Our First Blind Play-Test
I didn’t realize how well last Friday’s play-test went, until I was over at my Uncle’ Kevin’s house two days later. We we’re over for dinner, my brother and I. And we were also joined by our cousin. I was really jonesing to play a board game so I took Settlers of Catan, (factually the galaxy’s best game ever,) over with an intent to teach my Uncle and capitalize on the number of game enthusiasts present. It didn’t take me long to explain the rules of the game to Kevin. Luckily my brother and cousin had already been victims of my board game parties so they were able to chime in with the occasional clarification. If anyone reading this is aware, in Catan, you can trade resources with other players and strategize against others. When explaining this concept I merely mentioned the fact that you could trade resources. Weather it was for the sake of time or some other subconscious reason, I didn’t mention the reason to do it or the potential strategy it would add. To my amazement, about 30-40 minutes into the game, he became wise to these strategies on his own, and the game found its outer layer of fun. The game was now being played the way the creators had fully intended, and Kevin genuinely understood the game. During one of his playful quarrels with my brother over how much wheat was worth his ore, it dawned on me that I witnessed this exact same thing, over my game, just two nights before. Whatever satisfaction I had felt after the play-test on Friday was amplified to a whole new level of realization; Destined Legends, (in our amalgamation of concepts and mechanics,) is now officially a game. It still has some bugs for us to work out, but it is still a very satisfying feeling.
Back to Friday. We hosted our first “Blind Play-test.” That means that we took the game itself, the How to Play guide, and the play mat, and presented it to two of our friends Ana and Alec, and let them figure it out and play it. It so happens that neither of them have ever played any other kind of card-based game nor any role-playing videogames. (So bless their hearts for giving this a go.) Our goal was to let them take the How to Play guide and leave them to their own devices. After 10 minutes we had to intervene to catch a couple of my own mistakes with the guide.
Most of our issues were luckily in our How to Play guide. Although some of the issues did stem from their inexperience with RPG concepts. It’s something that I had accounted for, but not to this degree. We are planning on releasing a complete Rulebook online, in addition to the How to Play guide that will be in the box, so I’m not sure how much more in-depth we need to get. I remember that Magic the Gathering and Pokemon both took me several games to completely understand, so it may just be a reality of card games. However our game is relatively simple in execution, but heavier in the conditions and regulations departments.
After reading for a good 20 minutes or so amongst themselves, I recommended that they begin playing, and continue through the rules as they begin, (a method I use when learning a new game.) Denis, my brother Shawn, and I helped explains the rules through their first few turns. They quickly understood the main concepts and the game continued with minimal interjection from the rest of us.
The game utilizes randomized decks of cards, similar to other trading card battle games. Luckily for us, both of them had good shuffles, (card gamers know what I mean by that,) and were building their arsenals nicely. Lo and behold, about an hour into the game they were comfortably using all of the expected RPG lingo. Beyond that, by hour 2, they were using the actual strategy of their respective decks without our help! This blew all of our minds. My experiences two days later with Catan, made me realize all the factors that decide weather or not a game is successful as a game. Everything might look great on paper, but its no good until tested. And luckily everything has seemed to fall nicely into place.
The play-through lasted very long, around 3 hours, although a very large portion of it was their learning of the game itself. We have yet to do a postmortem on the game, but I am very excited about what their reactions were. They did mention that they were excited to play the game again. Their initial reactions were that they had no idea the game would involve this much strategy and “would be this epic.” All music to my ears. I don’t wanna jinx it, but the future looks bright for Destined Legends.
I can confidently announce that game is now in Alpha Testing Phase, keeping us on track for a mid to late summer release. We will be running a Kickstarter campaign to acquire funds that we need to actually produce the game around March, so look out for that. Until then we’ll continue to blog as the game ramps to completion. If you dig what we’re doing please spread the word. You can follow and share us on twitter. Below is a short montage of the Play-test from Friday night.
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