 http://bit.ly/2bR1KFU Good Day Internet! This week we’re going to take a look at places to find external playtesters (based on a comment we received on last week’s blog) and also discuss the topic of paying for playtesting. The paid playtesting portion of this post is inspired by a recent lengthy discussion regarding the Coalition Game Studios’ blind playtesting services on the Card & Board Game Designers Guild Facebook page (which if you haven’t joined--you definitely should). For those of you who don’t know, I recently joined Coalition Game Studios as one of their Consultants--my technical title being “professional developer” (which sounds rather odd and incredibly cool all at the same time). I thought it may be good to try and give some insights from both sides of this topic and then see what the public thinks instead of having my thoughts lost amongst the plethora of Facebook comments. Let’s first start with where to find playtesters. Searching for external playtesters for the first time can be daunting--especially if you don’t know where to look. Luckily, there are plenty of places and resources to find external playtesters: your friendly local game store (FLGS), local designer nights, gaming groups, conventions, and community events are all good places to start. The first place you should check is your FLGS or local board game cafe (if you have one) to see if they do designer nights (we’re fortunate enough to be able to attend the monthly Snakes & Lattes Desinger Nights). If you prefer smaller gaming groups but don’t know of any local ones, you can always search social media sites or check places like meetup.com (where we found Token Resistance) or the boardgamegeek game groups forums. If there’s nothing in your area, don’t be afraid to start something; chances are there is a community in your neighbourhood that would love to participate in a consistent gaming group, designer night, or even a small local convention.  http://bit.ly/2bW2UDk With conventions, this is one place where size doesn’t matter. If you can, making it to conventions that focus specifically on playtesting and prototyping (or have an area for it) is probably best (FEPH at Gen Con, Protospiel, Unpub and Unpub Minis, Metatopia, Spielbany, ProtoTO, are all good examples), but you can always grab playtesters from any convention that has open gaming. Just two weekends ago at FMG CON (which may have had 50 people when I was there) my friend and I were both able to get in playtests with some great feedback on our prototypes. Perhaps none of those options really appeal to you or aren’t available to you. For those of you in this situation there are a few more options that will allow to get your game in front of people without having to leave your home. You could digitally upload your game to sites like Tabletopia or Tabletop Simulator and run scheduled playtests on those platforms. You’ll have to broadcast well to bring in playtesters, but this should help you reach a much larger audience. Print and plays are also an option (check out places like BoardGameGeek’s WIP forum to see some), but that usually requires a comprehensible rulebook. The last option is to pay for playtesting through sites like Coalition Game Studios. However, just like print and plays, these services would require a clear rulebook, so make sure you’ve put in time testing and editing it before paying for these kinds of services. The benefits to paying for playtesting is that you will receive additional analysis and development work beyond what you get from other playtesting methods. Before we get into that though, let’s take a look at the controversy around paying for playtesting. The below list is a few of the most common concerns I’ve heard and seen (primarily from the aforementioned Facebook discussion) regarding paid playtesting:
Let’s take a look at these concerns one by one.  http://bit.ly/2bW0KU1 1) “Why would I pay for Something I Could get Done for Free?” Before joining the Coalition, I felt this way too. As far as I could tell their proposition was to “pay us to play your game so you don’t have to be social and convince strangers to give it a chance”. That’s changed since I’ve actually started working for the Coalition and realizing the extra value that they are adding beyond simply telling you whether or not your game is any good. First though, I want to quickly touch on the experience of those who are in the Coalition for those who may think we’re all just hacks trying to take your money. To join the Coalition I had to submit my “board gaming resume” along with a sample of my written work. The resume was to focus on my experience in playtesting, game design, and design theory among other things (you can see the desired qualifications here). Additionally, I can tell you that I personally was given an introductory case shortly after joining to make sure I was up to their standards. So we’re not just random people who like board games--we are experienced writers with vast knowledge, experience, and passion for testing and developing games. In terms of the extra value added, Coalition Game Studios offers a wide variety of services depending on the client’s wants and needs. Beyond blind logged playtesting and thorough analysis, we also provide collaborative design consulting, where the consultant will actually join you in the creative process to take a more active role in guiding your game to its final iteration. It will allow you to keep in touch with your consultant throughout the progress of your game after receiving all the feedback and reports. Coalition consultants also play your game multiple times to determine its replayability, a trait that is usually difficult to test otherwise because getting someone to play your game over and over again is a hard sell. Basically, we are not only independent playtesters, but game developers.  