Blog Post #6: Playtesting OP, Please Nerf (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

Introduction

In this blog post, I showcase our card game’s elements and QA questions for our in-class playtesting session. I also explain my hopes and expectations of the playtest.

Card Game Elements

Playtesting Questions

1. Do you play any other card games?
2. If so, which ones do you play?
3. How difficult was the game to learn?
4. Did the game feel fair? Was there anything that was unbalanced?
5. What do you think about the game overall?
6. If you could change 1 thing about the game, what would you change?

What I Hope to Discover

My board game group discovered many issues while playtesting Get Off My Island!, and it improved drastically after we tweaked the game mechanics over and over. None of it would have been possible if we didn’t playtest. I hope that we can do the same for our card game’s playtest sessions, as cleaning up the mechanics made the gameplay much more fun.

To do this, we have to observe how the playtesters play with little to no explanation of the game. If we tell the players how the game is supposed to work, we can never go back and see their natural first impression (Fullerton). We have to observe their mistakes, see how they approach the game, and where confusion arises. This way, we will learn much more from the mistakes the players make than if they played the game after our explanations (Fullerton).