 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/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  Good Day Internet! Today we’re going to discuss what to keep in mind when creating your own Print and Play (PnP) for blind playtesting. For those who have never heard this term, a Print and Play is a set of electronic files that allow willing playtesters to print off (almost) everything they need to play your game at home. This would include the rule set, and files to create paper copies of all components. Many PnPs are available online on various forums and websites, but you also have the option to email your files or grant access to them on platforms like Google Docs to select personnel. Through creating our own Print and Play for Pulled into Darkness and playing multiple Print and Plays from other creators we’ve learned a lot of tips and tricks on how to make a Print and Play more playtester friendly! 1) Provide a Theme and Mechanics Overview in Your Post You need to be able to catch potential playtesters’ attention before they even open any of your files. Therefore, it’s important to have a short, well-rounded overview of what your game is in your post. That way potential playtesters can get an idea of if your game is for them and worth looking into more. Furthermore, most playtesters aren’t going to click through to your PnP files unless you give them a reason to; they’ll most likely skim the overview and decide whether or not to from there. So only cover the basic theme and mechanics, and keep it short. As an example, take a look at our original post for Pulled into Darkness on boardgamegeek.  http://bit.ly/28Lq7oG 2) Provide the Basic Board Game Stats Number of players, play time, and type of game should be prominently shown near the top of your post. Some of these should also be included in your post title if posting your PnP on a forum. These stats let your potential playtesters know at a glance if they can play your game or want to. However, don’t deceive your playtesters. If your game doesn’t play 2 players and takes 2 hours, don’t say it plays 2 players and only takes an hour just to get more interest. It’s hard enough to get people to play Print and Plays, don’t chase them away with lies. 3) Be Upfront About Required Additional Components Whether you post your PnP on your own site or on a forum like the boardgamegeek Works in Progress forum, part of your original post needs to tell players if they will require any additional components not provided in your files. There is nothing more frustrating than committing to printing off a PnP only to find that you don’t have all the components you need to play the game. Let your players know upfront in the post (not just in the rules) if they will require extra components. Additionally, you need to be practical about how many extra components you can reasonably expect your playtesters to have on hand. If your game requires 150 tokens in 10 different colours and shapes you’re probably going to want to provide files for those in the PnP. Even if it’s not that many, you could still provide them on their own sheets in the PnP and then if a playtester happens to already have those components they simply don’t print off those sheets. Again, if you do such a thing, remember to explain that in your original post.  http://bit.ly/28MKuB0 4) Avoid Round Components if Possible For your first PnP, you want to make it as easy as possible for players to get up and running with your game. Round components are more time consuming to cut out than triangle, square, or rectangle components, so you should eliminate round components wherever possible. Also, when it comes to cards most playtesters won’t cut rounded corners, so don’t waste your time putting those in. When you have a game that has proven to be good, and art that brings out the theme and looks aesthetically pleasing your playtesters will be more willing to spend the time cutting out components. 5) Provide a Black and White Version Not everyone wants to spend the money or has the option to print in colour, but there can be information loss printing a coloured version of a PnP in black and white (the amount of information loss depends on the number of similar tones and how they’re combined). Therefore, you should provide a black and white version of your game for those people, but remember to keep colour variants where it matters. For instance, unless your game is strictly solo or 2-player, you should keep colour in player pieces. You could also use symbols instead which is more friendly to colour blind players. Although you may not have any colour blind playtesters for your game, it’s always a good idea to keep them in mind and be inclusive when choosing player colours or by utilizing symbols for player pieces instead.  http://bit.ly/28MxuO1 6) Appropriate Access
If you’re granting access to your documents online be careful to make sure your playtesters don’t have full access to edit your entire documents. Chances are they won’t destroy everything you’ve worked so hard on, but they might (even if only accidentally). If sharing access on a PDF or Google Docs use ‘Can View’ on your share settings to make sure your playtesters can’t do anything to your document. You may also want to use a watermark on your documents to prevent any fraud or theft (although I’ve been told removing a permanent watermark is easy if you know what you’re doing). The other option on Google Docs is to use the ‘Can Comment’ share setting to allow your playtesters to put their feedback directly into your rules without finalizing any changes. This is extremely helpful for applying your playtester feedback afterwards, but it will make your rules messy and harder to navigate for later playtesters. If you looked at our PnP you may have noticed that we didn’t follow all of these tips and tricks. All of our spaceships are circles, we didn’t put a mechanics description on our website, and we didn’t provide a black and white version (although that would have required some creativity on our behalf). In retrospect, we probably could have made the spaceships triangles, and it would have been easy to include a mechanics description on our website. The reality is that you’ll probably never create an initial PnP for a game that everyone loves, but there are ways to make it stand out a little better. We’ll definitely be trying to improve our PnP for the next version and apply what we’ve learned so far. After we return from GenCon we’ll be working hard to get that up and running so check back soon for updates! That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll put out a last minute, scrambled blog post after a week of packing in preparation for moving! Perhaps the packing will inspire us to write about organization of mechanics and making a working ‘turn order’ in game. We’ll see. 