Playtesting

The cycle of board game design is: make changes, playtest, make changes, playtest. Many games will need a hundred or more playtests.

Design with playtesting in mind

Your game must be playable two-player. If you thought it was hard getting one playtester, try getting two (or five) at the same time.

If your game won't work properly with two players, don't make that game. This rules out most voting, trading, negotiation, and hidden identity games. You didn't need to wander into those specific genres anyway.

Make sure there's nothing stopping your game working with higher numbers of players, but leave it until late in development to start actually creating the components and structures for those extra players.

Make it easy to play

Your game should ideally be playable in half an hour.

Your game should be medium-light at most, in terms of game weight. Many people can't properly play, enjoy, or analyse heavy games. Also, as game complexity increases, development time increases exponentially.

Rules

No playtester wants to read rules — not even a small rulesheet. They want you to explain the game to them. Just have a reminder card, so players can look up the complicated and hard-to-remember bits, and how the scoring works.

Tabletop Simulator

Once you have your online playtesters, you'll need Tabletop Simulator (TTS). That's what almost everyone uses for playtesting online. It costs $20, and simply provides a 3D space containing a table. You can import cards and other bits into the space, and play all kinds of games in there. It's not hard to use.

I use Discord, to chat with people, and we playtest each other's games. Feel free to get on a Discord server, and ask people more about Tabletop Simulator.

I haven't done real-life testing since about 2017.

Be nice

Be as nice as possible to your playtesters.

Thank your playtesters. Unless the arrangement is reciprocal, they're doing you a huge favour. Don't waste their time.

End the playtest before they get tired of it. They'll appreciate that. Just test long enough to get a feel for the game. Until the half-way mark, I will rarely complete a game.

Always let them off, in gameplay. Let them take things back. If a rule isn't clear, let them adjudicate it. If they get massively screwed by bad luck, just annul it, in the interest of the playtest. Sometimes, let them win.

Do not disagree with their feedback. You can explain to them, if they've misunderstood something. Otherwise, just take it in. When they do give a piece of good feedback, identify it, and make it clear that it's a very good idea.

Thank them, at the end of the playtest.

Always ask yourself "why is this person helping me? What are they getting out of it?" They don't have to help you.

Cycle through your playtesters. If a playtester has a bad experience with your game, make sure it's in a good place, before testing with them again. Test with someone else.

When you make major changes, or when the game has problems, test with your best-known playtesters. They'll be more forgiving.

As with any group, playtesters will drift away, and you'll need a constant stream of new recruits.

If they're a game designer too, and your playtesting is reciprocal, most of this doesn't apply.

Managing playtesters

You must tell your playtesters what to do, and guide them.

Ask them specific questions, and let them know what you're looking for. They do not know how to be a playtester yet!

What you don't want:

• Attempts to break the game (unless it's a very late-stage design.)
• Power and balance opinions. Balance is always off, early in design.
• Musings about what might be a problem, but was not actually a problem during this playthrough.
• Solutions. 

I did a one-off playtest with another designer. After I explained the rules, he turned the deck over, and began reading through every card, so that he could play optimally.

What you do want:

• The playtester's feelings — what they did and didn't like. How they felt.
• Problems they ran into.
• Ideas. These are usually not useful, but occasionally great.

Negative feedback

Positive feedback is fantastic, but I can't usually act upon it, unless I'm not sure where I'm going with a game.

Negative feedback is really the only useful feedback.

Negative feedback is a gold nugget of new insight.

Prompt the playtesters for negative feedback. "What part was the least fun?" is a great opener for negative feedback.

I ask if the player felt any of the following things. Were they...

• Bored
• Overwhelmed
• Frustrated
• Aimless
• Powerless

BOFAP! These are the biggest negatives I hear. Playtesters often don't recognise their negative feelings, so prompt them. Literally just remember these five.

Don't worry so much about player confusion. Prototypes are hard to understand, and you haven't smoothed everything out yet.

Democracy

Playtesters can't always understand the reasons why things need to be some way, to make the machine work. However, there are many things that are non-structural, and just a matter of preference. Late in design, just start asking playtesters what they like, and go with the majority.

There was a space in my farming game that gave you a bonus, and everyone (including you) got a cabbage. Is it fun or not, for players to get resources from other players' actions? I wasn't sure, but the playtesters liked it, so it stayed.

In my farm game, there is no spatial element. However, I made some buildings that occupy more than one space. This makes the arrangement of things occasionally matter. This contravenes my rule that says that there should be lots of something, or none. However, what actually matters is what the players think. And, my playtesters are similar to the people who will actually play the game. They told me that multi-space buildings were okay, so I went with them.

During the Radlands expansion, I went through the names of every card, with all six of the regular playtesters. Where they didn't like a name, I changed it.

Also, get a feel for the big picture of your game. 

• "Is there enough or too much stuff in the game?"
• "What's missing from the game?"
• "Is the game the right length?"

Always remember, however, that you're the designer. Playtesters are not capable of doing your job. They're just an opponent, and a source of feedback and ideas, at best. I've done large stretches of productive playtesting with playtesters who provided no useful feedback or input.

You are the main playtester.

Emotional monitoring

The playtest isn't just for the playtesters. What should you be doing during the playtest?

Be constantly aware of your emotions during playtests.

This point might sound obvious, like saying "make your game fun", but it's actually a crucial part of my design process. Forgive me if I labour the point.

Normally, we're trying to ignore negative emotions — not monitor them. In day-to-day life, we don't haul a bag of groceries, and analyse ourselves as we do it. We don't think "my hand is sore... my arm is sore... I'm somewhat frustrated..."

It's a strange thing to do, but if you're experiencing a negative emotion while you're playing your game, other players will too.

You're creating an emotional experience here, and you can test it on a human — yourself.

Earlier in the development of Radlands, I noticed that I had more fun when there were less cards on the table. When there were more cards, the game could become a slog, and it was hard to impact the opponent. While the slog was entirely fair, I found it frustrating and boring.