The great sun of Catan rises over Indianapolis, and we are once more gathered to the summit of The Hobby. Cower good friends, for GenCon draws near.
This year, I’m dragging my fledgling game to the Midwest, and throwing it out into the First Exposure Playtest Hall. Between the tests in the hall and the random games and demos around the convention, I should get a good idea how flight worthy my bits of cardboard are at this point. Of course, that means I’m carrying a few knots around in my stomach, hoping for the best, and getting ready for the worst.
I’ve been playtesting this game for a year, but I usually only get two or three good sessions in a month. The convention should get me ten or twelve in a couple days. With that kind of intensity, I thought it was a good idea to think back through how I playtest and what I need to do going forward.
To be clear, what I’m about to babble on about is the methodology of an idiot. Namely me. I’m the idiot. I’ve made exactly one game, that I self published, and produced a whopping 250 copies. I’ve never had a game signed by a publisher, and I’ve barely had any pitch meetings outside of contests. This is a five year old piping up at an astrophysics symposium.
So, my fellow designers, please keep in mind that I’m writing this out more to gather my own thoughts, rather than to give anything that could be called advice. If anything, this is mainly me yelling at myself for past mistakes, and making sure I do better this time around.
The biggest thing I wanted to focus on when thinking back through how I playtest is what I look for while people are actually playing the game. It’s so easy to get swept up explaining the rules and trying to talk up the game, that I forget to really pay attention as players navigate the mechanics. Throwing down a bunch of notes during the debrief after the game is always helpful, but a lot of the time I end up wishing I’d paid more attention to the details when my players still had cards in hand.
So, I’m trying to pin down what to look for as the game is going. To help figure out what I’m looking for in a reaction, I’m made a short list of what I'm looking for in my game, and broke it down into a bastardization of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, because it’s been over a decade since I used my Psych minor and I should get some use out of those fifteen credit hours. To my eyes what my game needs to be successful are Choice, Pop, Story, and Experience. And I think there are playtester reactions that swing off of each of those keys, so let's start poking at this from there.
Choice - The biggest key to a game is that it offers choice. Real actual choice. That means providing multiple viable options that are immediately available, and have real quantifiable consequences. I know that sounds simple, but I’ve jumped over moments in designing a game where I’ve said “yeah, sometimes there will be one necessary move that you have to do,” like that was okay. If you give a player a turn where one action far outweighs all of the rest, even every now and again, all the air drains out of the game. Players need difficult choices.
What that means for playtesting is that I need to take notice when my players go into the tank, and not rush them. I’ve fallen into this trap so many times, where someone is taking a long turn and I jump in to help them, or panic and scribble something down about analysis paralysis. Players are trying my game for the first time. It should take a little while for them to take a turn. It’s probably worse if you see players just speeding through taking quick actions without a thought. Maybe they’re just experimenting to begin with, but if a player never pauses on their turns, that’s the warning bell. If someone does get hung up, possibly the right question to ask is what’s got them stuck. Are they thinking through options, or just trying to clear up what their options are? If something’s unclear, that’s a design issue. If something’s challenging, that might be more of a feature rather than a bug. Especially if that player picks up speed as the game goes on. I need to stop rushing people, and keep watch.
Pop - Players like to be surprised. It’s just fun. We love it when someone beats the odds and makes the perfect roll, or surprises an opponent with a trap card they’d had waiting forever. That moment when something goes sideways and the whole table can’t help but react is one of the biggest reasons we play games to begin with. This feeds back on choice because those surprises are only affecting if they bubble out of a real consequential choice that someone walked into holding their breath.
If the game gets a pop; if the table reacts, do NOT be afraid to pause the game to interrogate that moment. I get why I ride these moments. Whenever I've designed something, I’ve spent a lot of hours with it when it was terrible, and everyone hated it, and wondered what I was even doing for all this time. Getting to the point where a table of people get a buoyant moment of yay out of my misshapen creation is a dopamine hit unlike any other. The moment is perfect, and I don’t want to touch it in case it crumbles in my fingers. But, when I get a huge moment like that, I could kick in a Time Out, and check in with the players. See why they were invested, and give them a moment to talk about the experience of that emotion while they’re still in it. In the same way, if the game hits a moment that should get a Pop but doesn’t, call time. Why didn’t that moment have an effect? Were people unaware, uninvested, or bored? Those Pop moments are some of the most important in the game, so I have to take the time to really pick through them if they come up.
Story - There is an entire line of games based on the word “epic.” There’s a reason. The theme of the game can transform the movement of a tiny piece of painted wood into a shocking invasion, or the flip of a piece of paper into a horrible betrayal. People want to tell the story of the games they play, and story makes a moment of pop at the table into something they can tell their friends about without having to break down the rule book for their friends first. When the theme lines up right with the mechanics, it turns players into eager bards echoing tales of infamy everywhere they go.
This one is simple. Watch for the recap. One of the best things I’ve heard at a table is any mini-monologue that starts with “So, what just happened was…” Whenever a player recaps any portion of the game in theme, that is phenomenal. Instead of, “he moved two of his agents to push me out of my space, and took down extra resources,” they say “So you just mugged me on the way to the market and took my apples?” That’s the best thing ever. That’s connection, choice, and the story all coming together. Write it down. Pause and ask. And I really need to pay attention to all the times the story or terms doesn’t stick. If people are calling them meeples instead of dragons, that’s a problem.
Experience - They’re toys. They’re toys with huge sweeping back stories, and intricate interlocking stories, but they’re still toys. They’re fun to look at, pick up, and mess around with. People don’t need fifteen sets of dice, but we get them anyway cause they’re super fun. The best games make you want to interact with them. They want you to flourish with the mini you just swept in with. WIngspan would be an awesome game without that dice tower, but the dice tower definitely adds to the awesome. It makes me want to roll for worms!
In playtesting, check out people’s idle animations. What are they doing when it’s not their turn? Are they fiddling with the pieces, flipping through their cards, or arranging their dragon meeples into little towers? On the other side, when they take their turn, do they ever announce what they’re going to do and forget to actually move the piece? Part of this is the quality of the components, which isn’t going to be perfect on a prototype, but it also comes down to how clear everything is. If players know how a component works, and it’s clear where it goes, they have more confidence moving it around, or picking it up for a second. When the design or the rules are unclear, players sit back a bit in their chair, afraid to move anything in case it causes an uproar. How badly do they want to interact with the toybox, and do they feel comfortable doing so?
So there’s my goals for myself this time out. I’ll still be asking all my questions after the game is wrapped up, and possibly handing out surveys to see what everyone thought, but this year I’m coming back with a lot more notes from the games themselves. We’ll see what flies.
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