http://bit.ly/2c8tAAj 2) “Money will Taint the Process” As a consultant for the Coalition Game Studios, I get paid to playtest and develop games. As a happy paid worker I will do my job to the best of my abilities, knowing that it will be reviewed by my boss before being sent out. This means if the game is bad, I will tell you it is bad, and if it is good, I will tell you it is good. Either way, I am happy to tell you these things, along with further analysis and suggestions, in order to improve your game and hope to continue to do business in such a manner. In order for that to happen we as a business must do a great job with honest feedback. If we do anything else, we would no longer exist in the very near future. Furthermore, we are paid to do through analysis and development on games, not to review games. Designers know their own games better than anyone. If we can't engage them with intelligent discourse, they'll be the first to know. They will know whether or not we’ve done our job and they got their money’s worth. This is why having the consultants being paid will ensure the quality of the work instead of taint it.  http://bit.ly/2bRCAfd - "Because it's funny" -- Allysha 3) “Proper Playtesting is the Designer’s Job” First off, the services provided by people like Coalition Game Studios do not replace designers playtesting their own game and by no means are the two mutually exclusive. Coalition simply provides services to assist game designers with their playtesting and game development at various stages. From the earliest stages of a game’s design, we can provide light playtesting and input to get your game on the right track. We can also provide full-fledged game development to games in their later stages (which is not technicaly part of a designer’s job). Coalition Game Studios’ services could be used to help a designer put the final touches on their game before pitching to a publisher or launching their Kickstarter. Those final steps are difficult to do on your own without the proper personnel (ie. a publisher).  http://bit.ly/2cqhpx8 In the future the Coalition is looking to work with publishers and act as a kind of screening process for them. After providing our services to the designer, if we believe the game to be of superior quality and a good fit, we would suggest it to one of our member publishers to potentially sign. This is great for the designer, as they get access to publishers who are looking for their kind of game, and great for the publishers who don’t have to go looking through the hundreds of submissions they get for that one gem. Bottom line, the Coalition Game Studios provide much more than just playtesting and a game designer can’t always be expected to do (or be great at) everything. Especially, if they are restricted by other circumstances beyond their control.
Now that I’ve gone over my perspective as an employee of the Coalition Game Studios, what do you think of what we’re trying to do? Would you pay for playtesting? Is there only certain situations that you would be willing to do such a thing? Do you still think it’s a scam to separate the poor designer and their money? What concerns do you have that haven’t been addressed? Let us know below in the comments. Also, if we’ve peaked your interest and you’d like to have a Coalition Game Studios Consultant take a look at on one of your games, you can receive a $10 discount off your final invoice by entering the promo code “dancinggiant” at checkout courtesy of Mike Mihealsick. Thanks for dropping by! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Take Care! Kevin
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 http://bit.ly/2bNy8eO Good Day Internet! Recently we’ve reflected on the journey of designing and developing Pulled into Darkness and we realized that a lot (if not all) of the success we’ve been having is directly related to playtester feedback. That may sound obvious, but in our case the feedback implemented didn’t require any refining. The playtesters told us how they’d like to see the game change, we did it, and it worked basically flawlessly. In retrospect though, it wasn’t just a matter of waiting for the right suggestion to come up to fix our game, as we had received feedback on these subjects many times before. We had tried the suggestions, it didn’t work and we moved on. What was new to us was realizing that every time after trying the first few implementations that didn’t work we no longer took the feedback into consideration as much as we should of. Furthermore, although we may have tried a few implementations of the suggestions we received, we stopped working at it relatively quickly and were complacent in the fact that it could not work nor was it a match for the style of game we were making. This was all despite the fact that we continued to get suggestions regarding these same topics over and over again. So this week we’re going to go over these mistakes in the hopes that they will help designers who may have also fallen into this trap. We’ll also give some information on the results of actually properly implementing playtester ideas, and give credit where credit is due; to the playtesters (who after all are usually right). But before we can give praise and reflect more on what we should have done, we’ll need to go over what we did wrong in implementing playtesters’ ideas/feedback in the categories of Special Powers, and Scoring and End Game Trigger for Pulled into Darkness.  