Thirsty Playtests

After a bit of a playtesting drought over the last couple of months, things have started to improve.  I have managed to persuade a few people to try my "Secret Satan" game, which is now known as "Giftmas with the Grimms", and is my most popular prototype with my daughter, Miss B.  And better still, I was able to get to a Playtest UK meetup in Oxford.

Oxford is a load closer to me than the London meetups I have been attending, but it is an evening meet, which has disadvantages, and the dates haven't fallen right for me previously, so it was nice to finally get along to meet a different group.  This meetup takes place at the Thirsty Meeples boardgame cafe, which unfortunately means paying a cover charge to sit at a table, and it's a little cramped, but it is also a totally awesome place with brilliant staff who bring you good coffee.

There were seven of us there last night and we were given two tables between us, and had games running on both tables for much of the evening.  I was lucky enough to get a five-player play of Boogie Knights in, getting half way through before the last couple of people turned up.

I don't have a photo to share from the meetup, so here's a picture of some modified Boogie Knight cards.

This was a big deal, as I have made a fundamental change to Boogie Knights, which had been working consistently well in playtests, but I had been bugged by a steadily flow of comments asking if it would be possible to remove the dice.  I know some people love the tension of using dice to resolve contests, but that also a good number of people feel that using dice in this way is a terrible mistake that removes both fun and challenge.  Recognising that whatever I do I won't please all the people, and also taking onboard some games industry insider advice that in general it is good to reduce the number of types of component (so cards plus score markers is more attractive to some publishers than cards plus score markers plus dice), I resolved to at least experiment.  I pencilled a number (from 1 to 6) onto each card, decided that in challenges players choose a card from hand to act as in lieu of a die roll, and made a few other rule tweaks to support the change.  This was quite a while ago and I just never quite managed to get the new version of the game into a playtest.

Until last night.  The headline news is that basically it works, and the players were enthusiastic about the change (I explained the previous form of the game).  There are a few rough edges to deal with, but this looks like I could be heading in the right direction.

Following that I got to play one of someone else's games, this one being a cooperative puzzle solving game which I had actually played an earlier incarnation of at UK Games Expo.  There have been a few tweaks since I last saw the game, which I think have been for the better, and I really enjoyed this play.  It will be interesting to see how it develops.

Finally, and actually rather surprisingly to me, I got to test Giftmas with the Grimms with four players, and got some more useful insights.  It's nice to get a few playtests of a game close together as you start getting a real feel for the characteristics of the game.  And, of course, now I really need to finish writing a rulebook...

So, overall a really useful evening out and I'm sure I'll be back again if the dates fall right.  Apart from anything else, it's great to have more opportunities to chat with like-minded people.  I find it's great for morale.

Still in London: Shifty Gifts

After the boardgame design talking day, I stayed in London for an extra night so I could attend this month's Sunday playtest meetup, though my commitments elsewhere meant that I was only able to stay for half of the afternoon and had to leave after the first two test slots.

The game I brought with me this time has a bit of a story.  You see, each November our family attends a big banquet event.  These banquets started off being medieval, but have mutated into a series of weirdly themed events; the last few have been based on, respectively, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Firefly/Serenity, and A Game of Thrones.  This year it is to be a soiree hosted by the Addams Family.  One of the traditions amongst some of the regular attendees is an exchange of small gifts, many of which are things made by the givers, and in the past, my wife, S, has exercised her crafting and knitting skills towards this.  This year, I have been thinking that there is something I make, so why don't I take a more active role in the gift making and giving process and make a small game, themed for the event?

Anyway, I've been bouncing assorted ideas around, on and off, for most of this year, but I have finally managed to put a playable prototype together (there have been other prototypes but they were dire), and so I took along a little 18 card microgame with the codename Secret Satan.

For prototype purposes I couldn't help but scribble together some simple illustrations.
I'm rather pleased with some of them.

The idea of the game is that there are six characters from a family of weirdos, and they are sharing out gifts.  There are six types of gifts (two of each -- stuff like puppies, cakes, and electrodes), and each character has one gift they would really like and one that they would like a bit less.  Play involves swapping cards around between players and revealing cards, which may then no longer be swapped.  At the end of a round, players score points according to whether their character has received their desired gifts.

So far, so boring.  The twists come from two sources.  One is that the gifts all have actions which take place when they are revealed, allowing additional swapping, revealing or un-revealing.  The other twist is that one of the types of gift is a bomb, and if you have a bomb at the end of the round you score nothing, except for one of the characters, who scores major points for having bombs, and revealing a bomb instantly ends the round.

We had a couple of plays of the game, one with five players and one with six, with a little tweaking of rules between plays, and I was delighted that the game was pretty fun to play.  We identified a couple of flaws, and it is clear that there is not much depth here, but a game with 18 cards which takes 5 minutes to play a round doesn't necessarily need much depth.  And yet, when we finished, there was some discussion about the various possible ways to bluff or misdirect the other players, so I felt really positive about this.

I actually need to finalise the game pretty quickly as I don't have all that much time to improve on it and actually get it printed, so I may have to settle for something less polished than I would like, but I'm pretty sure that, with a little more testing and revision, I'll have something that I am happy giving away.

Of course, I wasn't only playing my own game at this playtest session, and I got to play three other games in the time that I was able to stay: one was about creating (and foiling) evil and convoluted plans for world domination, one was about manipulating the political system to be in the winning faction when the incumbent dictator gets overthrown, and one was about smuggling dodgy goods past customs at an airport.  Three very different games which all show great potential and were very enjoyable to play as they were.