Up to Eleven

Looking back I see that my first post in this blog was in April 2014, so I've been blogging - albeit sporadically - about tabletop game design for eleven years. As this is a nice, round number, I figure it's probably worth a look back - and also a bit forward. 

I have a spreadsheet, on which I record all the games I developed as far as having a playable prototype and note its status, etc., and the earliest entry on there is from 2013, so pre-dating this blog. At present there are 58 entries on there. It misses a few entries, like some speed-design exercises done at an event last year, but it covers most of what I have done. Plenty of these games have had a test or two and been buried, never to be seen again. There were a good number of these games, however, that went through at least a few iterations of playtesting and improvement before being shelved, and I'll have a think about some of those in a bit.

I make it that eleven of these projects have got as far as being pitched to publishers. Some of these were a bit speculative rather than in any real expectation of getting anywhere, but four of them actually ended up being signed. Three of these fell through for various reasons - one of which did have a 30-copy limited edition made first though - leaving the one that is now out on shelves and available to buy.

5 prototypes. Clockwise from top left: Corlea, Invaded, Explore & Settle,
Boogie Knights, and in the middle, My Name is...

Thinking back over the past projects, there are plenty that I would like to go back for another look at. I went through something like this a couple of years ago, but I'm a bit more positive about game design in general than I was back then, so here are some of the ones that come to mind...

Boogie Knights is the first game that I took to a public playtest event, in 2015, and helped introduce me to the Playtest UK community. It was a game that I got to a state where it pretty much always went down well with players, but it felt like something was missing. I think there were some unnecessary complexities in it and a fresh look might find how to straighten it out.

Explore and Settle is a terrible working title for possibly the heaviest game I have designed yet. I think there was some interesting stuff in the game with resource management and map building that could have potential. It might actually be that a new title is the main thing needed here!

My Name is... is pretty much the polar opposite of the last game, and is a mind tangling party game with just a deck of cards and very few rules. For some people, this game just worked amazingly, producing laughter and agonised groans in equal amounts. There was never a satisfying end or win condition for the game though - in this sort of game, scoring and winning is rarely that important for most groups, but that aspect does need to be there for it to be sellable.

Corlea is a midweight Euro-ish game based on a real example of iron age people in Ireland building a wooden road through a peat bog. 

And finally for now, Invaded, my long-running white whale of a game with an interesting concept of being a competitive game with a players being residents of a land under attack from a powerful, non-player colonial force. I never really got this one firing properly, and have had thoughts about remaking it with squirrels, but I dunno... should I get back to it and take advantage of years of more experience, or just consign it to the archives?

That question applies to all of the games really, but I think I left Invaded in a state that is most in need of work before being worthy of a playtest. The others, though, maybe I can get them out and onto the table to see what can be done with them. 

To be fair, though, the last time I did a review of games I could get back to work on, it didn't go anywhere, so let's say that by UK Games Expo (which is just a month away), I'll have at least one of these games in a playable state and will see if I can get it to the table there, if not before.

Starting over for a new year - March is the new year, right?

Over the last couple of years, the board game design part of my life has stagnated quite a lot. While online game development and testing works pretty well, it turns out that I am most energised by regular face-to-face sessions of testing. Before Covid, I was visiting London for an afternoon of playtesting most months, having a monthly meetup with a couple of semi-local designers, and having occasional other testing opportunities at other times too. It was never the several-times-a-week testing that some folk manage, but it kept things moving along pretty nicely.

In recent months, I have started getting back to the London meetup occasionally (not regularly yet), and we have just reinstated the semi-local meetup, though I've not yet tried recruiting other local playtesters again. 

During an email exchange with another game designer recently, it occurred to me that I used to enjoy writing this blog as a rough journal that encouraged me to get thoughts into some semblance of order, and very occasionally being the start of a conversation with someone out there. I've fallen into a cycle of not feeling I have much to say and editing myself too much, as well as finding all sorts of excuses why I shouldn't write anything. I don't think this is a helpful situation, so maybe I should just pull my finger out and write something.

So, in the spirit of getting things going again, I'll make a quick note of a few of the projects I have been working on recently...

The Artifact is a tile-laying and some-other-stuff game that I have been working on with Alex Cannon, almost entirely online. There is a core of game play that works pretty well and there are several other bits of game that we have tried, but while the game has had many forms that have played pretty well, there has always been something that we have been unhappy with. This has been a really interesting process, and I think we are gradually homing in on a game that we can then work on refining properly, but there is still a little way to go.

Squirrel Invasion is a re-imagining of a game that I was working on long ago, that long-term readers of this blog might remember as Invaded. The idea is that players control tribes (now of squirrels) trying to get by in their homeland, which is invaded by an aggressive, non-player, colonial power (grey squirrels). The current version is very light and plays more like a wonky family game than I would like, but it plays, which is something, and I have some ideas.

City State Co-op is an implementation (with a terrible working title) of an idea I posted about on this blog several years ago. The core idea is players each control city states in an ancient world that are beholden to demands from both their populace and the gods; the problem is that some of the demands involve attacking each other, and you need everyone to survive and thrive in order to win. I was stuck on this for a very long time, but a discussion a few months ago with Rory Muldoon got some good ideas up, and I now have a functioning version which I think has some merit, but the challenge curve is currently terrible.

Now, let's see how often I can continue this blog...

Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed Invaders

If you have read some of my older posts, you may remember a game I have been working on, on-and-off, for several years now, with the working title, Invaded. It is based on being on the receiving end of a colonial invasion, where players are trying to respond to the overwhelming force of the non-player invaders. I had a game that showed a lot of potential, but had various things wrong with it. For instance, it was too fiddly for its depth of play, was uneven in its experience (some plays were compelling, while others were quite dull), and I think generally insufficiently focused. All of this is potentially fixable, but it has been on a back burner for a while now while I have done other things.

Recently, though, I had another wave of inspiration about the game, largely based on a few things that have been rattling around my mind...

• A publisher I was talking to a year or so back, who said I should commit to a setting for the game rather than the generic setting I had been working with.
• A discussion from all-round top chap Adam Porter in a YouTube video, suggesting that a useful exercise is to make a "junior..." or "my first..." version of a game you are working on to try to find the simplest version of a design that is true to it's core idea.
• Squirrels. Over the last few months of working from home and/or being in lockdown, my wife and I have been taking mostly-daily walks around the neighbourhood, where there is a decent population of squirrels, and we have had a running game of seeing how many we can spot. Our best so far has been seventeen.

"Squirrel Invasion" in Tabletopia.
I think that might be the new working title.

So, challenge accepted, I guess. After some monkeying about, I have a just-about-playable game for two players as an attempt to at least try out some concepts before I flesh things out some more.  It even has some features that seemed like a good idea, but I'm not yet quite sure what to do with.

