Early-stages playtest questions

My process goes something like this...

1) Once the game is playable, I focus upon making it fun. Are player's challenged? Are there multiple paths to victory? Is there a sense of tension and excitement throughout the game or does it lag in certain places? Although I may need to introduce rule changes and element changes to accomplish this, cranking up the excitement / tension / strategy elements are crucial. If the game is fun, people will GLADLY continue to help playtesting. This helps to build energy around the game.

2) Once it is playable and fun, I focus upon streamlining and simplifying wherever possible. Find the parts that seem awkward or unwieldy. Look for the places where people are confused about the next step in the game. Are there extraneous mechanics or rules that aren't really adding depth or excitement to the game. Rip things out, clean things up, smooth things over.

3) Next I create the first draft for the rulebook. At this point you have a playable game that people enjoy which is fairly elegant and simple. At this stage I put together a complete rulebook. I know that it will be changed, but it helps to work through the process of explaining the game to someone else. It helps me as a designer and helps to identify things that are still awkward or non intuitive. It is also important to start an FAQ which you may or may not include with your rules (you might just have it online). This is important as you may have something that you discover in a playtesting session that does not come up frequently, but needs to be documented to clarify how that situation is handled.

4) Try to break your game. Also look for playtesters that are willing to help you break the game. Take a strategy and run with it. See if you can gain an unfair advantage. What if you only ever took actions of type A? How would the game turn out if you stuck with actions of type B? What if you never stopped employing an early game strategy? What would happen if you initiated a late game strategy right off the bat? Is there a certain card, move, or combination of moves that you can consistently exploit to crush other players?

Find the flaws and fix them.

5) Next, work on improving / refining the rules. Continue playtesting, refining the rules, and playtesting some more.

6) Once the rules are reasonably clear and complete, I move on to doing blind playtesting sessions. This involves handing the game components and rulebook to a new group that has never seen it before. Ask them to sit down and read through the instructions as if they had just bought the game at a store. Have them play the game without your involvement. Stand back and just watch. Don't play, don't explain, don't clarify. Just watch and take LOTS of notes. How did they interpret the rules? What sort of discussions do they have? What strategies do they employ?

Update the rules to clarify the game instructions and make any other changes as needed based upon the blind playtesting sessions.

Continue to perform blind playtesting sessions, taking notes, and refining the game until you are able to have at least 3 smooth sessions that execute without issue.

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Back to your original question - small tweaks or major changes? I employ both. If I have a hunch about how to change the game and it is dramatic, I give it a shot to see if it fixes things in one big sweep. If that doesn't pan out, then I go back to the previous format and continue to make small adjustments between sessions. I try to get something to reveal itself as least twice before changing it (trying to rule out flukes).

Designing a game certainly is a lot of fun. I wish you all the best on yours!

Unlike you (and apparently Native Texan), I write the rules first. They're 99% likely to get changed and modified in the course of play testing and development, but I like to have them because I can take notes on them as players play. Also, I can refer to them while playing to ensure that we're playing correctly or to find out why I made a specific design decision. ("Why is it three cards per turn?" "Why does the energize phase come after the reaping phase?")

Do you have a specific game design goal? Is it written down? A design goal helps you keep crafting the rules in the right direction.

So I'd recommend putting the best ruleset you can in writing. That way you know that you're being consistent from sessions to session. Next, I'd note all of the changes you'd like to make and prioritize them for testing.

Regarding changing the game in-play: It really depends . If the problem is so bad that it's going to invalidate any fun or useful information you're going to get from the play test, then either make the change or re-start the game. If the problem isn't so bad, you may want to play through - especially if changing the rules mid-game will result in hard feelings with your play testers.

Interesting! What exactly do you mean by "proof of concept". This sounds like heplful practice you mension.

I don't like to involve playtesters until I'm sure I have a design that works to some degree. My usual process is to get an idea, and start writing it down, making changes and additions as they occur to me and as I think more deeply about the design. This is not a full ruleset at this point, but sort of a skeleton of a ruleset. I may spend a couple of days or a week on this phase.

Next I make a quick-and-dirty prototype, often on a pencil-sketched board with bits of paper for pieces. I play a solo game, pretending to be four different people, to see how it all really works. Usually this reveals my idea to be awful and unworkable, and many of my ideas get thrown away at this point.

If the idea survives the initial solo playtest, I'll put some effort into a better prototype (mainly because I hate playing with fly-away little bits of paper) and start the real development process. This means playing lots of those solo games, getting a feel for what parts work and what parts don't. As I identify problems, I look for solutions and try them out. The rules evolve during this period. Sometimes the design will fail at this point, if there are serious problems that I'm unable to fix. If not, then after a while the rules will begin to stabilize.

When that happens, it's time to produce a really playable prototype, with proper player aids and a complete, well-written rulebook. It is only now that I will risk showing the game to other people. The "risk", in my mind, is this: I don't have a huge pool of playtesters, so I want the ones I have to look forward to my games. I don't want to make them sit through a bad or even mediocre design. That's why I try as hard as I can to find and fix every problem that I can before I involve playtesters.

Of course, the playtests will reveal problems I didn't find on my own; that's what playtests are for. But my playtesters get the best possible experience: a playable game that nevertheless needs their criticism and advice.

I have learned not to make changes to games in progress. I have never really had this be successful, and on one memorable occasion, it ruined a playtest session because the change turned out to be a really bad idea. Yes, it was good to learn that it was a bad change, but I could have figured that out on my own later, and avoided spoiling the playtest.

Some interesting advice I got this weekend: you can playtest portions of a game, focussing on one particular part of a game that's troublesome. For example, you can try several different auction mechanics without having to play the entire game: just set your testers up with a pre-set position, have them try the auction, and stop when the auction is over. Then do it again, with a different kind of auction. Repeat until you've found the method that works best. This is much faster than having to play entire games, just to test a mechanic that only takes five minutes. I've never done this, but I intend to keep it in mind from now on.

I can never tell whether one of my designs is actually fun until I hold a live playtest. That's usually the scariest moment: I put a lot of effort into a game before I'll try a playtest. By that time I know whether it "works" reasonably well, but I can't tell whether it will be fun without letting other people try it, and asking them.

We use single page printing for draft rules - Each playtester gets give a set, and notes their changes or ideas on the reverse of the page they relate to.

After a few solo tests of the ideas a new rule book is written up and then playtested again.

this is a good way of doing things for a childrens game, I don't think it would work for a 60 page rule book!

I found one good tool for this kind of solo-playtesting: ZunTzu!

Here is how it works. Prepare a ZunTzu package that has a little bit of everything: cards, counters, chits, tiles etc. Only leave the images blank. Make sure you specify "supply =" some large number on all components so you can vary the quantities.

When you need to play-test something, edit the image files to add some text to cards (or tiles, etc.) You do not have to make them fancy; often some plain text or an icon or two suffice. Then you load the editied image into ZunTzu, and in 1 minute you can play with those cards and other components, draw as many as you want, shuffle etc. I found this to be faster and easier than cuting and playing with actual paper pieces.