Designing a MegaGame: 7 - Playtesting

I find that blogging about this game does two things for the design process:

1) It allows me to put down my thoughts and further makes me think about why a particular mechanic works or doesn’t work and 2) Gets me excited to keep designing. Designing a megagame is a LOT of work. As a professor once told me, an idea is worth NOTHING! Harsh but true. All gamers have design ideas for games but to turn those ideas into something tangible is a huge amount of work with plenty of boring and frustrating bumps in the road. Even though you have a control team to help handwave some of the issues that might arise on event day, there is so much that goes into the design and production of a megagame.

Playtesting is an annoying yet important part of the design process. Partly because I don’t want to impose on my friends to playtest something that is half-baked and broken, and partly because its a very vulnerable time for a designer. In particular, it highlights the negatives of your design once it’s in front of players.

The Quest of Champions

The first iteration of the QoC is totally broken! My push-your-luck mechanic is essentially worthless - there is no incentive for not pushing your luck every time which results in a game whereby you just keep drawing until the game tells you to stop. You might as well have a regular deck of playing cards and take it in turns to draw until someone pulls the Ace of Hearts - it’s essentially the same game.

I think I’m going to look at something like Diamant (Incan Gold) which has the push your luck mechanic but with incentives for stopping. And perhaps combining that with something like saboteur which has the treasure at the end of the “track”.

The Military Map

The playtest of this went much better but still with very large flaws that I need to think about. Here are my takeaways:

• I’m worried that if you push too hard too early and you lose, you’ll be stuck with very little to do for a long period of the game until the Overseers can produce more troops for you. This makes me think I need to add control notes to tell control that they’re to be a roadblock rather than a real threat. That’ll account for the NPCs but not the other player.

  Another note, it’s important to make sure that Gods powers are mostly additive rather than subtractive so the Gods don’t absolutely obliterate the players. I have some ideas about their powers but I think I need to design them last, once the rest of the game is fleshed out. I may need to do something about putting limits on the amount of times each God power can be activated. Or make them more expensive if they’ve been used recently.

• My assumption that the players will go for the NPCs first to get warmed up was incorrect. In the playtest, we had players at each others throats by turn 2! I can decrease the incentive to hit each other by making it a little more difficult to get to each other and give the teams more options to attack NPCs. Not entirely sure how to do this yet.

  Something I’m contemplating is splitting each region by 2 which will make border disputes more obvious as it increases the size of the map.

• I’m not sure the best way to decide who goes first - a decision which I found is extremely important. On a map which is designed for conflict and can feel fairly crowded, going second gave you massive amount of information. I think the best way to overcome this is to have all players write down their orders and run them simultaneously but I’m worried that’ll slow the game down considerably. Another option I have is to alternate the first player each turn but this leads to each player essentially getting two turns in a row. Another is to make it random but that could really bite someone in the behind.

• The core game play seems fine right now. We definitely need to play again on a map that’s larger and we need to play for more turns.