The game is now set in a woodland, inhabited by assorted squirrels, which is being invaded by a population of nasty and aggressive grey squirrels. Instead of having the assorted resources that you could gather and spend in the old versions of the game, there is just one: acorns, and you are trying to gather enough acorns to feed your "clan" before winter comes or the greys take over entirely.

The old version had a series of rounds, during which you played through a hand of cards that activate the invading force in various ways (with a system that ramped up intensity as play progressed), while also taking actions for your tribe, selected from an action menu. What I have now are cards that each require you to take one action on behalf of your own clan and one for the greys, and the way to gain more cards is to trigger an event from a selection on display, and several of the events push the game towards an end.

Initial tests suggests that this works passably at the level I expect it to -- which is to work for a few turns for two players. The balance of actions isn't right, and there are some big holes in the gameplay, but I think it is worth extending the decks to allow for more play.  As with most of this year's game design work, I'm building the prototype online (in this case, in Tabletopia), which means that I don't need to be doing printing, cutting and sleeving, and also that I can get nicer pictures of the work in progress, but it is missing the immediacy of physical components. 

With several other projects also ticking along, this is a few down in priority, but it at least has some pretty straightforward tasks to do with it for now, so it might keep moving along for a while.

Virtual Invasion

So, Invaded, my old nemesis, are you back to torture me once again?

As you may remember, a couple of years or so ago, a large amount of my game design life was spent working on a "reverse colonialism" game with the working title, Invaded. The conceit is that you are tribes in a comparatively peaceful land, and have been invaded by a powerful colonial army that wants to settle in your lands and take all your stuff. Do you try to resist, keep out of the way, collaborate, or what?

The game has changed a lot from its early days, and works reasonably well, but the experience can be pretty inconsistent, and the game takes longer than I would like to explain, but it has some interesting features, particularly the way that players compete with each other and jointly control the invading force as it pushes forwards.  Eventually I pretty much burned out on the game, and it has been nearly a year since last time I looked at it.

Back in the present day, and after my chat the other day about online game testing, I have decided to buy a subscription to Tabletopia. I don't want to get into religious wars, but right now it seems to be a better fit to me than the main alternative, which I'm sure I will also continue to fiddle with a bit.  Anyway, I now have the capability to have a few games in my workshop, so I decided to start pulling Invaded's assets in to see how I do with setting it up.

Some of the Invaded components set up in Tabletopia.
If nothing else, I think this tool will be great for generating prototype rulebook illustrations.

I've actually been musing on this game for a while now, and a way forward has been bouncing around my brain. At the moment there is a system that ramps up the aggression of the invaders through the game, making them more demanding in trades and more likely to attack. The problem is that this required multi-part cards that needed to be read in conjunction with a score on a track, and this was a bit fiddly and easy for players to get confused.

The idea I am working with is that everything is done with cards, rather than my previous system of having the invaders controlled by card play but player tribe actions coming from a standard menu of options.  Under the new system, each card a player holds involves an invader action and a tribe action, and you do both of these on your turn. The ramping up of the game can come from there being two decks of these cards, the first one being more benign, but as these cards are used, they are discarded from the game and replaced by the second deck which contains more powerful actions for both sides.  This should remove the need to do all sorts of tracking and cross-referencing of status levels and action options, and make the game flow more smoothly. That's the hope, anyway.

It'll take me a little while to get all that set up as it is a massive overhaul of the game at a level that has not happened since its early days, but I think it will be at least worth trying.

Re-Invaded

I've done very little work over the last year on Invaded, my game about being on the receiving end of a colonial invasion, but that doesn't mean that I have stopped thinking about it.  By May/June last year I think I was hitting a bit of a wall with it  -- for the previous year or so it had been a major focus of effort for me, and maybe I was burning out with it a bit.  Having a project staying on the shelf for a while is not a bad thing, though, as sometimes it means I can detach myself from the details and come back with a fresh perspective.  That worked with Scurvy Crew, and I feel it is about time to take another look at Invaded.

This is another "not actually done anything" post, like my recent one about puffins wearing hats.  I feel I need to make sure I don't fall into the trap of constantly writing about things I am planning to do rather than actually doing anything but, conversely, writing things down and sharing them can sometimes help keep me moving forward. I hope you will bear with me.

In case you aren't familiar with Invaded, the outline is that you are a tribe in a relatively peaceful land that has just been invaded by a powerful (non-player) colonial force that wants your land and your resources. It's a competitive game where you win by surviving the invasion the "best", though there are opportunities to change the way you score along the way, and as a result, strategies could involve trying to run and hide, collaborating, or fighting back. The actions of the colonial power are decided by the players by playing colonial activity cards: when it is your turn you take one action for your tribe, and one on behalf of the colonial power, and those actions generally tend to make the invaders expand their base, build forts, and attack the native tribes.

This is how Invaded looked in its very first playable version.
It has come a long way since then.

Anyhoo...  With some distance from my last substantive change, it is clear that there are several structural issues with the game that I had been trying to avoid thinking about too hard, including...

• The game has a lengthy player reference sheet that is largely reminding players of the actions available to them, and players usually initially spend a lot of time referring to this. Actually there are two sheets: the second is an icon reference.  Complex (or, at least, lengthy) reference materials may be an indicator of problems in the understandability of a game that is, or should be, relatively straightforward to play.
• The central "aggression" tracking board is a bit of a kludge, and several aspects of the game require cross-referencing with this board to see how those other elements behave. For instance, the colonial activity cards have different options based on the aggression level of the invaders, and it is easy to make mistakes with this.
• The fact that players make a move using a card and a move from a menu of options using pieces on the board feels like there are different mechanisms for different parts of what they do on their turn. Which there are. The different mechanisms, while arguably justified, do add a cognitive load on the players and leads to questions.

I have been pondering this all and am now starting to think that I may be ready to make some serious changes. I have a few notes, but basically I need to find some time to knuckle down and retool the entire game with the biggest change in components for a very long time.  It's worth a try and if it doesn't work out, I will be able to roll back, so it's just time (and a load of toner and some cardstock) at risk here.  A quick outline of what I am planning to do:

• Instead of the colonial activity deck I will try having a deck of cards with combined tribal and colonial actions. As with the recent iterations, you will have a hand of cards and choose what order to play them in, and will be able to decide whether to play the tribal or colonial action first, but you must do both if you are able. Playing tribal actions from cards will remove the need for the "menu" player aid.
• You will start with an initial hand of "low intensity" activity cards, which you keep from round to round, but as the game progresses you will gain additional cards which allow more powerful actions, but which also make the colonial power more aggressive, and you will be able to get rid of your starter cards over time.
• This may not be needed, but I will probably replace the aggression board with a small event deck, which gradually ramps up the game's intensity.  The developing hands of action cards will be another way to build intensity without needing the tracker board.
• The strategy/upgrade cards may no longer be needed, but I'll probably leave them for now, though making adjustments for the other changes taking places.
• Not really necessary, but I feel an urge to retool the location cards, partly to rejig the resource distribution, though I may turn them into actual hexagonal tiles to make everything look a little nicer as we move forward.

