Wings

Two months ago, when I went down to York to help Paul with Gamefound fulfilment, I told him I had no more roll and writes under development.

Then I had an idea on the way home.

I was able to cannibalise bits from The Planets My Destination and Exodus from Reynoldsworld to knock up a quick prototype.

Since then I've played it and tweaked it 16 times.

It had its first public outing at Newcastle Playtest in early October.

That highlighted some overly complex bits.

I made changes.

Tweaked it some more.

At Yorcon just over a week ago it had its second outing.

And it was very well received.

They wanted to play it some more.

I've now got a rough and ready playtest kit together.

So I've prepared it for sharing.

No diagrams in the rules yet, but it's got rules and a player sheet as PDFs ready to download.

Anyone fancy giving it a try and providing feedback?

Either on the game or the clarity of the rules.

I would love to hear what you think...

Feedback

I have three games that I ought to be playtesting more widely.

Jotunsaga, about Vikings hunting trolls.

Colony, the new roll and write that’s only a few weeks old.

And Coalescence, which has been years in the making.

The next step is to get people playtesting without me there explaining the rules.

To do this I need to send physical (or at least digital!) copies of the games to people.

Troll is still sharpie on blank cards. Needs some work before it’s ready to send out.

Coalescence is a real pain to manufacturer. 

Needs a 5-layer board and 3D-printed planets.

So Colony was first out the door.

I already had everything I needed!

I’m off on holiday this week. Need to work on the others when I get back.

Perspective

A month ago we sent five copies of FlickFleet: Xeno Wars for blind playtesting.

It’s a scary time.

And an exciting one.

Will they like it? Is it any good? Am I rubbish at this games design lark?

Like an adult child leaving home, it's time for it to develop its personality away from the watchful stare of its parents.

The playtesters are providing feedback now they’ve got it.

It’s fun. The aliens are fun to play.

And they have ideas to make it better still.

Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash

A fresh perspective.

We’re grateful.

Final Changes

This week has been all about tweaking FlickFleet. There are now three blindplaytesting copies in three different countries. Three sets of people trying to learn the game from my rulebook and then provide feedback on the rulebook and the game. The first set of feedback has come in with some great suggestions for improving the rulebook and some comments about the game.

The playtester found the game fundamentally fun and loved a few bits about it, but there were a couple of things he didn't enjoy. The biggest problem he has was that it is possible to get yourself into a situation where victory is impossible for one of the players. I'd seen this happen a few times - it's an asymmetric game, so the players often have different forces, and some of the ships need to be played in a particular way to be successful (e.g. carriers need to launch their fighters and bombers quickly as they are weak on their own) and the ramming rules were an attempt to dealt with this, but clearly for new players without my experience (or strategy advice) the problem was bigger than I realised.

The Uprising are trying to abandon their base before my fleet arrives. Pity their fearful flight. I will crush them. #FlickFleet #FleeTheFirestorm

A post shared by Jackson Pope (@jacksonpopeeg) on Apr 21, 2018 at 3:34pm PDT

Clearly this situation is no fun at all for the loser and not much fun for the winner, so it was something that needed addressing. The playtester had even volunteered a couple of suggestions that he thought might fixed the problem - which was great.

As a designer you will get a lot of suggestions about your game. Some will be great, some will be rubbish. Some will be great, but take your game in a direction you are unhappy with. One of the things you need to be good at is to take the suggestions (and where not spelled out work out the root issue) and then decide what to do with them. Are they a good idea? Do they take your game in a direction you are happy with? What's the problem the suggestion is trying to fix? Is there a better or different solution to that problem you should also consider? Is that problem just that the the game is not the suggester's type of game? Perhaps the suggester's perceived problem is not a problem in your eyes, or something you are happy to live with? As creator of the game, the editorial control lies with you until you sign it over to a publisher.

As it turns out the problems spotted by the playtester were an issue and something I wanted to address. Paul (my co-designer) and I talked it over and we had an alternative solution that we've been trying out this week (and over the weekend while Paul was visiting with his family). It seems at first blush that our solution improves the game and largely addresses the problem. As a result of this feedback the game has improved, despite the fact we didn't go with the playtester's suggestion. Hopefully, he will find our solution addresses the problem as he experienced it too.

Remember that playtesters suggestions are valid, and are shaped by their experience of your game. But the control lies with you. Are you happy to leave the problem they experience un-addressed? If not, is their suggestion the best resolution to the problem they experienced? It might be. Or it might not. You decide!

A Digital Digression II

So I've made a bit of progress on Zombology this week, posting blind playtesting copies to the Leeds and London Playtest UK groups, I'm hoping to get initial feedback from those groups in a week or two, once they've met and had a chance to get a game or two in. I also got a few games in at Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, my first attendance there in a while.

I still haven't decided what I want to do re. board game publishing, so in the meantime I've been doing some work on my German learning app instead. I loved Duolingo, which I've spent a lot of time on, but I've finished the course now. I still practice every now and again when things show up as needing refreshing but certainly not every day any more. The main thing I didn't like about Duolingo was the lack of structure. You seemed to learn words in a haphazard fashion, and it was hard to see things that were related at the same time. I learn well when I can tabulate things in my head, so I've been writing another app for my phone to provide a more structured learning experience for myself.

I started it months ago, and then in the Zombology publishing related excitement I shelved it for a while. Last week I went to Manchester on the train again for work on my own (which is unusual). I had my laptop with me to use in a demo once I got there, which gave me an opportunity to do some development on the train, and since then I've been cracking on, making some decent progress. At the moment I'm focusing on getting the basic functionality in there, rather than lots of vocabulary. That can always come later once it works. Hopefully I'll find it useful as my language learning journey continues.

I think I'm now waiting for the Zombology feedback before I make any decision on the publishing side of things. There are still three options I'm considering:

• Self publishing a run of 150 hand-made copies
• Print on demand, e.g. Drive Thru Cards or The Game Crafter
• Hawking to an established publisher

I had an established publisher who was vaguely interested, but he wanted to see blind playtesting feedback, which at the time I didn't really have. So getting the feedback from the Playtest UK network is useful for that route and will hopefully lead to a better game regardless of which route I take.