Seeking Playtesters - Draftcar

Draftcar is a racing game for 2 to 10 players in which you draft cards to manipulate the way the cars draft with each other so that you can hopefully end up in the first place position at the end of the game.

Think Nascar, but without the sponsors covering every possible surface. You can get a rough idea of the gameplay in this video.

Surrounded, with a Shotgun - Playtesting report

This week VPG put the playtest call out for Surrounded with a Shotgun. I've decided to experiment with digital playtesting and so far it has been a huge success.

Previously when I've done play testing, I've sent out physical kits. These kits take time and money to produce, so there is always an imposed cap on the number of testers. Then they have to be mailed to the tester, which takes time. When all is said and done the tester doesn't see the game for 2 weeks to a month after agreeing to be a tester. In that time the game stalls. I can't make changes because then the testers will be testing the wrong version. And about half of physical kit testers aren't going to provide feedback at all, which I assume is because something new has caught their attention in the last 2-4 weeks since they said they were interested.

Using a pure digital kit approach, I had actionable feedback before I could finish replying to all the testers to send them the link. Granted, this is at least partially because SwaSG is a short game, but it's also there was an immediate ability for the testers to test while they were / are at peak interest. And so far I've had about 60-70% of the testers provide feedback. I'm used to only having maybe 20% of the kits I send out result in actionable feedback.

So, as of right now I see no reason to go back to physical kits for play testing unless I'm working on a game with a dexterity element or a component that I can't emulate digitally.

This is awesome!

The Lab of Dr. Martuese

Above is the first playable prototype of The Lab of Dr. Martuese. This game is intended as a spin off of Dawn of the Zeds from Victory Point Games. It is a thematically linked game, not a mechanically linked game. The Lab of Dr. Martuese is not a State of Siege, and basically has zero mechanical connection to Dawn of the Zeds. In this game each player plays a chimp in the Lab who is trying to help or hinder the efforts of Dr. Martuese in creating a Super Zed. The first playtest was played with the following basic rules:

1. The player to the right of the player with the Martuese token will draw three resource cards, place one on top of the event deck, and give the remaining two to the player with the Martuese token. Then they will move the time marker one space clockwise around the rondel.
2. The player with the Martuese token will choose one of the two cards they are given to play and place the other on top of the event deck.
3. The played card is resolved as follow; if the symbol on the card matches one of the unresolved dice then one die with that symbol may be moved to the resolved dice area. The player with the Martuese token must move the time marker a number of spaces clockwise around the rondel that are indicated on the card.
4. Resolve Rondel - Look at what space on the rondel the time marker is in. Do what it says. If the time marker moved onto or past the start space, the Police Investigation marker must move one space towards Police Arrive.
5. If all dice are resolved, move the Step marker one space towards Martuese Victory, reroll all the dice in the resolved dice area and place them in the unresolved dice area near the Step marker.
6. Pass the Martuese token to the player on your left.

The game ends immediately if the Police Investigation marker is moved into the Police Arrive space with the player playing Horatious winning. (Horatious is the chimp that was added to the Dawn of the Zeds 3rd edition as a stretch goal of the kickstarter) It ends with a Martuese Victory if the Step marker ever moves into the Martuese Victory space AND at least 3 of the body parts are not rotten.

After the initial play, and after some discussion a few things are going to change. Or at least be tried:

• There needs to be more ways for events to happen, so I'm thinking of making it so that if the player with the Martuese marker can't play a card with a symbol that matches an unresolved die, they must play it as an event. The time still affects the play.
• Instead of always having the player to the right draw cards and passing the Martuese token, I think I want to try using two tokens, one for Martuese and one for Lab Chimp, and have them leap frog around the board. This would mean a player would spend two turns as Dr. Martuese and interact with both his neighbors. And each player when playing as their chimp would interact with both their neighbors as Martuese. I think this will lead to the players having better information, but I'm worried it will be difficult to explain in the rules.
• Some more variation in the Victory Conditions. Right now either Horatious wins or everyone else wins. I'm thinking each chimp could want to make a different type of Super Zed, and when Martuese Victory occurs you determine what type of Super Zed was created by looking at what body parts are in what condition. Different combinations of Fresh and Rotten equate to different Super Zeds. And if no one made the Super Zed they wanted the game wins.

After Action Report of first gross playtest of Abstraction.

I'm past the purely conceptual stages and on to an actual playable prototype :0)

The above image is the end of the first ever playthrough of Abstraction. The blue player won because none of the red pieces can move.

As stated in the title, this was a gross test. Meaning that I was playing both sides and basically just moving pieces around to make sure it all felt like it was working the way it should. I am quite happy with the results.

The whole game took maybe 10-15 minutes to setup and play to completion. Obviously this time would go up with more concentrated move consideration, but all in all a very fast game.

The setup in this test was random. A random grid of 6x6, then a random placement of 6 of the 7 pieces along the players edge. This resulted in some pieces having very limited initial movement options. Going forward, I will likely keep the random grid, but make the piece placement a player choice.

The red player went first, and was able to immediately attack from the lower left corner to the upper right corner of the board. The blue player didn't have an immediate defense but was able to position himself over the course of two turns to start driving the attack back towards the red player and by the halfway point or so was able to force the red player to choose between his loses without gaining headway. This was mostly do to the limited mobility of the initial placement. The red "pawn" in the center of the example above was never able to use any of the special movement on the cards and only move forward one space each turn.

So in short, the mechanisms work but setup needs to include some choices. Next step is to get it in front of a pair of testers and see how they respond.

Abstract: the abstract game

Recently Greater Than Games had a contest on their site for a ______: the ______ game contest. It was a cool exercise, and while I'm fairly certain if I had won I would have heard about it by now I'm not going to discuss any of my submissions in this post on the off chance that I'm one of the finalist. I submitted 4 games and when I'm certain I'm out of the running I'll likely discuss them at length. The contest was for a game they would be kick starting for April fools so I'm not 100% sure if it would be appropriate to discuss the games I submitted publicly before then.

Instead I'm going to talk about a game idea I came up with to late for the contest. Because I think it would have been a good fit for the contest it's working title is Abstract: the Abstract Game.

Component wise the game consists of 50 bridge cards. 36 of those cards are board cards which are randomly placed into a 6x6 grid. The remaining cards are the player pieces. These have one of 7 icons and are double sided with one player controlling each side.

As shown above, the board cards have 6 icons and 4 movement grids printed along their edges. The icons represent player pieces and the grids indicate how a movement pattern. The two taken together tell the players how their piece will move if it is on that card. And perspective matters. Each movement pattern is associated with the icon "above" it from the players perspective. And if the piece has an icon that doesn't have a pattern indicated then it may move one space forward (ie towards your opponent).

You win if either all the pieces left in the board are yours or if you opponent can't move on their turn (ie all off their pieces are on your back row AND their icons don't have a movement pattern on the card they are on). In the above example, the red piece would move by leaping orthogonally and Flipping pieces that it leapt over. The blue piece however moves like a rook in chess.

Anyone interested in testing this idea out?

The Chosin Few

First play test of a state of siege I'm working on. Result? A crushing defeat :0)