As a bonus little aside, there's also the theme to consider. This is an odd one actually: the game is very much linked to its theme (that of being at the receiving end of a colonial invasion, which is a push back against a common trope in board games), but I have shied away from actually linking the game to a specific location or period of history.  I was talking about Invaded with a publisher recently (one who I wouldn't expect to publish it, but who expressed general interest) and they said that I should stop being so squeamish and give the game a defined setting, which should give it some more character and make it more initially appealing, even if that setting gets changed for publication.

I'm thinking about this and am considering setting up an alternate world of some sort, so as not to commit to something historical, but at least to tie everything to something a little more coherent and less vague.  We'll see.

Back From the Expo

So, another year's UK Games Expo has been and gone, and this time I traveled up the day before it started, thanks to a generous lift from a friend (thanks, Matt!), got checked into my hotel, and then wandered over to the NEC where the set-up was under way.

A view of Hall 1, mid-setup, from the Playtest Zone balcony. 

After a little help on the Cubicle 7 stand and then in the Playtest Zone, I headed back to the hotel, where I stumbled across a group of lovely people who let me play a few games with them for the evening. I seem to manage this with a different group each year, somehow finding a really relaxed and friendly group each time, and it is one of the things that makes this event so special for me. It was also lovely to catch up with these folk at breakfast each morning and occasional other times through the weekend.

On Friday I worked as a volunteer in the Playtest Zone for the morning, then had my first ever "formal" pitch meeting with a publisher in the afternoon, which was terrifying but didn't need to be, as the publisher is an absolutely lovely fellow who was easy to talk to, and was very supportive and interested in what I had to say. The outcome of this was that they won't be publishing Invaded, which is the game I was presenting, but I am welcome to pitch other games in the future, which seems a good result, and I got some very helpful suggestions.

Friday evening included the designer-publisher speed-dating event. There were something like fifteen publishers there, but twenty designers, and twelve time slots for pitches, which sounds like a horrendous mismatch, but it worked out that the designers each ended up seeing nine or ten publishers, with a couple of "break" slots in between, and it was organised so that designers mostly saw publishers that were more likely to be interested in their games. For instance, I didn't get to see the publisher of party games, who definitely wouldn't have been interested in Invaded.

By Saturday morning, after a couple of exchanges of emails based on meetings at the speed-dating, one publisher had asked for a copy of the prototype (I had a spare copy so was able to accommodate that) and another had asked for a meeting to try actually playing Invaded.

After my Saturday morning spell of volunteering I was able to quickly eat a sandwich before meeting with the publisher who wanted to play Invaded. We found a table and had a full, three-player game that demonstrated well some of the features of the game, but fell flat overall (quickly make some notes about what went wrong -- mostly that the game went too quickly and was entirely peaceful). This publisher was very interested if the issues that showed up could be addressed, and gave some really useful feedback.

Drafty Valley in play. Hand modelling by Jen.

Continuing another busy day I got back to the Playtest Zone in time for a testing slot of my own, running a play of Drafty Valley. This being something of a prime time, I hadn't even finished setting up when I had two players asking to play, and we were just starting off when another two turned up, so we reset and got going with a four player game.

So the headline news was that the game was horribly broken. One player in particular seemed to be  getting a bit frustrated by the imbalances between the action options and the objectives. I need to do a massive reworking of the game before another playtest, but I have a list of points to address and some ideas on how to progress, so I can work with that over the next week or two.

Alongside the problems that were identified, there was something totally awesome. I managed to explain the game in about five minutes, and then stepped back and managed to watch the players play the game on their own, with only a few clarifications and corrections needed here and there. I don't think I have ever spoken less during a playtest. This was an amazing feeling, and I'm holding onto that bit of win with both hands.

Saturday was rounded off with an actual sit-down dinner with some friends (some old, some new) followed by a great session of gaming (some published games, some prototypes).

On Sunday morning I had another playtesting session booked, which I had been intending to use for Drafty Valley, but given the previous day's test I felt I would not gain very much by playing that again before an overhaul, so on a whim I pulled out Boogie Knights, to take a fresh look at that.

The knights seem quite fighty at the moment, but there's that tutu...

We managed to play three games of Boogie Knights (twice with three players and once with four) in the ninety minute slot, and managed to get a good amount of feedback and insight in that time. The biggest problem at the moment is that the balance of equipment and challenge cards can be uneven, and particularly late in the game in three player games (less so with four, but it's still there) it can be frustrating to have too many equipment cards and not enough challenges.

Based on some of these discussions I am now thinking about ways to change the game to include multi-use cards (cards that work for both equipment and challenges, for instance). This would be a dramatic change to the game, but if I can figure this out it might just work. I have a couple of ideas...

The rest of Sunday was largely spent perusing the stalls around the two enormous convention halls with my wife and daughter, who had come up for the last day of the event, as they have done for the last few years. And then it was all over.

So, I've finally put my toe in the water as far as having meetings with publishers is concerned, and survived the crucible of the speed-dating. I probably wouldn't do the speed-dating again, but it was a valuable experience and helped get some dialogues going. Overall, I now feel a lot more confident about talking with publishers about my games, so will be sure to do more of that in the future. As always, the experience of being involved in the Playtest Zone was really rewarding, being an opportunity to meet and hang out with game designers ranging from first-timers to highly experienced, published veterans, who make up a great community.

Now I need to catch up on sleep, and get to work on implementing the changes I need to make to various games...

Someone Swiped Right!

Last night I had a great bit of news before I went to bed: my sell sheet for Invaded was accepted for the Designer/Publisher Speed-Dating event at UK Games Expo. The problem is that my head was buzzing after that and it took me ages to get to sleep.

OK, so what is speed-dating in this context? This is something that has been going on at US games conventions for a few years now, and is basically a session where game designers have their prototype set out on a table, and then have a series of publishers parading through to receive a 5-minute pitch on each game.  I gather that the USian way of doing this is to have the designers pay a table fee and then they are off.  It's potentially pretty efficient for both designers and publishers as while there will be a lot of misses, you get through them quickly and can potentially set up deeper meetings for later with the most likely candidates.

Not the world's sexiest sell sheet, but it got me there.

