Designing a MegaGame: 8 - More Playtesting

As is the way, playtesting is vitally important. And whilst impossible to fully playtest at scale with all the interconnected pieces, is still important to do on the micro level (all individual roles fully play tested). If you can do more than one role at once, that’s even better.

Quest of Champions (take 2)

This one is an easy one to playtest because its basically standalone. And it’s really small comparatively.

Essentially, the game now plays much closer to my initial vision - whereby it’s a push your luck game and you get a bonus for going first. I had 2 friends over for this so we played some 3 player games. In one game, they were neck and neck for a significant portion of the game and I kept going bust and was way behind. But in some ways that was perfect because it was a push your luck game - it meant that I ALWAYS felt like I could win it. I didn’t, but I could’ve!

Also, its helpful to have extra sets of eyes on your game because they give you different perspectives on new ideas and help you hash-out some of the nuances (how many points to play for) and you can argue why one option might be better than another.

So that mini-game is essentially complete now. I just need some cool artwork.

The Lawmakers Game (take 1)

With some mini-games, it’s easy to fall into the trap that the game you design will work out of the box with zero playtesting required. That might be true in rare cases but a play test will highlight the things you didn’t think of. For this mini-game, it was timing of things. I think the game is solid and will create some really interesting decisions but I hadn’t considered when the potential laws will be shown for the first time. Originally I had thought that control would put the laws on the table at the beginning of the round and they’d have at it. But what one of my players suggested is that it’s super important for the law makers to have plenty of time to think about the laws before they vote on them (it sounds obvious now). This is especially true in a megagame where the laws effect all the other roles and you need to talk them through with your leaders that might be forming overarching strategy.

We also did some slight balancing but outside of that, the game is pretty solid and one I’m super excited for.