Board Game Testing

Earlier today our board game assignments underwent some rigorous testing. We each had a game and separated into groups of 3 so that we'd each get to play our games and the others in our group.

Alan went first in our group, his game involved a hex grid where you would colour in sides based on dice rolls in order to capture a hex, the winner was the player with the most hexes at the end. It worked well until the end when we were running out of hexes and our dice rolls were too high to continue. Alan won, with Basil coming second and myself a distant last place!

Basils game was next and involved strategically moving pieces of "mess" around an apartment for control of the board, if two pieces overlapped they would fight and the winner stayed on the board while the losing item was removed. I somehow managed to win this one but I think it was down to luck more so than skill as Basil cleared the way for me to play my last piece safely.

Lastly we played my game "8 Legged Warriors", its about using spiders to gain territory and wipe out the competition, the presentation on my previous post explains the rules. I was a bit worried starting out about how the game would scale as I had only playtested with 2 players over the weekend, luckily the 3 players worked really smoothly. I had been worried about a game breaker or exploit in the rules being found but I think its actually pretty well covered as theres not much room for someone to become over powered. I think for the game to be more fun the cards need to be more balanced in terms of their effect and quantities, it was the imbalance in some of the cards that threw up the only real issues but these weren't major and the game still worked well. The game takes on a visual style that I really enjoy seeing develop as the game continues, essentially the quantity of coloured tiles by each player hints at their overall power within the game. I think this happens because the player with the most spiders has the most resources to capture tiles. One slight issue I think is that larger stacks are as mobile and effective as smaller stacks so currently there's no incentive to to use smaller stacks. Having single spiders move 3 spaces, 2 spiders move 2 spaces and a stack of 3 move 1 space might be interesting but I'd worry about the effect of that on the playability of the game given that there are only 19 unique spaces on the board. Lots to think about but overall I'm calling this design a success!

For next week we're moving ahead with developing Basils game further, so it should be fun.