Meetups and Resurrections

I've not been going regularly to playtest meetups since before Covid - I've been to a handful, but that's in comparison to generally about one a month beforehand. But then the lovely Naomi and Callum, designers of Platypus, and friends and helpers at the UKGE Playtest Zone, decided to reestablish the Oxford meetup at a pub around the edge of the city, a location that is much easier to get to for an out-of-towner like me than the city centre would be. 

So we've had two meetings so far, taking place on the last Wednesday of each month. The meetups are a bit shorter than other ones I have been to, with the structure so far being two slots of an hour or so each. We have so far been fortunate to have several attendees each time who hadn't brought games and just wanted to play, which makes it far easier to make sure everyone who did bring a game can get it tested.

Bits of three prototypes: Boogie Knights, Reign of Terror, and My Name Is...

I've been on a bit of a run of trying out old, shelved projects, as I was musing back in my post in April. I have tried out two of the games mentioned in that post and one other, so I think I'm doing OK on that front. The aim of the tests was what one of the other designers described as a "vibe check", it was kinda like throwing part-cooked spaghetti at a window to see what sticks. 

Reign of Terror is a game that I threw together long ago as a possible party favour at a French Revolution themed event, and is a hidden role game where multiple players can win or lose according to their individual role. I playtested and revised it a couple of times, but I didn't persist long enough to get to a place I was happy with. The game worked OK in this test; the players enjoyed it overall, but some elements were unclear or inconsistent, and it was a bit frustrating in places. The concept was a hit and the flow of the game was good, so maybe if I can tidy up the messy bits, it could become something to take further. It does have the disadvantage of four players being the minimum count for a decent game, so that's a limitation for testing and potential pitching.

My Name Is... is about memory and mental agility and I am truly terrible at playing it. The game is great at inducing both pain and laughter, sometimes simultaneously, but has a potential issue with timid players - if nobody is brave enough to challenge other players over their mistakes, nothing happens in the game. In its current state, tracking what cards people have in their stacks can be a big issue too - though with more players (we had only three, which I think is the minimum) that is likely to be less, though there would be other challenges coming into play. All in all, this feels like it is one or two small rule changes away from being "done", but I don't really have inspiration. Maybe this is one I should talk to one of my game designer friends about possibly turning it into a co-design.

This week I got Boogie Knights out. This is the first game I ever took to a specific playtesting event, and I have a real soft spot for it, though that may be a problem, preventing me from either letting go of it or making a dramatic change. Shockingly, it has been seven years since the last revision I made to the game, so this fresh look was long overdue. The game has, practically from the start, been enjoyed by players in general, but has just been a bit hollow, with actions being frustratingly unavailable, periods of play being repetitive, an unexciting endgame, or any number of other flaws at different stages of development. My players this time played the game in the spirit that is intended (it's pretty much a family game with gentler conflict than you might imagine), found that the game is basically OK (as usual - engagement was good) but the discussion afterwards came up with a whole lot of potential avenues to explore.

All in all, I think I will be spending some time on Boogie Knights and seeing if I can address its current flaws. I mean, I'm seven years older, and a load more experienced, so maybe the game has a chance...

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.

A Little Light Playtesting

I've recently had a couple of playtesting sessions (one at home and one over lunch at work) when we have played a couple of my lighter games, just generally looking for what needs to be done to them to make them better.

Cards, meeples and cake, the recipe for a good evening of playtesting.

After bringing My Name Is... to a Playtest UK meetup, I've been looking to see if there is anything to be done for the end of the game.  Other game designers had observed that, at least in the test game they played, the last couple of turns can feel a bit trivial and maybe there needs to be something to provide some sort of finale, so the game ends on a bit of a high.  We tried out the idea I had to make people have to remember any cards they have left in front of them in order to score them, but this felt really clunky and unfun, so got abandoned pretty quickly.  Further plays seemed generally fine as it is, though it sometimes feels a bit weird when one player builds up a big stack of cards, and the game seems very variable in its feel depending on how good people's memories are and how confident they are at making challenges.  What I need to do next is to use a rule where players grab a token in order to make a challenge and see how that goes.