This is the second year that UK Games Expo has hosted an event like this, and it runs a little differently in that the tables are free, but there is an application process where designers submit a sell sheet (basically a one-page summary of the key attractions of the game) for one of their games, and those sell sheets are distributed to a number of the publishers who are planning on attending.  The publishers vote for the games that interest them the most and the designers of the most popular games are invited to the event. I'm not sure of the precise procedure, but that's approximately it.

The benefit here is that, if you are invited to take part on the day, you know that at least some of the publishers in attendance have expressed interest in your game. There are bound to be some who have no interest at all, but just knowing that you have impressed someone, at least a bit, is a huge boost.

So, I'm in, and now I need to figure out my pitch. I'm currently in the process of reading the "Board Game Design Advice" book from the Board Game Design Lab and there is a lot of advice in there about making pitches. So far, some of the key points to remember are:

• What is the key attraction (the hook) of the game? Focus on the experience.
• What are the basics (play time, number of players, who you are, how you win, etc.)?
• Treat the publisher like a person, have a conversation with them, and listen to what they say.
• Be ready to show the key parts of game play, but don't get bogged down in detail, so probably show the mid-game, or the coolest bit.

With that in mind, I need to craft my pitch that I can do in, say, two or three minutes, so there is space for discussion.  I'm working on it, but have just a week to go...

The Return of the Invaded

Just a quick post this time to celebrate the return of Invaded to the playtesting cycle after spending pretty much the whole of this year working on other projects.  This is not a good thing for me as, of the projects I have on the go, Invaded is probably the most advanced and the closest to being publishable. I mean, the prototype is currently version 16.

Anyway, I was expecting to not have a chance to playtest this week, but I received an email from a friend, saying that he and his wife had a change of plans, and asking if I wanted to do a playtesting session.  When testers are a very limited resource, having people actually volunteering to help is a gift horse whose mouth should not be looked into.  So they came along with another friend, and I was able to watch a 3-player game of Invaded, managing to keep out of the way most of the time other than to act as an interactive rulebook and to give a reminder or two here and there.

Three players have been invaded. Halfway through round two, and red is about to feel the pain.

I don't often sit out of playtests, sometimes as I want to increase the numbers in the game, and sometimes because I find it useful to play and get a feel for the game as it develops.  With a game in a relatively late state of development, though, it becomes increasingly useful to be able to just observe, and to be free to make notes without interrupting the flow of play.

I do miss playing though. Despite playing 20-odd times myself, I do still like the game, which has to be a good sign.

The output from the playtest was good: I have some data about scores, choices made at various times, and turning points in the game, which should all help me find the imbalances and wonky parts. Aside from a few clarifications to some rules, I don't think I need to change anything of substance before next play. And I definitely need to get in a load more tests...

Trying to Find a Balance

Over the last few years of learning to design games, I've picked up all sorts of tricks and techniques, but possibly the most interesting things I have learnt have been about my own processes and how I design games, as well as how those processes have changed over the years.

Many years ago, back in the 80's and 90's when I occasionally dabbled a little in tabletop game design, the games I came up with worked OK but were invariably duller than ditch water.  I never really got very far with any of those designs.

More recently, as I have been making a more concerted effort to develop my game design skills, I have come to realise that one of the reasons I had previously failed was that I obsessed too much about balance, and almost certainly misunderstood what balance is about in the context of tabletop games.  I probably still don't really have a complete handle on it, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

My current feelings on the matter are that balance does not mean making everything in a game equally powerful, but rather to mean that there are no strategies and no individual components or elements that as good as guarantee victory.  And similarly, there should be no component in the game (I'm talking cards, units, etc) that is never any use in a winning strategy.

I have some confidence that these two cards are reasonably well balanced.

So to make things a little more concrete, in the example of Scurvy Crew, it is totally fine for some crew cards to be more powerful than others, but there should not be any combination of crew that you could acquire without other players being able to stop you, that would make your ship into an unstoppable, loot gathering juggernaut.  Similarly, every crew card in the deck should be of enough utility that experienced players would at least sometimes choose to recruit them.

Incidentally, in this case, having crew with special abilities and skill icons, as they do, is a decent way to help this: if an ability proves to be too powerful, I can reduce its effectiveness, or decrease the icons provided by the card; conversely, a card with a weaker ability could have an extra icon added.

Thinking about this has brought be to a realisation about how my game design process has developed. Where once I worried about balance from the very start, I now leave such matters until very late on, when most of the game is settled into what I think is close to a final form.  This seems to work well for me, as it allows me to concentrate on getting the flow and the experience of the game where I want it, and it also means that I don't waste too much effort on balancing elements of the game that might change dramatically, or even disappear from the game.  See, it all comes down to constructive laziness.

I only recently started working on the balance of Invaded, after it had been in development for more than a year, and the main focus of my balancing efforts, the strategy cards, didn't even exist for a lot of that time, though they are partly based on the objective cards that I had in some early iterations.  Stressing about balance much earlier would have led to wasted effort.  And, going back to my earlier point, as I balance these strategy cards, the aim is not to make them all equally useful, but rather to make all of them compelling in some situation, even if that situation only comes up in the occasional game.  Some will get chosen most of the time, while I hope the others attract "remember that time when..." stories for those moments when they were perfect.

This delayed balancing approach does have its down sides though, primarily for me when dealing with playtesters.  When testing a game, players give their feedback based on how they perceive the game and how things go for them, so it is not unreasonable that they focus on issues that they see as being wrong with the game, and that is quite often when they see that a particular strategy or decision is stronger or weaker than they expected it to be.  One data point does not necessarily mean that there is a problem, but it can muddy the waters when, for instance, I am wanting to see how the game flows and if there are any parts of the game that cause cognitive hiccups for the players.

This sort of issue is actually more about how I handle the testers than about them, and while I have been working on games for a few years now, I still consider myself relatively inexperienced, particularly at running playtests with a wide variety of players.  As such, I am trying to learn the best ways to brief testers on what to expect from the session, and how to read their reactions and respond to them.  I feel that it is fine to tell the testers that, in this particular test, I am not looking to concentrate on balance, but when they come up with these points, it is best to just write the concern down and move on if possible. After all, knowing about the perceived imbalance may help later, and it may be easy to fix for the next prototype iteration.

Oh, and this whole "balance later" thing is, as with so many things, more of a guideline than an actual rule. Sometimes it's worth tweaking and balancing along the way, if only to remove a distraction. But remember: a little imbalance makes a game far more interesting.

Credit where credit's due: I've been thinking about this subject for a while, but it came to the front thanks to an as-always interesting post on Bastiaan Reinink's Make Them Play blog.

