Another less common style of post, but I thought I’d go through everything I did at Protospiel Milwaukee this last weekend. For those who don’t know, a Protospiel is a game designer convention where everyone tests each others’ games, and being a Milwaukee native, I try and make it down every year. Here are all of the games of mine I played and what feedback I got from it.

Hypnotic Kittens

Hypnotic kittens is a game I really, truly want to be a good game, but it keeps falling flat. This time was no different. My last attempt has people saying that they thought one side was more powerfully than the other, so I tried pushing it the other way, but in doing so, made it too easy (even though I moved the line about as small as I could move it). There was no tension, as players thought they could do anything and not get punished for it. It told me something that I had been trying to ignore for a long time: there need to be major changes. I was advised to focus on the main mechanic and remove everything else, which, funnily enough, I thought I had been doing, but no. They gave me some suggestions and I came up with some on my own, so I might try going that direction. The big change I had been thinking about making for a while now is the victory condition, which has been weighted to one side for a while, but I thought that was part of what made it interesting, with one side being on the edge of defeat and the other side trying to figure out how to push it across that edge. The problem is that losses feel like they come from nowhere. So I might change it to more of a tug-of-war effect. The other major change/suggestion was removing the rooms/moving. This has a lot of useful upsides, like making turns more straightforward and reducing the board to something manageable. The downside is that the game feels more constrained, and players are given fewer ways to diversify themselves. But is that okay? I worry about it being too similar to battlestar galactica, a famous hidden role game with the closest thing to my mechanic (switching sides mid-game), but maybe my game will be different enough to be okay. Oh, and also they suggested the cats be more cat-like, which, yeah, I get that.

Stinky Cheese Game

This one was the most volatile, but I’ve been trying to make it work. Again, the action economy was weird. I think I need to make placing cheese a free action. One designer suggested starting with all cheese in play, but players seem to enjoy the placement aspect of the game. As usual, things don’t get stinky enough quickly enough. I tried a version where you can place 50% more stink on cheese and it ended up backfiring a bit, as it became way too easy to get the rat to eat something. I decided to track how much cheese the rat eats, and this lead to a breakthrough. One thing one of the playtests made clear is that the endgame is a little weird, and one way to mess with it is to make the rat decide the endgame. Once they eat enough cheese, the game ends. This means that there’s a bit of a comeback mechanic, as the game doesn’t end when one player says it should, but it also makes boring or depressing games end sooner. If the rat ends up eating everyone’s cheeses very quickly, then the game ends before anyone can feel too sad about it. The last big suggestion was to swap the roles, thematically. It makes more sense than I would have expected. Let each player play a rat hunting cheese, and the antagonist is a human. It makes sense for them to protect cheese, and for them to hoard it, and for them to be picky enough to want to eat stinkier cheese. The biggest downside is that there is no longer a fun little rat token at the table.

Alibi

This is my newest game, and one I was hoping to be able to playtest digitally once more before going, but it worked out alright. One player was a huge fan of the game, at least the drafting. A drafting game with an interactive element was something they hadn’t seen enough of. However, the main mechanic needed work. They liked that it was in there, because it created some good tension, and not playing your whole hand is a good hook for the game, but it was a weird way to end the game. The biggest issue was the “blind guess” problem, where a player with a bad hand could try and just blind guess another player and the game would either end anticlimactically or continue with one player losing and another provably not it. It was a bad strategy, but it was one someone could do. The other major breakthrough was theming. The criminal is actually a gossip. That’s why they want to talk so much and hear so much, but also why other people don’t want to tell them anything. I’m going to make that change as soon as possible

Lily Livered Scallywags

I wasn’t planning on testing this game, but I brought it with me so I could get some opinions on the visual redesign I made. However, one person remembered the game from a previous Protospiel, and they wanted to play it. I figured it was the right thing to do. While I did get some feedback on the graphics and some typos, it was nice just to watch them play. I didn’t play, mostly so I wouldn’t skew the data, but also because I wanted to see it played at 4 players, which is probably the ideal number. It was really nice to just watch people enjoy my game. I saw some things come up that hadn’t before, and a cool interaction that was a lot of fun.

Conclusion

That was all of them! I didn’t get to Hextouple Agent (again), but what can ya do. I’m glad that I was able to play a lot of other peoples’ games, some fun, some not so much. I even got to see some reimplementations of games I had playtested before. There were two games I really wish I had been able to play; one that was a cool simultaneous action drawing game from a designer friend that just looked fun, and one that had a slightly similar system to Lily Livered Scallywags that I wanted to check out for research. I’m just hoping I didn’t get on anyone’s nerves with all my feedback!