One of my old 24 hour games, Treasures of Atlantis, has been busted out of deep storage for another look, and we have had a few plays, now working in a limited number of meeples that each player can use through the game -- originally you could take part in all rounds, however many there are, but now, if you place a meeple during a round (which you do to claim treasure, and you might miss your chance if the waters rise too quickly), that meeple is used up, so you may run out before the game is over.  This approach actually seems to work well and adds a little more tension, but it does sometimes mean that one or two players have to sit out the last round.  There are also possible issues when one player can sometimes collect enormous amounts of treasure if other players wimp out too soon, and also there is a non-zero chance that the game will end before anyone has collected any treasure.  I'd also like to rethink the set collection rules and possibly make monsters and boats work a little differently.

What's my name again?

I have recently been taking a fresh look at some of my game designs that I haven't touched for a while, and this week it has been the turn of "My Name Is...", the game that I had previously described as an icebreaker game of memory and mental agility, a description I haven't been able to improve on yet.  The game got pulled out at a Playtest UK meetup at Thirsty Meeples in Oxford and was, appropriately enough, used as a starter game while we waited for a few more people to arrive.

Just as a quick reminder, the game involves players taking it in turns to reveal cards which express an opinion (love or hate) about some subject or other (like cats, dogs, football, or vegetables) and you have to try to remember which other players have opinions on the same subjects as you, and what they are. The wrinkles come in that some cards invert your opinions (all of them!), and you can challenge other players if you think they got something wrong.

Striking fear into everyone's hearts -- and not just the player who drew the card!

The headline result is that the game went down fantastically well.  Once again there was a great combination of laughter and tortured facial expressions, which I think is a perfect reaction for a game of this type.

It wasn't all perfect, of course, and my woolly rules on what happens if you flip a card that contradicts one of your previous opinions were exposed for what they were (woolly and unsatisfactory) but with the help of the players we switched to an improved version that seems to work better.  More troubling is that the end of the game can just feel like that last bit of the roller coaster where you are just coasting slowly back, maybe still laughing (or nauseous) from what happened a little earlier, but generally just waiting to get off so you can get on with something else.  In other words, the end of the game was rather anticlimactic.

So this is my challenge right now, to give the end-game some kind of spark.  My instant thought was to make the exact moment of the game end to be less predictable, say by shuffling an "end of game" card into the bottom few cards of the deck, which I think would improve things but probably not by much.  An alternative approach, as suggested by one of the players, might be to make players name the cards they have left in their stack (if any) in order to score points for them, and I think some variation on this could be good.  I will certainly be testing some variants like this.  I'm also wondering about the optimum size of the deck, but I think that can be worried about later.

Keeping Score in My Name Is...

In my recent tests of My Name Is..., one of the key elements I was trying to figure out was how to keep score.  A game of this sort probably doesn't really have to have a totally robust scoring system as playing it is mostly about the interaction between players on a social level, but it still needs a way to determine a winner that feels reasonable to the players.

The original version of the game had counters which moved around as challenges were made, and they provided a measure of success.  In the latest iteration, the counters have gone and scoring is being done with cards themselves: if you successfully challenge someone, you add the cards in their "live" stack to your score pile, and if your challenge is unsuccessful they gain your stack.

Some games look compelling when they are set up on the table. This is not one of those games.

This now opens up a question: should the winner be determined by who has been "correct" in the most challenges, or by who has accumulated the most cards in their score pile?

Luckily, it's possible to try both methods out simultaneously.  If one approach or the other is chosen, it might change how some people play the game, but I figure that those players would be in a minority, and possibly not the core target audience anyway.

So, what I have done for recent playtests is ask players to keep the cards they gain in challenges in separate piles so we can count how many "tricks" (that's technically an inappropriate term but it's what I'm thinking in my head) they win as well as how many cards they have in total.  I can record both sets of scores, along with what I call the "people's choice", where I ask everyone who they feel did best in the game and thus deserved to win.

