How complete should your game be before you ask for playtesters

It is important that unless your playtesters enjoy the overwhelming majority of your game, chances are you only get to tap each playtester pool once. You post a PnP on this forum, and some people will take it up and play it... That said, you should definitely go with the idea you think is the best fit (the one that seemed the smoothest/most balanced/fun in your internal playtesting) before you take it to a playtesting group... If it playtests badly, you can change it to your other idea to see how that works.

Some people may get really excited and want to try it the other way, but many people if you had a gaping hole, they are going to be done with your game. In those situations, you want to try a different audience... Maybe print it out yourself and take it to your local gaming store and see if you can get some playtesters.

In the spirit of failing faster (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjrOaoHz9s), you should make some decisions, test them yourself, and get your game to playtesters as quickly as you can.

Short Answer: You should have a "complete" game before you playtest using the best stuff you've put together, but the reality is that playtesting is performed to help refine, cut, and test features, so you'll never be "done" when you first take a game to playtesting.

Ultimately, you want to play test as soon as possible. The sooner you have a play test kit, the sooner you start polishing your game.

You'll want to generally categorize your play testing into these phases (though not restricted to):

Alpha - First few iterations of the game. You'll want to test your mechanic to see if it just works. Typically, alpha is just your own personal tests; though in a multiplayer situation you'll want to test with a very select few that can give you real criticism; does the game work? What works? What doesn't? Once you feel like your game is "solid" enough, move to:

Beta - I believe this is where you feel like you are (maybe tail end of alpha). Play with local people. You'll need to see their reactions, their time it takes to "get it", any game breaking mechanics. Anything too over/underpowered? Your play testers should really try and break your game. Iterate, iterate, iterate! Doesn't matter how you label it, just make sure you know the differences between builds. Don't worry about whether or not you're "wasting their time", if they agreed to test your game, use it as an opportunity.

Between Beta and Blind, I suggest doing a test blind (or a few); give the game to people that have never played the game (with rules) and just watch them try and figure it out; you'll learn a lot this way.

Blind - This is where the tire meets the tracks. By this time you should have your game on lockdown, your rules fleshed out, and your numbers tweaked so much you consider it a final game. Find (I don't know how you do this) players that haven't played your game, then give them a copy; credit them in your game as a thank you for their time. Give them something to write their opinions on. Let them figure it out. The hope is that they get it and they have no questions. If they can't understand it, then you're back to beta. If they get it and they love it, you should be closer to sending the game to a distributor and/or to the press.

The point here, despite all the technical terms, is PLAY TEST NOW! In the game I'm making, I got blank cards, penciled in all 100+ cards in my game, then tested it. Then I made another, tested it, then made another. Every time I made a new iteration, I tested it. During this time, I was making my first test kits in Illustrator. Once I finished that, I started play testing with the printed copies of my game. The people that tested my game started to get excited because they felt like they were on the journey with me as I was creating this game. While I was testing with my printed decks, I was making my rules. After tweaking my numbers, fine tuning my rules, and fixing possible game-breaking issues, I pitched it to Victory Point Games.

I passed the first time.

If it wasn't for my constant testing, I wouldn't have passed. Now it's being sent out on blind tests and it's set to be published this year.

You can do it.

I highly recommend trying to find a group of game designers in your local area or, if none exists, reaching out to find people interested in game design and starting your own meetup group (for an example, see http://www.meetup.com/Middle-Tennessee-Tabletop-Game-Designers/). If you can find a group of people that is interested in game design, you can continuously bounce ideas off of each other and playtest each others' games. When it comes to more wide-scale playtesting, you can work together to get all of your games playtested by strangers, potentially going to conventions together or arranging group events in your city.

When I started designing my first board game in November 2013, I was very lucky to have a regular board game night at my college that I went to on Fridays where I was able to make friends test my game. After a few tests, I proposed the idea of starting a board game design student organization, Vanderbilt Gamecraft, on campus and I got some of these friends to join me in that. Since then we've been helping each other design games quickly and I've developed a lengthy list of game designs at various stages of development. We meet up every Friday to play games and every Sunday to work on designing games, and meeting this frequently and pushing each other to get testable prototypes ready ASAP really helps us to make progress with our games design. Last Sunday we did a 10 minute brainstorming session and, thanks to our general game components library, we were able to test one of the ideas as soon as the designer finished describing it. To get outside playtesters, we hold roughly monthly playtesting events and advertise them across our campus.

If you're interested in trying to start your own group, send me a message and I can help by giving some more information on how I generally run my group. Being the leader of the group and having that commitment has inspired me to more seriously research and think about game design, and I believe that you starting your own group would have the same effect.

I don't know if you have already gone and made a decision but I have a suggestion.

You can try to create a minimum viable product prototype, which is to say, a prototype that has the most important components and mechanics that encapsulate the whole of your project.

So create a simple prototype that has keeps all of your important mechanics, the ones that form the game you are envisioning and playtest that. This will make for faster and easier prototyping while also helping you really solidify your core mechanics. Try to playtest this prototype by yourself first and see if it meets a level of fun that can be taken to other to playtest.

Then you should try to playtest with other designers who are more likely to stomach a bare bones game. This should help create a good foundation of mechanics and ideas that can be easily iterated upon with ideas that help improve and support your established mechanics. Lastly you can take this iterated prototype to other friends or even to strangers to gain diverse playtest sessions.