GD: Post-Playtest Blogging

The author and two friends playtesting Digsite Raid!

 Now that I've got the basic rules down for my game, it's time to playtest it. Playtesting is super important, as Jesse Schell says in his book on game design-- good games are made through playtesting and playtesting alone. Though it's painful, he admits, it's extremely important, like stepping back from a painting to realise you've got all the shadows wrong. So I needed to playtest my game, and badly. 7 o'clock on a Saturday evening, a night which on any other college campus would find me out on the town, met me in the Student Smart Room in Goldstein furiously rolling dice and taking notes as my friends and peers utterly destroyed my game.

Now, as my game is fairly derivative of a lot of other board games, I didn't have as many immediate teething problems as other games might have. The main problem for me was balancing-- were the Event Cards too annoying, did each player get enough Item Cards, were there enough opportunities to trigger the Combat mechanic? Were players frustrated too much, or not enough? Did players seem engaged enough to want to be competitive? These questions were the main ones I had in mind as I set out to playtest.

Event cards in particular were quite a thorn in my side-- either they were far too easy on the player, or the entire group was ruing even stepping on the second two layers. I have to come up with a balance of nice and bad cards, factoring in giving the player a sense of agency in the whole ordeal. So more 'choose a player' rather than 'go directly to,' if that makes sense.

Item Cards weren't that big of an issue, but it was suggested that I give them more of a sense of value by limiting their original number so people would have to work for them. This could also add more drama to the Theif Event Cards, as it gives a chance for players to rob others of their more hard-won Items.

Combat was kind of a huge issue-- no one wanted to use it! Or, rather, people were so engrossed in getting the items and avoiding event cards that they didn't want to attack people, or didn't have the opportunity to. Modding the Combat mechanic to allow for more ambushes could be a lot more fun, and add more agency to the gameplay. A suggested tweak could be that by passing a player you could challenge them, rather than directly landing on a same square. That way, you could attack people just leaving the Artifact tent and steal their items.

On the subject of Artifacts, though, the scores really need to be increased. Way too many people were just getting them like it was no big deal.

Another way to force combat, a friend suggested, was to make the final exit place have a chance roll as well, to let other people catch up and ambush them. I may also integrate this idea.

All in all, my game suffered from a complete lack of skill and a high dependency on chance. I'll definitely need to tweak some things to make it seem like the player has more agency.