http://bit.ly/2bggNsc Special Powers From the game’s inception and earliest playtests, players wanted special powers. Personally, we didn’t think special powers belonged in the game as we designed it with simplicity in mind. However, playtesters consistently asked for space/sci-fi themed special powers so we decided to give it a try. Our first implementation of unique special powers was the use of a separate card to be played on a single spaceship when it was (hopefully) most beneficial to the player. This implementation made the special powers practically useless and a distraction from the game for a few reasons. To start, each unique power was better at different stages of gameplay; for instance “Lasers”, which allowed you to shoot down a spaceship beside you, was usually best at the start of a round; whereas “Worm Hole”, which allowed you to teleport from one space to another, was much better in the middle of a round. For this reason, we weren’t sure when they should be allowed to be played without restricting player agency too much. To try and solve this problem we restricted the special power to a designated captain ship, doing so lead to a larger problem of once the captain ships were removed from the game (which could happen suddenly and unexpectedly) you could no longer use your special power. This only lead to more player frustration and solidified in our minds that special powers didn’t belong in our game. From that point on, when we received feedback regarding adding special powers we usually responded with we tried it and it didn’t work. Months later after consistently receiving feedback that special powers would be a cool addition, we started to question whether or not there was a way to implement them that wouldn’t ruin the game. After a suggestion from Peter Hayward, we decided to give it another try by adding two one-time use cards that could be used in place of a standard command card. These cards allowed a player to move first (instead of simultaneously with everyone else) and knock down any spaceship they ran into, which was a common special power suggestion. The result was the game gained a new level of strategy and more meaningful choices without a finicky system to resolve those new cards.  http://bit.ly/2bfavd0 Scoring and End Game Trigger Originally, Pulled into Darkness ended when there was one player left with multiple spaceships orbiting the black hole (who was declared the winner). Although this model was somewhat focused around player elimination, we thought we were okay because the game was relatively short (about 30 minutes). However, players (particularly those who were game designers) were not so happy with it. They also didn’t like how near the end of the game when there’s less spaceships that the level of excitement drops off dramatically and that the “Down” card (which forced you closer to the black hole and your ultimate doom) was frustrating and unnecessary. Based on feedback, we decided to try scoring to make it a little more interesting for players who only had one spaceship. Once again though, we implemented this idea poorly. Our first implementation included a scoring system where the further away from the black hole your spaceship was the more points you got, but we kept the same end game trigger of there being only one player with multiple spaceships on the board. It was quickly realized that this type of scoring system only made the problem of players not wanting to play their “Down” card more prominent, so we reversed the scoring so that the closer you were to the black hole the more points you got. However, keeping the end game trigger ensured that the game still fell flat. There still wasn’t enough going on at the end of the game so the scoring system seemed arbitrary and just didn’t feel right. So once again, we reverted back to the previous version and each time the scoring suggestion came up we basically shot it down with, “We tried that and it didn’t work”. Just like the special powers suggestion, the scoring suggestion came up many more times and it wasn’t until months later that we decided we were willing to give it another try. I brought the game to Protospiel Michigan where the scoring suggestion came up and once again I told the playtesters it didn’t work out. The next suggestion was to try it with a new end game trigger, which for some reason we never thought of trying. We then played a game where it ended when a majority of the spaceships had been removed from the board and you scored more points the closer you were to the black hole. Doing so made the gameplay a lot better and this was without the one-time use special power cards (which were actually added later). As I playtested it throughout the rest of the weekend, we started to receive comments that people wanted to buy the game without us even having to ask and were told at the Snakes and Lattes Designers Night to look for a publisher. When we did add the one-time use special power cards, it only made the game that much better and increased the number of playtesters who thought the game was publishable.  http://bit.ly/2bCJGlF Conclusion
We’ve previously discussed listening to playtesters and making sure to apply feedback, especially if it keeps coming up. However, we never really discussed in detail the idea that if you apply that feedback and it didn’t work that maybe it wasn’t because it was bad feedback, but that your implementation was poor. Reflecting on our journey with Pulled into Darkness we realized that we failed to implement feedback properly in the above mentioned areas and then didn’t continue to work on figuring out a way that would work. Our thought was that we applied the feedback the way it was presented to us and it didn’t work so we’ve done our job. We wrongly assumed that anyone who was suggesting the same kind of idea after the fact didn’t understand the logistics of applying the feedback or wanted the game to be something that it is not (which sometimes is the case). The work that we should have been doing to make those suggestions work ended up being done by our playtesters (which we’re very grateful for) despite it not being their responsibility. Looking back, we realize that this reflects poorly on us designers and is something we will be aiming to fix to make our games and our game design knowledge even better. Once again, we are very thankful and grateful to the playtesters who initially tried to tell us to try new things and helped us implement those ideas so that we have a game that is publish ready. We couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks for dropping by! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Take Care! Kevin  http://bit.ly/294serh Good Day Internet! Today we’re going to discuss some of the things you may do during a regular game night that you should avoid when playtesting and explaining your game. We’ve already covered explaining your game to playtesters and preparing for external playtesting, but with us getting into the heart of convention season (Protospiel, GenCon, and so many others) we thought it would be a good time to revisit these topics from a slightly different perspective. So this week we’re talking once again about presenting your game to playtesters with more of a focus on how it’s different than a normal game night: a semi-formal presentation with a purpose compared to playing with friends at home. 1) Avoid Discussing Tactics or Strategy During a regular game night, you may help new player(s) by giving them some tactical and strategic tips as well as suggestions to help them contend with the rest of the group. When playtesting though, you need to avoid this at all costs: you’re not interested in how “well” your playtesters play the game. What you are interested in is seeing how your game performs under as many different circumstances as possible, including different tactics, strategies, and player experience--which in turn may reveal why certain players do well. You also need to recognize that not every playtester is going to be clueless on what to do. Experienced board gamers and playtesters will usually figure out a strategy or potential way to break your game quickly and put it into action--your job is to let them figure that out on their own and stay out of their way. You’ll get way more useful feedback by observing how they play and manipulate the game rather than by telling them how they should play your game.  http://bit.ly/290dAiB 2) Don’t be an Alpha Gamer You should always be available and willing to help with rule clarification and interpretation. However, under no circumstance should you be playing the game for your playtesters. The decisions should always be in the hands of your playtesters without any interference from you. You should do your best to tell playtesters what their options are as they would be described in your rules. Don’t give them examples of plays they can make, like you might do during a regular game night. Let the playtesters ask questions and figure it out themselves. Part of the data you want to collect is how easy your game is to learn and how intuitive it is; the only time you want to step in with what a player can do is if they literally are doing nothing and have no idea what is going on. Sidenote: if this happens during your playtest there’s a good chance you have something to fix either in your game or explanation. Try not to look at this as a negative though; rather, look at it as a learning experience in improving your game and/or explanation.  http://bit.ly/292oCoC 3) Avoid Discussing Other Playtesters’ Feedback Until After the Game Gamers usually love discussing how previous games and situations have played out as well as previous players’ plans and thoughts on/for the game. Although a big part of the social aspect of board gaming and playtesting, it can be detrimental during playtests. You want to avoid influencing your playtesters’ feedback before they’ve made their own conclusions. Hopefully your playtesters will think for themselves, but you don’t want to take a chance that they’ll just agree with what you’ve told them a lot of playtesters have said before. Besides, you’ll most likely have the chance once the playtest finishes to let playtesters know you’ve had similar feedback before and are working on solutions. Before you do though, listen attentively to your playtesters feedback, ask followup questions, and don’t shut down ideas. Then you can talk about the feedback you’ve had before and have a discussion around those points.  http://bit.ly/296Qjwc 4) Be Helpful, Kind, Happy, and an Active Observer
Okay, you probably want to be some of these things at your regular game night, but they’re even more important during playtests. You should make your playtesters feel comfortable even while you’re attentitively watching them play your game. It’s important to remember that your playtesters aren’t machines or guinea pigs--they have feelings and want to be heard too. Appreciate and accept incoming opinions, and keep an open mind when it comes to feedback and critiques you receive. The only thing you don’t want to do in terms of attitude is bring in artificial enthusiasm for your game. Part of being an active observer is being involved in the playtest--give the group your time and attention, even if you are not playing. Pay attention to aspects of the game you did/didn’t expect, think about those moments and ask questions about them. Playtesters will only comment and give feedback on what stood out to them in the experience. By being observant you can ask questions and get feedback on other important aspects of your game that may not immediately come to mind for your playtesters. That’s it for this week. We hope this helps you as you go around playtesting your game during convention season. Speaking of which, due to our participation in Protospiel, GenCon, and helping to organize ProtoTO (plus other commitments) we’re going to have to take a small hiatus from the blog for the next month. If we get a chance though, we’ll post some content on our adventures at Protospiel and Gencon. We will also still be active on our twitter and facebook--so make sure to follow us there. Along with moving, and travelling for Allysha’s work, we’ve got lots to do to get Pulled into Darkness and our island survival game: Swept Ashore updated and ready for critique. However, we’re getting pretty confident with the play of Pulled into Darkness, and depending how these events go we hope to start working towards getting Pulled into Darkness published! Thanks for dropping by! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Take Care! Kevin  http://bit.ly/1TdpSqo Good Day Internet! Today we’re going to discuss when you should and when you shouldn’t play your own game during external playtesting. We’ll also talk about how it can affect the game and the kind of feedback you’ll get. When first starting out with external playtesting, it’s natural to want to play your own game: it’s what you’ve been doing so far for playtesting, so it feels comfortable. Initially, including yourself in your playtests will help transition you into external playtesting as it can sometimes be a little unnerving first presenting your game in front of strangers. Plus, playing your own game means you don’t need as many playtesters, and don’t have to put yourself out there as much to get your game up and running. Therefore, we personally recommend that for the first few run throughs of external playtesting you play your game with the playtesters to get yourself into the groove. Additionally, by including yourself in the game you also get the personal player experience which is useful for seeing the game in another perspective. Board games are a very social experience, so it’s good to connect with your playtesters on a social level to get a true feeling of the emotions and level of fun. If you experience the same kind of frustration, joy, or other emotion based on a similar game situation as your playtesters, you’ll better understand how that situation needs to be dealt with (if at all). Depending on your learning style, and personal preferences, this may be very beneficial for you in order to understand some of the feedback you receive. Another benefit of including yourself in playtesting is that you can try out different strategies/ways of playing to see how they “work” in game. , By doing so, you have control over when and how a play style is implemented into your game. You don’t have to hope that a playtester will play your game that way eventually. There are limitations to this however--if your game has direct conflict, playing as an aggressive player against new players (your playtesters) is probably not very beneficial to getting good feedback. The whole point of external playtesting is to get external feedback. If you crush your playtesters in game because they don’t know how to respond (or you’ve found out through being aggressive that your game favours aggressive play), that may negatively affect what kind of feedback you get. There are however other potential downsides to playing your game with external playtesters.  http://bit.ly/1sky6kn One thing to take notice of is you may get caught between playing your game and monitoring the playtesters for nonverbal feedback. Signs such as playtesters who seem to be frustrated over a certain situation, or players who are only doing a select few of the available actions all game won’t be as evident when you’re in “game mode”. This is because as a player you’re usually busy reacting to other player tactics and strategies, and trying to create a dominant strategy. This means you usually miss exactly what all other players are doing and their feelings towards your game. If you miss these signs you may have to rely on the playtester naturally bringing this feedback up verbally at the end of the game. Otherwise, you’ve lost out on that feedback and analysis. So what about not playing your game and just watching the action? What’s the benefit of that? If you decide not to play your game with external playtesters, you will be able to better monitor the action more closely and pick up on nonverbal cues. In general, it’s going to be easier to pick up on the smaller things like player tactics and keep track of analytics such as play length and when certain events triggered. This should lead to more game specific and player experience specific questions at the end of the playtest, which hopefully lead to better insights into your game. This is the main benefit of not playing your own game; you get to focus solely on analyzing your game and how it plays. Something else to consider is that removing yourself from playing your game sometimes helps with separating yourself from your game (as mentioned in Preparing For External Playtesting). By not playing your game and focusing on analyzing it, you too are looking at it in a similar way as your playtesters. You are only making judgements on the game, not you as a designer. Your goals are to improve the gameplay and make it fun, just like everyone else.  http://bit.ly/1Yx8z1P Lastly, not playing your game with playtesters helps you to transition into the final stage of playtesting: blind playtesting (which will be discussed further in a future blog post). In blind playtesting, you won’t have any interaction with the game. You’ll hand over the complete game and rules and let the players figure out everything themselves. This will be tough if you haven’t playtested a lot of times without playing your game. Even then, depending on how much control you exert over your playtests that you don’t participate in you may have a difficult time with blind playtesting. However, not playing your game is going to help at least a little in making that transition and “letting go” of your game.