This last point is one that I need to remember for the future.  It won't be appropriate for all games, but I think that for many it would be a really useful piece of feedback to ask for.  Where scores aren't being obviously tallied in a game, players often have a perception of who they feel is doing the best.  This is often mistaken, and surprise turnarounds can really add excitement to an endgame, but I think that seeing how well players' perceptions line up with the actual result may be very interesting.

I have so far only run a couple of test games using this game, but in both cases, all three measures lined up pretty well.  The player who everyone believed did the best amassed the most cards and either took the most "tricks" or tied for the most.  I am planning to do a few more playtests using this approach, but it is actually looking like whichever scoring scheme I settle on will probably be fine.  I'm guessing that the "just count the cards" system is probably best (pending further data) as, while there is a bit more counting, it is simpler (people do manage to get mixed up trying to track those tricks) and has the added benefit of being far less likely to result in a tie.

Meeting Dragons

I have been meaning to go to the Dragonmeet convention for many years.  It is a one-day annual event that has been held in London for decades, and has a great reputation for being fun and friendly.  The focus has traditionally been roleplaying, but these days it seems to be a general tabletop gaming event.  Finally, this weekend I managed to make the trip.

Once again I totally failed to take a usable photo, so here's this year's t-shirt design, totally yoinked from the Dragonmeet website. I hope they don't mind.

I can't tell you much about the con overall as I spent most of my time in the Playtest UK area, but I can say that there was a good trade hall, which included spaces for gaming of various types (including the "best of Essen" tables and the playtest zone), and roleplaying games, seminars and other stuff was taking place somewhere or other.  Oh, and the venue was comfortable, reasonably spacious, had good toilets, and was only about 5 minutes' walk from the nearest tube station.

Anyway, hanging around the playtest area allowed me to see a lot of great looking prototypes, and managed to play a few of them: a game about building skyscrapers, a game based on running game shows (with a modified Monty Hall mechanism), and a game about rolling dice to build gene sequences.

I had taken along "My Name Is...", which I am now usually describing as an ice-breaker game of memory and mental agility, which seems to both scare and intrigue people.  We had two plays of the game with different groups (I joined in on one of them) and had very different experiences with them.

The first group provided a constant flow of questions, suggestions, arguments and interruptions, identifying quite a lot of issues that need thinking about.  There was one player in particular, who was quite assertive in poking at the game and at me, but it was in good humour and he was genuinely being helpful (and, pleasingly, on the feedback form gave the game top marks for "fun").  This group had some roleplaying of opinions that turned up on cards, and some fairly tight policing of the rules about when turns finish and challenges are allowed.

The second group was a great contrast, just grokking the idea of the game immediately (with one or two questions after starting) and playing in a really relaxed way.  A few turns in and it looked like this group were old hands, and I could just sit back and watch as they played at their own pace, effectively house ruling an easy-going attitude to the challenges.  I have to say that while the feedback from this group was less informative in itself, it was the best feeling in the world to just watch a group chatting and laughing about the game and (to my eyes) thoroughly enjoying it.  This tells me that the game as it stands definitely has an audience, and that I am not heading up a blind alley.  Of course, I need to make the game work for more groups than this one (though it definitely worked for the other group too), but it's a good start.

Overall this was a really good experience and a helpful session, and I have a few notes for things to experiment with, including some possible alternate titles.

I should also mention that last week I started a thread on this game on Board Game Geek, asking for help for card subjects, and had a few people giving some very useful suggestions (some of which made it into the card set I was using here), plus a really interesting idea to try making the game into something other than the love/hate a subject that it is now... I will be thinking about this as it could be really cool if I can figure it out.

Grimmly Available

The last few weeks have been slow for me from a game design and testing point of view for a number of reasons, but they haven't been entirely unproductive.  My big achievement has been to get my second game into the BGG database.  As of earlier this month, Giftmas with the Grimms has officially been a thing, and if you go to its BGG page, you can find the files allowing you to to make a print and play set.  

