Playtest 'Swarm' for a free copy!

Not necessarily. For one thing, traffic is usually pretty slow on weekends to begin with, and this being a holiday weekend, it was probably even slower than usual, so it's highly likely that not that many people even saw your post yet. It takes people some time to respond, so you have to be patient.

However, I would also suspect that in general, requests for playtesters are only scattershot in their success rate. The reason is not too hard to see. Speaking for mysef, I have a hard enough time asking my friends to playtest one of my games, let alone someone else's, and my playtesting time is limited enough that I just am not able to playtest someone else's game in general. If I did, my own designs would never get anywhere!

However, there are definitely some altruistic souls on the boards here, and the enticement of getting to keep the proto is a good idea, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone takes you up on the offer. I also wouldn't be surprised if you have better success attracting playtesters at a gaming discussion group rather than a designer group, since the loyalties of such people are less divided.

And of course, as you know, there's the GDW for discussion of rulebooks, provided one is interested and willing to return the favor.

Sorry I can't help, but good luck!

-Jeff

Well I, for one, am very interested in abstracts. I just downloaded the rules you posted. I think I can whip up pieces to play test with, but if you had a printable board, that would make things easier.

Three early concerns:

1) Six actions per turn sounds like an awful lot for the diceless version. It could allow someone to completely surround a lone piece out of nowhere in one turn. How did you arrive at that number of actions?

2) A related question for the version played with dice -- how did you arrive at rolling 2d6 to determine the number of actions. The long-term average should be 6.5 actions, which still seems like a lot. Did you consider 1d6, 1d8 or 2d4?

3) Is there a significant first player advantage in the diceless version (six actions per turn)? If so, one way to balance it might be to give the first player only three actions on his/her first turn, and then six actions every turn thereafter. Or perhaps a series of two, three, four, five, six and then six thereafter.

Clark

Muuuuch better... now all is clear. I would title the illustrations thusly for additional clarity:

Example 1 - Basic Capturing
Example 2 - Six-Sided Encirclement
Example 3 - Multiple Piece Encirclement

This will help the reader tie the images to the text descriptions.

Your game seems very smooth and I look forward to giving it a spin... I have been reading the posts here and am curious to see how the movement limits play out in practice.

~Josh