During my silent weeks we had two more public events tied to our Advanced game design board game. the first of these two was a regular playtest to receive feedback on our game. If you are not familiar to our board game please read this (link to our board game blog). We found out that people thought that it was too hard to win the game because everyone would always call on a players last card. So in order to win the player has to win on the correct card and couldn’t win on a bluff. We also noticed that the Trap cards were a bit too evil since there were no drawback to playing them. Aside from that we got very positive feedback and the players thought it was fun 🙂 We took the feedback to heart and made the game a bit easier to win, actually a lot easier to win if the players was new to the game and haven’t gotten the right mindset for it yet. We also got a good advise from our teacher on how to balance the trap cards, so we changed them a bit so they can now ”backfire” on the player who put it in play. After these changes the game started to feel good, almost complete to be honest 🙂
Our final public session ended just recently and it was really fun to see all the complete games, they all seemed to be very fun and interesting and the ones I tried lived up to that 🙂
During this session we got some more feedback and mainly on the changes we did based on the feedback we got from last playtest. At first I was a bit shocked, I think because I have started to go ”blind” on our game, It is getting harder to see the balancing problems so it came as a little surprise. A good surprise actually, because the more I think of it the more obvious it became that we might have nerfed the trap cards too much and maybe chanced the winning condition too much as well. I’m not sure we want too make more changes to our trap cards and I think that if we try to show the players just how far they could go in order to prevent other players from winning they would say it’s better. I guess the right thing to do is to test more and take small steps balancing wise rather than large ones. Aside from that I think that our game turned out well and I hope the players thought it was fun too 🙂
Island PH 