Back from the Dragon Invasion

Saturday was a very long day, having to leave home early in order to drive to the next town to catch a train to get me to London, then detour on an indirect route around the underground due to line closures, get to Dragonmeet, run a playtest of Invaded, help out at the Playtest UK area, actually play a few games, and then make the return journey.  All pretty much powered by coffee and pasties.

Ready to play. Thanks to the wonderful Mr Dave Wetherall for the pic.

First order of the day was in getting to the venue in time to run a playtest of Invaded at my booked time of 10:00.  This wasn't a problem, but it turned out to be a bit tricky to get a table of players at the start of the day.  Two guys eventually came and volunteered and I decided that I would rather sit out and watch a two-player game than participate in a three-player run.

The game went well, with my volunteers taking very different strategies and having role-played discussions about the relative merits of resisting versus collaboration.  One of them did keep forgetting certain parts of the game (I need to examine whether that is a problem with the game, or not something to worry about), but the other seemed to get comfortable with it all pretty quickly and built a strategy to follow.  As is often the case, an aggressive approach against the colonial forces ended in disaster, but it would have actually not taken too much to go differently for things to have worked out better.  I think that fighting back is a strategy that is difficult to profit from, but it is possible, and those times it works out are great.

My main intent with this playtest was to try out my new way of dealing with strategy cards and controlling access to them: each has a value, and the total value of strategy cards you hold may not exceed the current colonial attitude score.  I'm not 100% happy with the way you have to add things up and compare them with a number on a chart, but it seems to work well overall, preventing one player from having easy access to the best cards, and allowing for some planning ahead, so it may well be worth the small amount of complexity.  The values I have assigned to the cards don't seem too far off the mark at the moment, but I'll need to do a load more playtesting to be sure of this.

The pacing of the game seemed pretty good though, and we took almost exactly an hour to get through the game, which ended half way through the fourth round.

So we're definitely making progress here, but I need to get more playtesting done to check how the pacing is really working out, and to find the imbalances in the costings of the strategy cards.  There's still this issue where a player who attacks the colonial power without sufficient preparation usually ends up getting into huge trouble very quickly.  My inclination here is to just let it go as a feature of the game.  I'm sure that this is going to be a controversial part of the game, so it'll be interesting to see what gets said when I finally start talking to publishers about it.

Apart from running a playtest of Invaded, I spent a little while looking around the rest of the convention, including the now separate trade hall, but didn't get much of a chance to stop and really smell the metaphorical coffee before I got back to spend the bulk of the afternoon helping out at the playtest zone.  It felt a bit harder to attract players to join in tests than it was last year, probably mainly because there was less footfall in the area where we were. But we managed to get plenty of people in, many of whom had come over specifically, which was great.

I got to play a few games myself, mostly after the closing of the trade hall and playtest zone, which was very welcome before heading home for a beer.

The Invasion Plods Onwards

What with one thing and another it has been a good few weeks since my last playtest of Invaded, and this was a bit of a two-edged sword in that it was good to have a bit of a break and clear my head of a game that I had been becoming a bit too close to, but conversely, getting back into the swing of things took some real effort.  Two of my local playtesting pool came along and joined me for a run of the latest iteration of the game, with a couple of very minor tweaks since last time. 

I have been thinking lately that the game seems to have more or less the shape I want for it, and most of the elements are basically OK, but we've been having difficulty with pacing and the length of the game.  Specifically, in several test plays we have seen the game ending in a way that left everyone thinking that they hadn't quite played long enough to get strategies up and running properly.  So my tweaks were mostly an attempt to make the game give players just a few more turns and to have more opportunity to execute a strategy.

This particular play went amazingly well.  Play time was almost exactly an hour, one player got a comfortable (actually too comfortable, but that's mostly a number balancing issue) win, with the other two of us both feeling that if we had just had another couple of turns we'd have done a lot better, and possibly even won.  There were a heap of balance issues, but the flow and feel were all pretty much what I wanted, and I ended up with a good pile of notes from in play and feedback from afterwards.

The thing to recognise at times like this is that one good play doesn't mean that the game is done, but it shows that the game can be good.  What remains is pretty much to look for all the problems and do everything I can to make those good plays happen every time rather than occasionally.

I would like now to start moving the testing and development into a new phase.  I have been joining in most of the plays so far, but while this gives me a good feel for the game and how it feels to play it, it means I can't really observe the other players and the flow of play quite as well, so I plan to sit out and watch more often.  I also need a combination of a pool of experienced players repeatedly playing (I have a few fine people here who can help there) and a few more newbie groups to play the game for the first time or two.  Overall, the emphasis now has to be on hunting down those imbalances and broken elements that I haven't been worrying about so far; the game has its shape, so I don't want to make major changes at this point.

I also probably need to find a new name for the game.  The current working title, "Invaded", does seem to be a sticking point for a few players who go in expecting a combat game, which this most definitely is not.  It's only a working title, but it has been problematic.

Hare Today, Invaded Tomorrow

I had been planning to stop taking Invaded to playtesting meetups in London as I thought the game was stabilising and would be better off getting focussed testing for a while from a group who could play the game repeatedly and look for problems.  Well, while the rate of change has slowed a lot, as this month's third-Sunday meetup approached, I felt that I could do with some more input from other designers, so off I went...

Getting to London was a bit more problematic than usual as the rail line I usually travel on was closed, so I had to take a detour via Oxford and end up at a different London terminal.  On the plus side, on the train from Oxford there were a couple of young women handing out free promotional chocolate, which went nicely with the coffee I had just bought myself.

Anyway, when the playtesting started up I was allocated a table in the first 90 minute slot, and had three other designers joining me, including two who had played an earlier incarnation of the game.

See? Actual people playing with me! Thanks to Rob Harris for the photo.

Overall the game went pretty well and I got a good combination of supportive and critical feedback.  The game ran for 50 minutes, which was great as I am hoping to keep it at about an hour, but there was a general feeling that the ending was a bit abrupt and came too early to allow strategies to really come into play.  This feeling was exacerbated by the "strategy" cards we had in play, which give an in-game benefit and an end-game scoring bonus, as these are definitely too hard to take advantage of.

Another issue was the balance of the cards in the colonial activity deck, and some aspects of how they work.  The approach I use works pretty well, I think, but there are points where things can be overlooked (like when the colonial aggression level changes), and the way things played out there just wasn't enough colonial presence on the board by the end of the game.

All of this is very fixable, and our discussion after the game came up with some good ideas, so I'll be trying some of them out in the coming weeks.  Unfortunately, though, this means that I won't be doing something that I was hoping to do.

