It's an expo, it's about games, it's in the UK

Another UK Games Expo has come and gone, and if you are paying attention to analogue games news, you may well have seen the numbers, which are significantly up from last year, and almost double the pre-Covid peak attendance. The event now occupies all five of the main halls (though with some unused space in some of them) around the NEC's central piazza space as well as a load of smaller rooms and a significant portion of the nearby Hilton hotel. It's not the biggest event of its type in the world, but it is flipping huge. I played only a handful of games (all on Friday night as it happens), but that isn't the point for me...

As has been the case for the last few years, my involvement in Expo has centred on the Playtest Zone, which was in the same spot as it was last year, which is a great little area at the side of hall 2, alongside a load of stalls related to university game design programmes and the Panda GM area that provides spaces for ad hoc meetings to anyone who needs them, which is a great facility to have.

The Playtest Zone in full flow.

There were over 200 game designers with us over the three days of the show, with a huge variety of games, the prototypes varying from shiny, professionally printed ones, all the way down to cards hand-drawn in pencil. I can tell you that I have a real soft spot for the games that are closer to the basic end of that continuum. Unfortunately I didn't get to play any of the games, but the buzz around the place was amazing.

For big chunks of time, we actually had a queue of players wanting to test something, and they stood incredibly patiently for spaces to become available. It's a wonderful thing to see how many people want to play unpublished games, and how many come over specifically for the experience. And hanging out with such a wide range of game designers and other folks (especially the other volunteers) is always a pleasure and a privilege.

Time for a little rant, though... Every year we have a few designers (or even publishers) booking playtesting slots, where it is clear that their objective is to promote their crowdfunding project. The most egregious one of these I spotted this time was a very nice crew who finished their spot and as they were packing up I asked (as I often do) how things went and whether they had useful feedback. Their answer was that it was great, but they weren't looking for feedback because the game was done. I stepped away at that point and did some breathing exercises.

So what? Well, the objective of the playtest zone is to enable designers of all levels of experience to get feedback from "normal" gamers, while also providing something fun and interesting for those gamers. We explicitly aren't there to provide a free demo table for publishers. We don't really have the ability to stop this sort of stuff happening, but if you are reading this and are someone who is looking to promote your game, please know that I understand how hard it is to build up a buzz around your game and you just want to take opportunities, but you are preventing another designer having an opportunity.

Note: I am just a regular volunteer and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone who organises anything or is in any position of authority.

Magical Artifacts around the middle of the game.

Back on the main plotline, I had a playtesting slot, and this time it was Magical Artifacts, which was played by a group who had played some of my games in previous years (thanks folks!) and threw themselves right into the game. Unfortunately we didn't quite get to complete the game in the allotted time (an hour of play for four players and we had a couple of rounds left to go), but I got some useful notes. The key stuff is still to find ways to make some rules explanations clearer, and probably to tighten up cost and benefit balance a bit.

Something else I'd like to mention is the Indie Market, organised by the lovely folk who organise the Bastion convention that I have been to a few times in North Wales. This was a room with some 15 or 16 designers selling small print run games for a couple of hours, and this had a huge queue of those of us who wanted to buy stuff, which meant big delays to get into the room. It seemed to be a huge success overall, and I understand the Expo organisers are planning to allocate more space to this for next year. 

It has basically taken me a week to get myself into a state where I can think about or do anything much, but now I'm back, and I'm still buzzing about the amazing vibes from the event. I'm looking forward to next year already.

An ironic sign at the Hilton. To be fair, this was at the bar,
while they had a huge amount of other space for folk to play in.

Introducing The Artificers...

Oh good grief, it has been a long time since I wrote a blog post. I haven't stopped working on games, so let's catch up on one of the projects I have on the go...

So, The Artifact, the game I have been working on, mostly online, with Alex Cannon for quite a while now that has been through a good few iterations based around a core mechanism that is pretty much unchanged since the early days. Last year we had a really interesting playtest with someone who happened to be part of a game publisher. They gave some really interesting suggestions (being very careful to stress that this was not advice on how to get them to publish it) which we thought about, and then decided to run with to see where it would take us.

The first physical playtest of the new version, with hand-made cards because
muppet here had forgotten to bring the cards he printed and cut out the day before.

One of the biggest points was that all the way through our work, we had clung to a concept of the game being effectively a race to complete a certain number of objectives (though more recent iterations involved a sort of tic-tac-toe element on top); the advice was to try turning it into a more standard victory point game. This basically involved killing one of our darlings, but we thought, why not? If we couldn't make this work properly, we could always roll back to what we had before.

The other key suggestion was to move away from our initial setting, which was about exploiting alien technologies, and go with something more "boring". This may seem counter-intuitive, but I think the overall thrust was that the core mechanism (the way resources are accessed and exploited) seems reasonably novel, so fitting that into a more vanilla fiction and mechanical structure would be more comfortable to a lot of players - and, to be honest, it would probably work out being easier for us to actually finish.

And so, we now have a pretty generic fantasy setting, where players are building a series of artifacts, making use of magical resources that their assistants are collecting from around the land, with the artifacts being built providing various combinations of special abilities and victory points. The title, The Artifact, just doesn't seem right any more, so I've taken to calling the game The Artificers - though maybe better would be something like, Artificers of Ambivalencia...?

After some online development, Alex and I finally got a physical prototype built and met up to test it - we live a few hours apart, so this sadly doesn't happen often. A first play-through went OK, so we then concentrated on playing through the first few turns of the game a few times in a row, trying different setup options and seeing what would happen if all the random elements conspired to make things as frustrating as possible. It took a couple of rule tweaks until we were happy that things looked pretty solid, but obviously this was just with the two of us playing.

Another playtest: this time, four players, none of whom were me!

I've had a couple of playtests so far since then and it's looking promising so far. The previous major version of the game was usually taking something like half an hour to play in physical form, but we're now looking more like an hour, which actually seems appropriate for the weight and style of the game. 

So it seems we have a solid direction of travel here, and we have actually started talking about game balance, which is something that neither of us usually spend too much time on, and we think this might mean that the game is finally getting to a pretty mature state. Obviously a load more testing is required...