Doctor* Rob's Play-Along Blog

So here is something of an experiment. You may remember that I was working with the awesome Chris O'Regan on a "flip and write" game, The Village on the River, which we started at "IDLECon" at the end of last year (and I now realise I haven't posted about since). We have kept working on this since, tweaking here and twiddling there, and the game seems to work pretty well, but although we have had a couple of plays with a load of people (the game in principle can scale to any player count), it has mostly been tested with just Chris and myself. This results in a few shortcomings: firstly that things that make sense (or are fun) to us don't necessarily make sense (or fun) to everyone else, but secondly, we can't be sure that there aren't huge imbalances in play.

 A not-terribly-impressive result for me on a recent play.

When I talk about balance, by the way, I mostly mean that everything in the game can contribute to a winning strategy, and there is nothing in the game that is absolutely essential for a win. In this context, I am mostly thinking about the buildings and special characters, and I would be OK with things like not being able to win unless you have dwellings in your village, etc. In recent versions of the game it does seem that some ways of playing often result in good scores more than others, but I'm OK with that as long as nothing is either essential or useless.

Anyway, one of the strongest ways of testing for this is to just play an enormous amount of games and see if we can see patterns in the way people play. More specifically, in the case of this game, it is really helpful to see the results of big games so, for example, seeing the way a dozen people interpret and exploit the same set of cards.

Back around the IDLECon time, another collaborator, Alex Cannon, set up a test for a roll and write game he had designed by posting a series of die roll results on his website (actually doing several of these sequences), with the rolls hidden behind "folds" so that a player can click through and play the same sequence as other players, and so the scores can be meaningfully compared.

This all seems like a good solution to the problem and I have finally got around to having a try at this. Chris and I had a run through the rules and the playsheet to make sure we had a stable version to share. So it was a matter of how to set up and share the sequence.

As you may know, we have implemented our custom card deck on Screentop.gg, which allows easy iteration and sharing, including allowing any number of people to watch the card flips in progress and play along easily. I set up a play session with this virtual prototype and ran through the deck, three cards at a time, taking a screenshot of each set of cards.

One turn's worth of card flips.

The Blogger platform I post this blog on doesn't seem to have an easy way to handle the staged reveals of each turn, but it turns out that Board Game Geek's blog system includes "spoiler" tags which are pretty much perfect for the purpose. And so, I present to you: The Village on the River playtest play-along #1.

As I said at the start this is an experiment and it relies on goodwill of other people, possibly even more than regular playtesting as we are asking people to do something without guidance or a schedule or anything, but we hope it will be both helpful for us and at least a bit of fun for testers. If you are up for taking a look, maybe playing, or maybe just commenting, that would be amazing.

* Not a doctor.

Learning to be a Mentor

This is just a very quick post about the Tabletop Mentorship Program, a scheme run by the wonderful Mike Belsole and Grace Kendall over the last couple of years or so. The idea is that they connect people who do just about anything within the games industry, or who want to, from game design to illustration to podcasting or reviewing, with more experienced members of the community who can help them take their next steps. A mentoring period is over three months, during which the mentor and mentee agree to meet (via an online call of some sort) at least six times, for at least half an hour each time.

After discussing the scheme with a couple of friends, I signed up as a mentor for the January run of the scheme. I must admit that I was somewhat nervous, as I am still close to the bottom of the industry ladder, and wasn't sure how much I could offer, but reassured by the friends, and the information on the scheme's website, I gave it a go.

I was matched with a designer who was working on their first "serious" design (they had tinkered with others, but not got far with them), and we hit it off well on a personal level, and over the three months it was great to see the designer preparing their game and pitch for showing to publishers. They were well motivated and, I think, just needed a little reassurance on a few things and some pointers based on at least some experience of interacting with publishers, which I do have a bit of.

Overall, I found my first time as a mentor to be a really enjoyable experience. My mentee claims I was helpful, and I felt that I learned a lot from the process as well. The scheme also has great support through a Discord server, through which you can get help, advice, or just chat, plus there are regular talks on YouTube (some streamed live, some recorded), interactive discussions, and social meetups.

Applications are now open for the next round of mentorships (which will be the last for this year as the organisers will then be working on restructuring the scheme to be a long-term prospect), and I have already signed up again. If you think you could offer something as a mentor (if you have any experience in any games business related activity, there is a good chance you can!), or would like to find a mentor for yourself (or both, in fact!), it's well worth looking on their website to find out more. Applications for this round are only open until 17th May, so there isn't a lot of time.