Simply baffled by how difficult it is to get Blind Play testers!!!

Hi,

I can only tell you that there is a monstrous advantage to monitoring players play your game in front of you in stead of waiting for a digital summary of a game experience.

For me, testing Ortus was much easier since it's a 2 player game that you can teach anyone in 5 or 10 minutes, is portable and over in about 45 minutes. Exile Sun seems to be a real hardcore gamers type of game, more players and longer playtme. So you will need some dedicated players with some time on their hands.

So why not try your local gaming store (loads of geeks)? In Holland at least, there are a bunch of people hanging around these places and many will be happy to help. Plus there is room to do so. Maybe put up a poster announcing you are setting up a blind playtest in a couple of weeks. Pick a date and bring beer and pretzels. This way you won't have to wait for a convention to come along.

Good luck!

You do not need anonymous people. You just need interested people. And the best way to do that is to sell it to them. Give them something to look at (graphics/logo) and be able to tell them what it's about in a sentence or two and you should be able to coax enough people at a hobby game store, match up event, college gaming club or a convention to playtest it if you don't already have a group.

If you do have a group, then try them first. Just don't explain the rules to them when you hand it over to them. Let them read it, try to figure it out and then watch them play.

But blind testing is always the last stage of playtesting. You need to pretty confident that your rules are accurate and your game makes sense and plays smoothly before you blind-test. Otherwise it will very quickly break down and provide you with little information.

If the game is quite complicated, you will want to explain how the game works at least a dozen different times before you hand it over to someone who knows nothing about it and cannot ask you questions about it.

But, remember, almost everyone is taught the rules to a game by someone who already knows them. So, people are used to listening to others explain the rules and you often can count on visual, verbal and tactile elements to circumvent a lot of information that must be formally presented to someone who has never heard of the game and needs to know what can happen in every contingency.

So, before you blind-test, you need to know that your rules are super clear. And, by that point, you probably already know whether it is a game worth publishing or not. Blind-testing is there only to make sure that people can learn the game without someone to explain it.

Eric,

My experiences have been somewhat similar to your own. I've put two games up for blind testing on BGG. One game elicited a huge response (the theme is a big draw), with many groups expressing interest in either printing it out or playtesting the prototype. Of the four groups that offered to print out their own copy, only one followed through, and his feedback was excellent. Of the three or so groups that I sent the prototype, one just played it but never provided feedback, the other provided some minimal feedback but was pretty difficult about actually sending the game back, and ended up keeping it for almost a year. My other game elicited only one response but their group played through the game four times and gave solid feedback. And I entered that game in the same contest as you, and was similarly disappointed by the lack of feedback.

The question I've asked myself, and that I'd ask you, is, what role is blind testing supposed to serve? It's one of those game design rules -- "you must blind test your game!", but for what actual purpose? I've found the feedback from blind tests very difficult to interpret, because you don't know all the context -- did they get the rules right? Are they prone to like this kind of game? Are they putting effort into it or is their interest in playtesting lackluster? etc. So I'm not convinced blind testing is important at the designer level. Maybe at the developer level, where a game is ready to publish and you want a consensus of players to tell you it's fun, worth buying, and the rules and components are functional.

I would assume you'll get less response with Vassal than you had with sending protos, since there are many fewer players who use Vassal than who could play a physical board game that was sent to them. But hopefully I'll be wrong!

Good luck.

Regarding fewer people being able to play with VASSAL: The good thing about VASSAL is that chances are you will find playtesters scattered throughout the world, and using VASSAL they can team up and play each other, which may result in more and better games than if each tester tries to convince their local gamers to playtest with them. That's my theory anyway. So far, as I said, it hasn't resulted in any real blind playtesting for me, but I have playtested using VASSAL with me as one of the players (non-blind playtesting).

Well, I hear you brothers… In my opinion, the difficulty of finding playtesters varies according to several factors regarding the game itself; the main been: broad appeal theme, number of players, playing time, number of components, rules length and the overall level of completion.

This is the same as saying that you’ll have more chances of running into a volunteer tester if you have a common theme (like space exploration), that plays ok with 1, best with 2 and up to 4 players, plays in 60 or under 90 minutes, can be printed in less than 10 A4/Letter size sheets of paper (in grayscale), with 3 to 6 pages of rules, and the design shows you’ve been devoted to it for a while.

My experience with Roman Emperors (that fit all the previous standards) was that I found many people willing to play the game, but few of them committed to review it in a detailed manner. As much as isolated comments proved very valuable in many aspects, as the designer, you are forced to devote a great deal of thinking for every “what about changing this” comment you get. Since a game is a complex system of interlocking mechanics, you have to see it working as a whole before replacing a part. Casual contributors create quite a challenge concerning this. On the other hand, if you have a complete and detailed review, spiced with comments on the actual gaming session, now you can take feedback with a lot more confidence.

Disclaimer: I think rules are the most important part of the game. The rules must be as complete, concise and proofread as humanly possible for me to commit to playtest.

As for sending prototypes, I would only do that (willingly) to publishers, even if they are only interested in it as playtesters. I think someone involved in the publishing business understand what is expected by you when you send the game, can provide feedback in a concise manner, and can give you insight about the publisher perspective (taking production / costs concerns in account). I wouldn’t trade that specialized feedback for 50 kids in a FLGS saying they “liked the game”.

This could go on for a while. As a side note, I’ve been AWOL because my newborn (Luke) has arrived! I’ll be on the next version of Roman Emperors, and my promised playtesting review (sorry Daniel) as soon as possible.

Keep thinking!

I never used vassal, and prefer to pnp the stuff myself, then hand-test it, usually with carcassonne meeples and other markers like stones or mussels, to avoid printing tedious markers.
Some of the results can be seen here:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/user/salish99

Uhm, and feel free to send us a laminated copy, that will give it definite prime attention and ascendancy over the other odds and bits we regularly test. :-)
To be fair, we only once received a pre-printed game to test, and did that the same night arrived, in all other cases, we never saw the final product (to be fair, all we ask for is to be mentioned in the acknowledgments).

We;ll take a look at the exile sun later.

Seriously

Why would you send out anything? Take your time and find testers around you. Family, friends etc...

I just watch people's mood while they play the game and work with that :)

Is blind testing absolutely necessary to get published? No, as long as you have playtesters who represent well your target group and who are not afraid to give you their true opinion (and who are willing to test it again and again and again...).

To be honest, I've only done true blind testing once, and that was with a friend in the U.S. who had a game group that liked games similar to the one I designed. I knew I could trust him, and he's an experienced game reviewer who gave me some very detailed, very honest feedback, which was extremely helpful. My friend, Bernd Eisenstein, also sent his self-published game Porto Carthago to the well-known German game club Westpark Gamers to blind test, and they were able to give him good feedback as well (he knew them, of course, as it is not their habit to play unsolicited prototypes).

Of course, I've also received good feedback from the blind playtesters that publishers used to test my prototype when I send them in for consideration. When you send your game to a competition like Hippodice, you also get feedback (at the very least, you find out if it it made the final round of consideration).

I would never send a prototype to someone I did not know and trust, however. It's best to find gamers in your area who like to play your game. My first design goal, after all, is always to design a game that my friends and I like to play.

And if you can't find enough people around you who are willing to try it (or they try it once but are not excited to play it again), you may have to face the hard truth that there aren't enough people anywhere else who would play it, either.