Board game testing!

I've mentioned in a few recent posts that I've been designing a board game. I think I did, anyway. I may have forgotten to actually write about it. In fact, now that I've walked away for a minute to check my past blog posts, I realise I've not actually said much about it at all.

So, since I've not said much about it, here it is: I'm designing a board game!

(... That sounded much more dramatic and much less rambling in my head.)

It's fairly obvious that I love a good, complex board game. And I've been itching to design one for ages, so when I finally had what I thought was a good idea for one, I jumped on it! I'm keeping most of the details off the internet for now, until I can refine it all a bit more, but I will say it's a tile-based game, which is one of my favourite kinds of board games.

To the people in my day-to-day life, I've been discussing this topic almost non-stop. Is this a good idea? Would this work? What do you think of this? Would this be too complicated or cheesy? I'm pretty sure they'll all be grateful when the darn thing is finally done, but in the meantime, I hope they continue to put up with me.

Anyway, I've reached a point in my design that is both a turning point and a stopping block, if that makes any sense at all. The turning point is that technically, the game is playable. Pretty much everything that is needed is there, with all the mechanics in place. The stumbling block, though, is the numbers. When I first ran through all the cards and dice rolls, I more or less picked numbers that sounded good, rather than made mathematical sense.

This proved to be both useful and awful. With my very tolerant boyfriend and two of our good friends, we sat down to have a play through, with me acting as a living rule book. The results were pretty much as I'd expected. There were rules I had not thought out all the way, and had to correct to close up loop holes. There were issues I hadn't considered at all, and had to make up rules for on the spot, which sometimes worked well and other times ended in disaster. Most importantly, the numbers proved to be very, very unappealing. Forty five minutes after we started the game, we found ourselves no closer to winning than when we began. A huge chunk of that was due to the numbers and the lack of balance in the game. We ended up calling it quits at that point until I could fix it.

I learned a great deal from that play through, though. I discovered that the mechanics of my game were intact, and that the players seemed to like the idea and the theme behind it. I discovered that a rebalance of all the numbers would likely fix a lot of the issues we had with the gameplay. I discovered that playing it and needing to fix it has made me all the more eager to do it again until this game is perfect. And then start all over again with a new game. (Be strong, my friends, one day your poor tired ears will recover from my abuse. Hopefully.)