So in general, you’re going to participate a lot more in your external playtests early on than later in external playtesting. In fact, perhaps you’re not playing your game at all near the end of external playtesting. There are, of course, exceptions. One of the main ones is if you don’t have enough players, then you should definitely play your own game (even if you are nearing the end of external playtesting). It’s also usually a good idea to join in if you’re short on the number of players you want to test your game with. In the end, the type of feedback you get may vary, but it will still be valuable. You just need to figure out how important it is to test your game with that many players at that particular moment. That’s it for this week. If you’d like to meetup, we’ll be at Snakes & Lattes on Monday night for the Game Designers Night. We’ve also been signing up for events at Gen Con this week. We’re completely overwhelmed by the number of events, so if there’s any event you think we’d be crazy to miss let us know! Next week in the blog we’re going to look into the Designer Effect and how that can affect playtesting. Thanks for dropping by! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Take Care! Kevin  Credit to: Mark Kolb designer of The Connections Card Game Good Day Internet! Today we’re going to prepare you for external playtesting. We already have gone through how to present your game, so this time we’re going to focus on the feedback aspect. Up to this point, you’ve been playtesting with family, friends, colleagues, and by yourself. Most of the feedback you’ve be given is probably very supportive of your project (regardless if it’s positive or negative). This feedback has hopefully helped you make a lot of progress in your game development. Your game should be functional now (although it may not be fun), and you’re probably feeling pretty proud of it (ie. me with my first project). So it’s pretty natural that your hopes are high that everything is going to go great for external playtesting. The reality is that the majority of the time external/public playtesting is not going to be as supportive or positive. You will get negative feedback, your game may not be as entertaining as you thought, some playtesters will make it clear they don’t like your game, and problems are going to be found (potentially very big ones). For new designers, and some experienced ones, this sometimes hurts more than it should. Now, we’re not saying you shouldn’t go into public playtesting feeling proud of your game in order to avoid this potential pain. Instead we’re going to focus on how to mentally prepare you for public playtesting in a way that you will be ready for what may otherwise be a demoralizing and hard-to-accept experience. We’re also going to go over what you need to do to make your playtests productive and to make sure you don’t put up a wall to criticism of your game. The main thing you can do to prepare is to do your best to separate yourself from your game. Whatever playtesters may say about your game is not a reflection of who you are as a person. It is also not because they want to ruin the thing you’ve worked so hard on. You’ve asked these people to give their feedback and perspective on your game--not you, not how much work you put into it, not what your vision is. The only thing you’re asking them to provide feedback on is the game, and that’s exactly what they’ll give you. Another way you can prepare for external playtesting is to keep in mind that your game is still in development and is not perfect. Being ‘in development’ implies that more work is expected to be done on your game and that you’re still tweaking/fixing parts of the game. Don’t fool yourself into believing that because your game has been working smoothly so far that it will continue to work smoothly forever (as this is rarely the case). Development happens in stages and sometimes you take steps backwards instead of forwards. That’s okay though because in order to develop a great game you need to know what doesn’t work as much as you need to know what does.  http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2452831_md.png  Accepting criticism and critiques also requires you to understand that there is no perfect game. You can’t reasonably expect to have everyone enjoy and give glowing feedback for your game because there is no game in existence that works flawlessly and pleases everyone. The number 1 game on boardgamegeek.com: Pandemic Legacy, has 3587 10/10 ratings. It also has 278 ratings of 1/10 (certainly not a number to be scoffed at). Not everybody will like your game--and this is just a reality of designing and playtesting. Regardless of what you do, a playtester who doesn’t like social deduction games (for example) is almost guaranteed to not like your social deduction game. So don’t get too worried or upset if they don’t like your game. However, even if the don’t like your game you still need to listen to what they have to say--they may have some advice about how to make your game more interesting to other types of players! Furthermore, when someone says they didn’t like an aspect of your game, you need to do your best to understand this is not out of hatred, but rather to help further