Each year there is a contest run by a German games club called Hippodice, where the club members and a group of publishers combine to judge a variety of unpublished games. A couple of my friends at Playtest UK have actually won this contest.  It's quite a prestigious contest as these things go, but one of the big benefits is getting blind playtesting and written feedback from the club members if your game is selected for the "main round" of the contest.  The deadline for submission of rulebooks and supporting blurb is only a couple of weeks away, and with the amount of work I still want to do (and test) on Invaded, I feel that I'm just not going to get there in time.  It's a shame, but no big deal. Maybe next time.

Seasonal Invasions

I'm making slow but steady progress on Invaded and am working on yet another revision of the game: the new version is number 13. This iteration is actually a relatively small change from version 12, being mostly component tweaks, hopefully improving clarity, and a little reworking of some of the card texts, as well as introducing "default" setups which mean that first-time players won't need to worry about initial placement of their pieces.

One of the small, cosmetic changes, though, is reflecting the way I have been explaining the game, and the realisation that I might as well just embrace a metaphor.  The way the game works, you "activate" your units on the board in order to take an action, and activation means moving the piece from one space on a card to another.  One round is a "square" round and all the pieces move into the square space, and when everything is in the square on the card, the round is over. The next round is then a "circle" round, and units move back to the circle spaces. It's basically just a way to keep track of what pieces have been used without having to reset everything at the end of each round.

This works well, but some people find it a bit abstract and weird, so I have started explaining it as, "You might want to think about one round being one season, say the spring, and the circle is where you put units that have done something in the spring," and so on.  This metaphor seems to work pretty well, so I figured I might as well make it explicit in the game.

Subtle season signage.

So all I did was to add the words "spring" and "autumn" into the two activation spaces on the location cards, and now the explanation will reference these and I am hoping this will make things a little more intuitive.  I'm hoping to do some playtesting this week, so we'll soon see how it goes down.

Of course, I'm bracing myself for comments and questions about whether the seasons are mechanically different -- they aren't.  If I wanted to get thematic I could make seasons have an effect on resource gathering (for example, grain is more plentiful in the autumn), but I suspect this might be adding more complexity for no real gain.  We'll see...

Lessons in Perspective... and Invaded

This weekend just past was another Playtest UK Sunday afternoon session in London, and once again I took Invaded along to see how things were going.  On this occasion, things went a little differently.

We had a four player game (including myself), and I settled in to explain the rules, acutely aware that partly as the game has been changing a lot recently, I haven't really developed an effective rules explanation.  This is something I really need to work on.  I was a few minutes into this ropy rules run-through when I started getting questions from the player to my left.  These weren't the typical request for clarification that I am used to, but more fundamental, calling into question the game from a very basic level and my assumptions about what the players would understand.  

I really should start thinking of a way to tidy things up and make the game look neater on the table.

It quickly became apparent that this particular player was not a hobby gamer like the rest of us around the table and did not have the shared vocabulary that the rest of us knew.  We ended up being a bit derailed into a conversation kicked off by questions about why anyone would invent a game as complicated as this one and what families I thought would be interested in it.

While frustrating at the time, this is actually an interesting point to ponder.  Invaded, by hobby game standards, is not a particularly complex game, but it takes a lot more explaining than the sort of mainstream games you can buy in high street shops in the lead-up to Christmas.  If it was given to the average non-geek family, it might be opened and the rules looked at, and then put straight in the pile of stuff to be sent to the charity shop.  It is important to keep in mind who the target audience for a game design is, and who it is not.

Despite being hit and slowed down by the Sledgehammer of Perspective and the Cricket Bat of Confusion, we did get a couple of rounds of the game played, during which I saw evidence that my new system for controlling the colonial power worked well in general (though some actions were too frequent and became dull and repetitive as a result) and, pleasingly, I saw the two more experienced gamers in the group grokking the rules easily and being able to explain them to the non-gamer.  I identified a few other small issues, but I think this test was mostly more evidence that I really need to start moving into a new phase of playtesting.

So the plan now is to fix the issues we identified in the current version of the game and then start to work on more intensive playtesting.  Yes, I know this game's development has actually been pretty intense (by my standards) over the last couple of months, but in this case I mean that I need to have people playing the game multiple times, look for balance issues, try all the different combinations of finale/mission cards, really concentrate on finding and fixing any areas where people get confused or disengaged.  Basically, it's a matter of turning what I think is now a reasonably decent game into a good (and hopefully great) one.

As Matt Leacock might say, the first 80% of the work is done.  Only 80% more to go...

What's in a Name?

Names have a lot of power, and I had a reminder of this recently when a playtester was giving me feedback about Invaded.  To him, the game's title suggested that there would be armies and fighting, and in practice, an entire game of Invaded can go by without any actual combat happening.  The mismatch of expectations with reality was a problem for him.  (He also had some other very interesting bits of feedback, but I'll focus on this one for the moment.)

So, as the game has developed, I've started to think that the combat side of things is not really the default focus.  I think that the threat of violence is probably more important than the violence itself, and if there isn't actually any fighting, that is fine, particularly if the reason for there being no combat is that the players were actively working to avoid it due to the danger it promises.

Turns out it wasn't just the British getting up to this sort of thing.
By Anonymous French engraver 1883 - "Histoire de la France" Milan Jeunesse, p.209, Public Domain, Link

On a related issue, I have been calling the players' mobile forces "warbands", but was called out on this by another playtester at UK Games Expo, who suggested that a different name would align better with their usual function within the game.  He's absolutely right, and at his prompting, I have started referring to them as "hunting parties", which is starting to feel a lot better.

I'm really not sure about the best way to address colonialism.  In the real world, colonial invasions often ended up with some real atrocities being committed, and at the very least, indigenous peoples were forced to take part in systems that were not in their own long-term best interests.  The atrocities and injustices were considered to be justified in the pursuit of profit (or in order to bring civilisation to the savages, the classic bogus rationale), rather than being the objective.  With colonial invaders typically having such a huge technological advantage over the indigenous peoples, though, any resultant violence can inevitably be blamed of those holding the power rather than those who feel threatened and fight back.

A game exploring these themes, where humans are considered to be resources, obstacles, and even animals that need to be trained, could get really dark and heavy.  The problem is that I want this to actually end up being a game, something that people can enjoy playing and hopefully helps to generate stories.  Anything above that is cool, but I'm aiming at having a game rather than a history lesson or a polemic.  That said, I keep thinking myself round in circles, as the theme of Invaded is so influential in what design decisions I make, and the invaders need, at the very least, to treat the natives unfairly.

And the playtester's comment about the title has made me think.  Based on a 10 second description of the theme, this game could go in a number of different directions, and the way it plays at the moment could result in several of them.  I normally don't worry about game titles: for the most part they are working titles, and can change later, but in this case, the title is instilling expectations that often are not fulfilled.  If it was called "Game 2016-K", or "Steve", there would be no such baggage.