What is more, I managed to get a few sets made up using cards printed via ArtsCow and distributed at the event the game was designed for.  I haven't heard if anyone has played it yet, but I consider it a small success.

Giftmas with the Grimms, with ArtsCow cards and spread on a bit of baize (not included).

Other than that, I have started to make some headway with my reverse-colonialism game, building a new set using what I have learnt from early tests (which used components plundered from other games).  And finally, I am preparing for a trip to Dragonmeet in London this coming weekend, where I am planning to spend most of my time around the Playtest UK zone, where I have booked a slot (13:00 to 14:30 -- come and say hello!) to test My Name Is..., my lightweight (but occasionally painful) game of memory and mental agility.  I will report on all this stuff soon.

My name is Rob and I love playtesting

So here is something new to the blog, though I have been sitting on it since May.  I took another trip to London on Sunday for a Playtest UK meetup (no problems with trains this time, and the bits of the underground I used were running fine) and took along a little game that I call "My Name Is...".  This is something that has only been played once before, during an evening at UK Games Expo, and showed some promise there, but I just haven't really got round to doing more work on.  But this weekend I fancied trying something fresh at the meetup.

The idea is based on the sort of icebreaking activity that you might have come across on training courses, large meetings, theatre workshops, or any number of other places, where everyone is meant to introduce themselves along with a little tidbit of information. Then conversation occurs where everyone is meant to remember the names and information they have been given.

My name is Rob and I design board and card games as a hobby.

Cards for this game happen to be the simplest I've made yet.

In order to turn this into a game I made a deck of cards with a number of subjects, like dogs, cats, movies, and vegetables.  Then each card had one of these subjects along with an attitude, "love" or "hate".  Game play is then to pull a card, introduce yourself by name, and state your opinion as defined by this card.  The card gets added to a growing stack in front of you, and play passes to the left.

What actually makes this a challenge is that you need to state when you have an opinion on a subject that another player has already declared on: "My name is Ermintrude and I love comics, unlike my friend Zebedee, who hates them."  You can challenge other players if you think they have missed something or made a mistake, and if you mess up you take an "oops!" token, the aim being to have the fewest tokens at the end of the game.

Oh, and to mess with heads a little more, there are "I've changed my mind" cards, which reverse the opinion on all the other cards in your stack.  Hilarity ensues.

There are a few more details, but not much, and the couple of test games I have now done resulted in much laughter as well as very furrowed brows, which is all pretty much what I was hoping for.  The group of other fellow designers at the meetup, however, after giving me a general thumbs up, were kind enough to keep me engaged for a good little while with great observations and suggestions.

One of the key points was a suggestion that, from a psychological (and marketing) point of view, it might be better to find a way to have players requiring high scores to win the game rather than low.  Plenty of good games award victory to the player with the lowest score, but it still seems more natural to aim to get more.  We discussed assorted ways of doing this, but as is often the case, it required sleeping on the matter to come up with a plan that I liked.  In the game as it has been so far, a penalised player discards her stack of cards, thus simplifying the game state a bit.  Well, I thought, how about if the discarded cards were given to another player to add to their score pile?  This has the attraction of reducing the components required for the game, as counters would no longer be needed.  However, I need to figure out if the score gained in this way is one point per pile of cards, or one point per card; at least in this case I can run playtests, record both scores, and see which seems to work the best.

Another very interesting thought was that some of the subjects on the cards go in pairs which occasionally get confused.  So Ermintrude declares an opinion on dogs, and remembers that Zebedee likes some sort of mammal, but can't remember whether it was dogs or cats.  I was encouraged to have more pairs like this.

A theme of discussion throughout the afternoon was varying levels of difficulty of play, and this thread came up in most of the groups I was involved in.  For my game, it was observed that if the "I've changed my mind" cards were taken out, the game should be a lot easier, so possibly more friendly to families, beginners, or drunk people.  It's always nice to have simple options like this.

Other games tested during the day were a few different variants on a colour-based card deck, a game of mining gems from asteroids, and a competitive deduction game of hunting for an alien.  All very enjoyable, and I missed out on some great looking other games as well.