Ice Creams and Meet of Dragons

This weekend was Dragonmeet, the one-day tabletop games convention in London, which had moved from its previous home in Hammersmith to the ExCel exhibition centre in the docklands area. As a result, the event now has a very different feel, moving from various function rooms in a hotel to a big hall and some attached seminar rooms. I didn't get involved with seminars or roleplaying games that were taking place out of the main hall, so can't comment on those, but the trade hall felt like a smaller, more easygoing version of the UK Games Expo halls, with more smaller traders and a lot less difference between the large and small exhibitors, which felt good to me. There were also some good options for getting food and drinks in the main concourse of the venue, which beat the previous location, where you had a choice of the hotel catering or leaving the venue.

Anyway, as usual, I was helping with the Playtest UK area, which had four tables in the corner of the main hall, which was much better positioning than last year, and things went really well. The day was split into four two-hour time slots for each of the tables, so that allowed sixteen designers to get their games tested, all of which seemed to go pretty smoothly. I even got to run some tests of a game I'm working on.

Ice Cream Chaos with a lot of dice.

The game this time is a new project collaborating again with Mike Harrison-Wood, the co-designer of Grab Bag: Jungle (pre-Christmas plug here: great family fun game, available now!). This one has the working title of Ice Cream Chaos and involves dexterity (chucking dice at targets), a good wadge of luck, and a little tactical thinking. It's still in the early stages, but we have a working prototype (actually we each have one, with some differences between them) and have been starting to test around the place. Fortunately, it just takes about ten minutes to play (and not long to explain), so it's easy to get to the table, but unfortunately (maybe?) it's another game that relies very much on the physicality of the game, so we can't meaningfully test it online. 

Anyway, the test was very useful, yielded some helpful feedback and criticism, and generally went down well with the testers, who were pretty positive about it. I was most pleased to talk to a twelve-year-old kid (with his dad, the closest thing to a target audience we have) who gave it a go and was really enthusiastic and had some helpful thoughts for us.

So, we have some momentum on this one. The core of the game works really well, but as is often the case, the devil is in the detail. Hopefully we'll get a good bit more testing over Christmas, trying out a few variations, and we'll see where that gets us.