"Invaded" as a title might be best consigned to history, but what to replace it with?  Some of the ideas people have come up with over the months might be better, like "Colonised", "Colonialism", or "Indigenous" all have their own potential implications.

I guess that at some point I need to just choose something that seems to do a reasonable job of representing the game and its theme, and just live with it.  After all, if this actually ends up being published it may well get renamed or get a specific historical setting, so it's not really worth losing sleep over.

I realise that this post is a little incoherent as I am partly using it to help me think some things through, but I would love to hear anyone's thoughts about the subject.  Particularly if any of you have any insights into any of the periods of history where a colonial invasion has taken place, but general thoughts and opinions would be great too.

Run to the Hills!

I've had another period of fairly intensive testing of Invaded.  This little wave kicked off with a trip to the monthly Sunday afternoon Playtest UK meetup in London on a baking hot day. 

As always this was a great get-together, and I played three really interesting games, all very different, created by other players (a dice allocation thingy, a timed co-op, and an abstract tessellation game), but also had a 3-player play of Invaded.  

Now, this test went a similar way to the second game at UK Games Expo: one player attacked the colonial power a bit too early and was smacked down for it, only this time the retaliation was not quite as overwhelming, so the player in question was left dangling in the wind, feeling helpless, while the rest of the game completed around him.

The end of a 3-player game where red got themselves into a world of pain.

This all led to a very interesting discussion about what the game should be: should it be punishing and realistic, or should it be more easygoing and forgiving of mistakes?  To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure where on that line it should fall, but I'm getting more of a feeling about it.  I think it should probably be pretty punishing, but hopefully have players able to see the likely outcomes of their actions, even on their first play, and that latter part is somewhere the game is currently falling down.  It also shouldn't be a war game, though violence should be an option that could be a plausible route to victory.

Another thing that came out of this was a thought that, perhaps, under certain circumstances, players should be able to escape from attacks or have options other than trading in favour cards (gained from supplying the colonials with their resource demands), which is currently the only defense.  I labelled this approach the "Run to the hills" strategy in my head, then went home to sleep on it.

Sleep is an essential ingredient in game design.

What this feedback, thinking and sleeping resulted in was a few cards that I labelled "finale cards" (I hate the name, but I'll think of something better later), which effectively provide special bonuses, either in victory points or in capabilities, which can be claimed and used in specific circumstances, and each player may only claim one of these cards during a game.  One of these, for instance, allows you to abandon your villages and be more mobile for the rest of the game, while another protects you from colonial attack as long as you keep them sweet.

Over the following few days I had a couple of two-player games and then went to another Playtest UK meetup, this time in Oxford, where we had a three-player game.  Distilling the key points from player feedback and my observations, I think the key things are:

• The "finale" cards look like they could well be the making of the game.
• BUT they absolutely are not right at the moment, neither in their form, how they are gained, or how I handle the opportunities for players to collect them.
• For a first game, there really needs to be a "standard" start, a bit like used in Catan, as new players rarely have a clue about where to set up.
• Villages are a bit boring: they need something else to do.  In fact there probably need to be one or two more things to do, though these could easily link to whatever the finale cards evolve into.
• Remembering to flip colonial movement cards can be a problem with some play groups. 

I'm churning over ideas at the moment about how to address these.  I'm looking at a fairly big change now which mostly has a go at the last of those bullets: flip a colonial move card on every player's turn.  This would require a lot of rethinking, but I think I know how to do this, and along with some reworking of the finale cards it could yield interesting results.  I'll be working on this over the next few days, and then see where this takes us...

Invaded in Birmingham

I said I would go into the results of my playtesting at UK Games Expo, so here we go.  I had two 90 minute slots for playtesting, and as Invaded tends to run for approximately an hour at the moment, one slot is just about perfect for playing once, when you figure in rules explanations, discussions and feedback.

Blurry, blurry, blurry, but I used the good pic in the last post.
You aren't here for the quality photography are you?

My first game was on Friday afternoon when the Playtest Zone was having a slightly slow recruitment period.  I had two people volunteering to play, Amy and Kevin, and I decided to join in to make it a three.  This isn't really ideal, as my taking part means that I can't observe other players as well and may influence play more than I would like, but at this stage I am still building up a feel for the game, and I wanted to get more plays at three or four players if I could.

Overall the game went pretty smoothly, but the start of the game felt a little slow and aimless, partly because of the lack of initial demands, and partly because of the colonial power being slow in its initial advance.  Still!  The end of the game felt a little abrupt and there was a feeling that the colonial power could be more aggressive.  This latter point keeps coming up, and I keep tweaking, but I never seem to get it right.  I think I have probably been to gentle with the tweaks.  I remember some experienced designer (I have a feeling it was either Matt Leacock or Rob Daviau) talking about how when you are adjusting values in games you should go large on the changes, either halving or doubling rather than just tweaking the numbers.  At least to start with.  I clearly haven't internalised this.

I didn't want to change too much before the next test, but after a little thinking I figured that I could make a couple of small changes to the colonial attitude chart to hopefully accelerate the start.  The game at this point involved one colonial move after each player move until the colonial power got very aggressive later in the game, so I thought that possibly I could just up this to two cards at a time at the beginning, so the first few moves would involve the regiments expanding quickly, and then settle down to a more steady pace.  Alongside this I brought the first drawing of an attack card to an earlier stage, meaning that, particularly given the increased pace of movement, there was a chance of an attack at the end of the first round of play.

Can you spot the changes I made?

The Sunday test was astonishing.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I had a group of four players, Connor, Helen, Heather, and Derek, queueing to play before I was even set up, and they sat attentively through my inexpert rules explanation.  As an aside, at this stage of a game's development I find explanations difficult as the game is in a state of flux and I haven't yet got a handle on the best way to explain it.  Later on, when the game is relatively stable and I am teaching the game multiple times between revisions, the explanation can get a lot smoother.  Hopefully we'll get there with Invaded sometime soonish.

Anyway, the game started and over the first few turns I found myself needing to intervene or answer questions less and less.  One of the players wasn't quite clicking on some of the rules, but the others were able to put her straight without my help.  The game seemed to be flowing nicely, there was a little table talk, and the players all seemed well engaged.

Then something cool happened.

One of the players figured that they liked the idea of the victory points available from attacking he colonial power.  I had to clarify the attack system a bit, but the attack worked fine, knocking out a couple of colonial units and earning a couple of points of enmity.  Then the counterattacks started, and at the end of the round the attacking player, who didn't have many of the favour cards which are used as defences, got knocked back to just possessing a single village, and the following turn got wiped off the board.  He was logically eliminated one round (about 10 minutes of play) before being actually eliminated, triggering the end game condition I wasn't expecting to see for some time.

