Posted January 17, 2021 by Pablo J. Gorigoitia Castro
#game design
I'm alone... ¡Wich is good! At least regarding my tabletop's design process.
Since a couple of days back, my 3 YO daughter is at my inlaws, almost not seen them for pandemic related reasons; for the same kind of reasons, my wife has to attend a series of long-hour shifts.
I reviewed part of my game design teaching material when I stumble upon one of the Travelling Salesmen prototypes that I had left mid-construction over a year ago. So I thought, "well, I could finish it before pack-it back," after a little more of half an hour (¡Heck, it takes longer to cut cardboard hex!), my chore was complete. But if you are a game designer, you know well that a recently finished prototype can't be kept untested.
I hadn't other plans, so I decided to give the gizmo a test run. Over the years, I have learned that testing alone a tabletop game for several players could take two forms, which I have called:
Over the years, I have done more than enough of the first type of test-runs, so I choose to do the second one. One key factor in doing a useful Playstyle run test is defining gameplan for each simulated player, avoiding using the same strategy repeatedly, since experience has shown me that to use "cloned players" tend to hide our game's weakness model.
Before continuing, let's do a quick recap of what Travelling Salesmen is about. In this game, 3 players compete to reach every post on the map, called Cities, with the 2 pawns under its control. The player will move their pawns over paths to reach the different Cities, called Roads; this movement consumes Movent Points. The Cities and Roads are represented by tiles making the game's map is modular, changing every session.
OK, let's go back to our story. I decide to use the following gameplans for each simulated player:
I left the first session uncompleted after 45 minutes due to major confusion; my cognitive overload was high. Even with the Tracking Boards added for the first time on this iteration, I forgot which City was going from turn to turn. Not only that, setting up the map at the beginning of the match took too long, and Citied had too many Roads connecting them. What I did to tackle each of these problems was:
After I made the changes, I completed 3 sessions (43, 56, and 39 minutes long, respectively). With these happy results, I take my game's sequence bullet points and notes and translate them to the first version of a rules sheet; then, I made a new Illustrator file with the necessary modifications and exported it to a PDF. Finally, I took both files and merged them into a single PNP version to share it.
One last thing I wanted to comment on, part of my cognitive overload on the first test run was due to poor prototyping. The City Tiles were marked with letters from A to I, while the Tracking Board use names such as "New York" and "Los Angeles", making me double-check the equivalence on entering at every City. On the same page, I intend to replace the pawns with Stand-up Player Pieces with different names, such as Jhon and Mary; this way, players' task of telling apart each of its units will be easier.