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/1RHttpu Good Day Internet! Today we’re going to discuss how to know when your game is ready for blind playtesting. We’ll go over the changes your game goes through to indicate it has completed external playtesting. Before we can do that though, we need to discuss what blind playtesting is. Blind playtesting is the process of playtesting your game without designers’ direction or input. Playtesters will be given the game with a set of rules and must figure out how to play the game on their own. One of the main goals of blind playtesting is to determine how strong and comprehensive your rulebook is. Therefore, you’re going to need a solid and unquestionable rulebook before you start blind playtesting (we’ll discuss how to do that next week). Your game is also going to need to be otherwise complete, but what does that mean? How do you know your game is complete? #1. External feedback is narrowed in on the superficial. You should notice that feedback has changed from mechanics and theme overhauls to working on slight art changes and/or wording of text. If your bigger, game breaking comments haven’t been around for awhile that’s a good sign your game is running smoothly and nearing its completion. #2. Feedback is generally positive and playtesters are having fun. A game that isn’t fun, or that playtesters can’t find a lot of positive things to say about means you have a problem. Either you; a) haven’t found your target audience, or; b) your theme and mechanics aren’t working very well together. If you plan to publish your game, these issues are going to be barriers to selling your game and will most likely prevent you from publishing/funding at all. On the other hand, having both positive feedback and fun playtests are good indications that you’ve found the market for your game. Unfortunately, we know the pain of having a game that works smoothly, but didn’t get glowing feedback. “Rariora” was the first game I worked on. It was a themeless card game until Allysha came aboard to help me out. After close to a year of development, the game was running smoothly, but we didn’t have anyone saying they wanted to buy it/back it. Despite our best efforts the theme and mechanics were not working together. Feedback indicated the theme was grander than the mechanics and players were confused how the winner actually won the game (definitely not good). As individual pieces they worked fine, but when together something just didn’t click.  http://bit.ly/1TU4VPN At that point, we put that project aside until we decide we can rehaul the game entirely to make theme and mechanics work seamlessly. It really sucked that it looked like we were making good progress over the year, but ended up with a game that was inherently flawed and had no market. However, if you find yourself in the same spot, you’ve got to make the effort to rehaul the game. A game that isn’t fun and won’t sell is no good to anyone. Step back and rethink the game so theme and mechanics work well together and players have fun playing. Don’t worry though, it happens, but it’s an experience to learn and grow from!
#3. You’re satisfied with your game. When it comes down to it, the designer(s) gets the final say on whether or not their game is complete. So you need to ask yourself: Are you happy with your game? Does it fit the vision you had? And are all the parts there? If something feels off, try to narrow down what the game might be lacking, figure out what aspect of the game that relates to, and try something new. Worse comes to worse, you revert back to what you had (you may find out in the end that it was exactly what you wanted). However you come about it, you need to be confident and satisfied with your game. Without it, you’ll struggle in putting in the extra work to get your game published. That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll take a look at writing clear and concise rulebooks (as long as Allysha isn’t too busy!). We hope you had a great Taco de Mayo! Don’t know what we’re talking about? Check it out. 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/1YU0HHW Good Day Internet! Today we’re going to discuss Lewis Pulsipher’s "Designer Effect" and how it relates to your external playtesting. We’ll go over both his thoughts and our own about what affects it has on the external development of your game. The "Designer Effect" is a term coined by Lewis Pulsipher to describe the effect a designer has on playtesters by participating in the playtest (you can check out his video on it here). Pulsipher says that when playing with the designer playtesters tend to fall into one of two categories. They either: a) think they have to gang up on the designer (“he knows the game best and is going to win if we don’t do something”) or; b) they don’t think they can beat the designer at their own game and don’t play as hard. In either case, Pulsipher’s view is that your game (assuming you plan to publish) is not going to be played with you there all the time and therefore these effects you have on the playtests are negatively impacting your results. Put simply: you should not playtest your own game. We, on the other hand, think that the "Designer Effect" is a good reason you should playtest your own game. When external playtesting, as with all playtesting, you want to test your game under as many different circumstances as possible. You want edge cases to come up whether it be in the game or because of a particular gameplay style. It helps to find out how your game operates under those situations and if your game breaks. The “Designer Effect” is one of those edge cases we’ve experienced when playing games without the designer and therefore want to playtest with our own games.  http://bit.ly/1YU1KHT Do you have one player in your group that seems to win every time they play “their game”? Have you ever had the rest of the group try to gang up on that player when “their game” comes out? I know we have (shout out to our amazing friends :D). Sometimes it can be because that player has already won a few games in a row that night and we need to end the winning streak. Or maybe it’s just because they got the first points of the game by backstabbing. Regardless the situation, ganging up on a player in game does happen. Occasionally, the opposite happens and everyone gives up because they “know” who is going to win (usually denoted by the: “I knew you were going to win, you always win” comments after the game). Again, this is a replication of playtesters not trying their best against the designer because how could they possible beat them? Therefore, if these are situations in which your game may be played, you should be playtesting them. If at the end of your playtest you think it fell into one of the categories described by the "Designer Effect", try to get answers to the below questions and any other pertinent questions for your game under those circumstances.  http://bit.ly/1OKeNpC If everyone ganged up on you, did you still win? Was it is easy to win? Does that mean there’s a steep learning curve to your game? Is there supposed to be a steep learning curve? If you think the other situation happened where everyone else kind of just gave up; Did everyone else still have fun? Was it fun for you? Was the game still close? If it was, is there too much of a catch up mechanism?
It’s important to recognize that just because you play your own game doesn’t mean you’ll always experience the "Designer Effect". You should be aware that it can occur, but you shouldn’t be actively seeking it out when playing your own game (that would most likely negatively affect the playtest). Of course, even if you do experience the "Designer Effect", you’ll be testing an edge case and the feedback you’ll get is still valuable to the development of your game. That's all for this week. Join us next week where we'll discuss when you know your game is ready for blind 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 |
Kevin CarmichaelBoard game designer and developer discussing the ins and outs of game design. 
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