develop your game. This isn’t necessarily about them not understanding the game, what your vision is, or how much work you’ve put in. Instead of getting overly defensive when you receive that negative feedback, try to figure out why the playtesters are saying that, and ask how you can fix it so that it works with what you were planning. You need to do your best to be unbiased and neutral in order to avoid influencing playtester feedback and show you are willing and enthusiastic about improving your game (same goes for presenting your game). Alright, we’ve started to make that transition into a productive playtest. So what should you be doing to get the best feedback? The first thing you should make sure you’re doing is recording the feedback you’re getting. This shows that you’re taking the playtesters’ feedback seriously and it will help you remember what was said when you go to apply your feedback. Of course, to apply feedback you need to be able to sort through it. So make sure you keep things neat and in order for your own sake. Part of that is writing down when (including start time) and where the playtest took place (something I’m not very diligent in doing, but Allysha is--see the picture to the left). If there’s an idea that comes up multiple times from different playtests, you should highlight it (use a different colour, put a star, asterisk, rainbow, or whatever else beside it)--this change should be something you consider for your game. There’s a reason multiple people are suggesting it, and there’s a good chance it’s going to improve your game. Just like in internal playtesting, most of your feedback for external playtesting will probably come at the end of the playtest. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be taking down feedback during the playtest. Just do your best not to interrupt the flow and speed of the game as we mentioned in Designing Your Core: Internal Playtesting. If a playtester mentions a piece of feedback during game that requires additional detail, the best practice is usually to write it down, and ask for further clarification after the game. Don’t delay the game for others by focusing on one person’s feedback during a playtest. The only time you may want to do this is if every playtester is thinking the same thing. If this happens to be something that’s potentially game breaking, ask the playtesters if they’d like to stop at this point. If they do, figure out if you can make a quick fix (with help from your playtesters if you need it) and keep going. If that’s not possible, have a discussion on how to fix it for the next playtest. Stopping your game because of a large flaw is difficult, but you have to be respectful of your playtesters’ time as well as your own. Playing and getting feedback on a game that is not fully functional is not going to be as productive for you or your playtesters. Take the time to figure out how to potentially fix it, and then go from there. When the playtest is done, write down the end time so you know how long the playtest took. This helps you determine whether your game is taking too long (or is too short, how we wish we had that problem) or if your playing time seems to be inconsistent. When you’re asking for feedback, remember that how the game felt is just as important on how the game played. You’re looking for how the experience played out for your playtesters, and feelings is a big portion of that. Don’t discount the fact that someone felt a card was overpowered just because they couldn’t tell you exactly why. Also, always allow players to explain how they’d like to see the game progress or improve after the playtest. You might find something you really like or can fix something you’ve been struggling with.  A board game designer in their natural habitat. Lastly, take the time to review your feedback after a playtest. Think about if the feedback is consistent amongst that playtesting session, consistent among other playtests, and/or if it’s consistent with your own thoughts on the game. Think about what you want to try (or should try based on volume) for future playtests. When you have those figured out, come up with how they’d work in game, apply them when you get the time, and start again. If anything is inconclusive, stick with what you got, and playtest with another group. You can ask them at the end of the playtest if they thought the same as the other playtesters, or if the game would go better with the previously proposed changes.
We’ve focused a lot on converting negative feedback into a positive experience in this blog. However, there will be times when you still get external playtesters who are enthusiastic about your game (even if they didn’t like it in it’s current state). Usually this happens after you’ve done your work and have applied feedback correctly. So don’t think that it’s going to be rough experience all the way through. You will be rewarded for properly playtesting and adjusting your game, and enjoy watching your game grow into something great. Thanks for dropping by! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Take Care! Kevin |
Kevin CarmichaelBoard game designer and developer discussing the ins and outs of game design. 
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