This whole turn of events was treated as a good bit of fun by the players, but revealed a part of the game that hasn't really shown up before.  We have now seen that the enmity system can result in devastating attacks from the colonial power, meaning that a player must think hard before attacking them and be ready for the potential counterattack.  I need to think about this and whether I need to protect players is some way from making a boneheaded move like attacking when they are not ready, but at the moment I am inclined to leave things more or less as they are and hopefully just make it clear in rules explanations just how dangerous attacks are.  On the other hand, it would be cool to make it so that the potential gain is enough to make players willing to risk it, so perhaps the victory point payoff for enmity tokens could go up.

More generally, I think the colonial behaviour is moving in the right direction, but is not there yet.  I am planning to make use of the different location terrains (the map cards are currently different colours, but this is purely decorative so far) as an input for deciding what moves the regiments make, which will make things rather less predictable than they are now.

Whoa!  An idea has just come to mind.  If I make a load more movement cards than are necessary and use a subset of them for any given play, it means that there will be a heap of uncertainty about what the colonial power will do at the start, but players should be able to learn the colonials' preferences and be able to predict its movements to some degree.  That has to be worth trying...

Anyway, thanks to all the testers from last weekend: you were all great and have given me a load to think about.  Now can I improve things some more...?

Completely Expo'ed

Wow, that was a heck of a weekend, with playtesting, wearing a red t-shirt, meeting heaps of people, negotiating rain and Take That fans, quite a lot of caffeine, and not as much actual playing of games as you might expect for a visit to UK Games Expo.

TL;DR: A couple of Invaded playtests, useful feedback, played some other stuff too, met and talked with a lot of people, had a great time.

So, I arrived on Friday morning, having been fortunate to meet friends en route at Oxford station, and had three hours available to explore the hall before my first playtesting slot in the afternoon.  The Playtest Zone was relatively quiet on Friday, but doing steady business, and I ended up joining in a game of Invaded to make a three-player test with a couple of innocent victims.  Normally at an event like this I would sit out and watch, but joining in was quite useful this time.  After this I donned the red shirt uniform of the Zone volunteers and helped pull in additional players for other designers.

A few rounds into the Sunday test of Invaded and it's all gone a bit pair shaped for green.

The close of the trade hall was followed by a trip to a seminar room where I was volunteering to help at the designer-publisher speed dating event.  This was a small and intense event with twelve game designers setting up one of their games on a table and then being visited by representatives of twelve publishers in a series of five-minute pitch meetings.  This was absolutely exhausting to watch, and I'm not sure how well I would do in those circumstances, so I'm really impressed with how all the designers did.  It's also interesting to note that, due to the screening process, which involved the publishers who planned to attend, that all of the designers had at least four of the companies interested in their games, so while nobody was interested in everything, there was already a feeling that nobody's time would be wasted.  (As an aside, I ended up having an interesting chat about these events with Seth Jaffee, who just turned up to see what was going on, and ended up signing my newly-acquired Eminent Domain expansion.)

Friday evening was rounded off by another designer-publisher event, this time an informal networking opportunity.  To be honest, I didn't make the most out of this, though a number of other designers took advantage of the chance to show some of their games to a few publishers, so hopefully someone got a break there.  I did, however, get a chance to play a prototype of a great game about badass princesses defending their kingdom from their evil uncle, which I really want to be able to buy some time soon.  After that it was a trudge through rain and a sea of Take That fans to get to my hotel for the night.

On Saturday I spent the morning working at the Playtest Zone, which started off being pretty hard work to pull in potential testers, but after barely half an hour people were queueing up to join test games, so the challenge was actually to find somewhere for them to play.  This is a fantastic problem to have, and it is lovely to see that so many people are interested in prototypes.  In fact, talking to a few people it is clear that for some of them coming to play works-in-progress is a major part of the Expo experience.

My afternoon was free, so I wandered about talking to people, playing a couple of demo games, and joining in a rather nice prototype about Jazz music in the Playtest Zone.  I was knackered after all this, so returned to the hotel reasonably early, where I stumbled across a lovely group of people who let me play a game of Giants with them for a while.

This seems to be developing into a pattern for me: Saturday evening is the time I just end up having a relaxed gaming session with strangers away from the main convention sites.  Long may this continue -- it is times like this which remind me of some of the reasons I love board games so much.

Finally we get to Sunday, when I started off the day by  with another 90 minute slot for testing Invaded in the Playtest zone.  I got in early and was just starting to set up when a couple of people came around and asked if they and the other couple of members of their family could play.  This was amazing and the upshot was that by the time the official start of my time had come, we were already well into the rules explanation and could get started really promptly.  I'll go into what I learned from the Invaded playtests in a later post.

For most of the rest of the day I was hanging out with S and Miss B, who had come up for the last day, though Miss B spent a good chunk of the time in the kids' roleplaying games corner, which is a highlight of her year.

So, that's what I did with my weekend.  I'm still processing some of what went on, but it was great to build up a little morale and direction.

Nearly Ready to Invade Expo

It's just a few days until UK Games expo, and I need to get my biggest objective for the event sorted: stabilise a prototype of Invaded that can be run at the Playtest Zone with innocent, unsuspecting members of the gaming public.  That means I need to be reasonably confident that it will play OK and not collapse under its own weight.  It doesn't have to be perfect, of course, but I don't want to waste the valuable time of the playtesters.

So, after my recent frenzy of high speed testing and development, the latest revision of Invaded was a fairly small change in time to get to a Playtest UK meetup in Oxford (at the Thirsty Meeples boardgame cafe) where I played the game with a couple of fellow designers.

Here we are about 2/3 of the way through a test game of Invaded,
with the colonial forces getting pretty well advanced and starting to launch attacks.

The upshot is that we identified a few problems, which were mostly things that I already knew about or suspected, and weren't show-stoppers.  We had some useful discussion about possible ways to fix things and additions to the game to fill gaps, and also noted a few minor things that could do with being tidied up.  Overall, though, I am getting more confident that the core of the game is looking at least OK.

Given all that, I'm planning to make a couple of small changes and then spend the next couple of days getting the prototype ready.  If a couple of plays with fresh people don't show up anything structurally wrong I plan to move on to looking at those gaps I mentioned (and it may turn out they are not really a major issue) and then move on to an exciting new stage of playtesting: checking balance and looking for interesting ways to break the game.

As for UK Games Expo, that is, as you may know, at the Birmingham NEC from the 2nd to the 4th June.  I have so far booked two playtesting sessions: 14:30-16:00 on Friday, and 10:00-11:30 on Sunday.  I will probably leave it at just those sessions, though I will also be volunteering at the Playtest Zone at various other times, so please drop by and say hello -- and play a prototype, ideally!