of my entries has had any playtesting at all with a player that isn't me, so having feedback and input from three people was amazing.  If you are interested, my contest entry is here, with links to the rules and playsheets.

And I think that this is where I wanted to end up with this post. While we are all pretty much housebound due to the Covid-19 pandemic and face-to-face gaming with anyone outside our immediate domestic situation is not a possibility, gaming doesn't have to stop. We just need to be a little more creative and flexible about how we do things. And, in my case, need to consider the current restrictions in my design activities.  (There are other options too, which I expect I'll talk about soon.)

Stay safe.