Chapter 3: Playtesting

With the physical prototype of my game created, it was time to playtest it.  Playtesting is very important to the development process because nothing is ever perfect the first time.  No matter how good your game idea is, you will always find problems that need to be eliminated.  Sometimes it’s a question of game balance, while other times you will find that your game is not as interesting as you thought it would be, and still other times you will simply want to change the aesthetics.  The reason my first prototype was so simple and abstract was because I knew that I would need to make a lot of changes, and there was no point in expending effort designing things that might need to be eliminated in the final version.

My first round of playtesting was done with my D&D group, an interesting group of people whom I have been gaming with for over twenty years.  We are a very diverse group which contains at least one person of every race, gender, and sexuality, so I knew that I would get a wide range of perspectives from them.  At the same time, two decades of optimizing strategy for our extremely challenging D&D battles meant that they all had similar tastes to my target audience – people who were willing to devote several hours to an intense strategic challenge.

From an aesthetic perspective, the game was pretty robust.  The board was aesthetically pleasing, and the only real flaw I could find is that the board was a little bit dark, which fit well with the game’s concept of a dark sci-fi future populated by warring city-states overseen by rival artificial intelligences.  Because one of the game design changes discussed below would be the addition of a new terrain type (swamp terrain) I decided to compensate for the dark aesthetics of the other terrains by making my swamps into vibrant areas full of plant life.

From a game design perspective, my game had significant flaws.  The most striking problem is that the tactics cards only effected one unit type, which means that unless your battle plan hinged on those specific units (something which was not advisable considering the inherent advantage of mixed unit tactics) the tactics cards didn’t actually do very much to change the gameplay, which meant that the desired impact of confusing AI would also be minimal.  I fixed this by implementing my friend Dave’s suggestion to give each tactics card two effects instead of one, and making the game effects of each card far more significant.  Additionally, I created some game effects focused on espionage, to reflect the significance of intelligence-gathering in futuristic warfare.

The second significant flaw was a no-brainer: I had designed my game only around ground combat.  While units could go into water, there was no focus on the naval or aerospace game.  This glaring oversight on my part necessitated a huge overhaul of the game.  Previously the game had only had the Army’s five major unit types: Tanks, Fast Mechs, Heavy Mechs, Artillery, and City Centers.  I added three unit types to include both the Navy and the Air Force: Carriers, Quadcopter Drones, and Jets.  Each of these units inherently had unique powers that would change the game, even before tactics cards were applied to them.  The Carriers were troop transports that would give air units a base of operations deep within enemy territory, while the Quadcopters and Jets added an entirely new layer of strategy: the air game.  Much like real life air combat, the air game would be much more fast paced and aggressive.  Air units had enhanced movement speed but much lower defensive capabilities, meaning that casualties from air combat would be much more frequent.  Additionally, the inability of air units to protect themselves meant that their defense relied almost entirely on movement and positioning.  They hit hard, but then had to retreat quickly to a zone of safety in order to avoid being vulnerable.

A third unexpected problem was how long the game took.  In the initial version of the game, play lasted until one player lost their City Center.  Considering how well-defended the City Centers were, this was a difficult task.  As a result, Mechwar games typically devolved into a grueling war of attrition.  A typical game could take several hours: longer if the players were very evenly matched.  This would greatly limit the audience because there are very few people who are willing to dedicate that amount of time purely to a strategy.  More significantly, it made the game less FUN.  The change I made was to limit the game to six turns, and instead of requiring the player to destroy a city center, I assigned a point value to the destruction of specific military targets related to logistics and supply chain.  When the game ended, the winner would be whomever had the most points.  This changed the game enormously.  Instead of the war of attrition that it had previously been, the game was now more focused on precise surgical strikes, something which I feel much better reflects the realities of modern warfare.  Sometimes it even made sense to sacrifice troops to achieve the destruction of a valuable strategic target, though if your timing was poor then you would have a lot of difficulty defending against the inevitable counterattack.  I liked the idea of occasionally having a longer war of attrition as a way to change the gameplay, so I left that option in as a variant game option – the same game, but with slightly different rules that would require a big change in your playstyle.

One change that I made as a result of playtesting was not a problem to be solved, but rather a feature that emerged organically during playtesting.  I noticed that every player’s military was fundamentally the same, and only the tactics cards made them different.  What if I gave each player a military specialty?  One player’s military might focus on guerrilla warfare, while another player’s forces might rely on speed and mobility, and a third player’s military advantage might be mass production – the ability to swiftly churn out cheap disposable troops.  I called this game variant “Clan Warfare” because there was a very clannish and insular feeling to the idea of military tactics being so vastly different that over generations they would give significant advantages to their practitioners.

The last change was something I discovered when I was telling my mom about the game.  She was eager to playtest it with me, but because the card size was so small (they were printed out on business cards after all) she could not see the fine print well enough to play the game!  I had been meaning to redesign the game anyway since the first prototype was printed on business cards, but now that I knew print size was an issue I decided that the next prototype would be printed on larger tarot-sized cards rather than the standard-sized playing cards.

With that first round of playtesting done, I had discovered that a phenomenal amount of changes needed to be made to the original version of the game.  It was now time to implement these changes and significantly refine the game concept.