“They don’t advertise for playtesters in the newspaper...”

Well, that could have gone better. It could have gone much, much worse too.
It’s Tuesday morning, and having spent a sleepless Sunday night downheartedly worrying about everything I’d done wrong, I collated the questionnaires compiled by my playtesters and realised that things weren’t quite as bad as I’d been thinking.
Now, before all you pitch-hardened design veterans out there start telling me that ‘people you know are always nicer than blind playtesters,’ and ‘friends aren’t a real test of a game.’ I know all that. And taking that into account, I have one game that works, two that are fixable and one that’s not so much a problem as a puzzle wrapped in a conundrum wrapped in an enigma.

RUS works. This is both a good thing and possibly a bad thing.
‘Rus’ is an historical strategy game based on the rise of Russia from the Viking Rus to the Russian Revolution. It was inspired by ‘Twilight Imperium’, which showed how you could apply Eurogame principles to a strategy game. So elements of ‘Rus’ resemble ‘Puerto Rico’ & ‘Settlers’. Other elements remind testers of ‘Britannia’ and ‘History of the World’, but unlike those two games, its short variant(s) only take c.2 hours to play and give you a satisfying game (admittedly, one game this weekend took 5 hours, but more on that later).
What’s even more heartening is that the testers picked up on the fact that there are multiple ways to win, and one even won a game by following a totally peaceful tech-tree route, eschewing violence and conquest altogether.
There are a couple of game balance issues I need to sort out, along with various rules clarifications, but it is essentially at a point where I can send it to America and have it torn apart by a bunch of ravening gamers who don’t even know me.
The only problem is, it’s HUGE! It’s the kind of thing that Fantasy Flight would produce for hardened gamers like me to salivate over whilst rhapsodizing lyrical about its production values. So it ain’t gonna be cheap to produce, and I don’t know, but I reckon that makes it a much harder commodity to sell.

BREAD & CIRCUSES is almost there. There is nothing more satisfying than sitting on the sidelines watching other people enjoy what you have designed: as a bunch of cynical dice-hacks get ever-deeper into character and pontificate about upholding traditional Roman values whilst viciously trying to kill each other. There is also nothing more depressing than the sick realisation that your simple fix to stop the game being too short has turned it into an interminable slugfest, and seeing all that original enthusiasm slowly drain away.
Put simply, you win the game by buying an ‘Imperator’ card and forcing the vote through the senate. In earlier tests, this was happening much too early, just as things were getting really interesting. So I upped the cost of the ‘Imperator’ card. And I’ve set it too high. Now it’s almost impossible to both gather the votes you need and pay for the card.
Added to that, one tester deliberately tried a ‘game-breaker’ strategy, by repeatedly buying the ‘Assassinate’ card and killing anyone who looked like they might win. And it worked far too well.
But this is what I mean by things aren’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. Both of those fixes are EASY! As are most of the other problems in the game. As one tester put it, it’s “Promising in just about every way bar the fact that it never ends!”
Once the anonymous Americans have tested it into oblivion, I will hopefully have a nice little historical strategy card game that the likes of Z-Man might be interested in looking at.

EVOLUTION is a bit more of a challenge, I’m afraid.
This is a strategy game that starts 600 million years ago with players as Trilobites in the Pre-Cambrian seas, and sees them compete with one another for lebensraum until the arrival of the Modern Epoch 12 turns later. If one of them manages to evolve into a species with intelligence before then, they win outright.
My original design was loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong and painful. So I completely overhauled it and managed to create a version that took about 2 hours to play. The only thing was, it had hundreds of counters, which my testers saw as a problem. So I tweaked the system to cut the countermix right down, only to discover that the test-game on Sunday went on FOR-EVER!
Bugger! (excuse my Anglo-Saxon).
But as I reviewed my playtester questionnaires, I discerned an interesting pattern. The interminable test-game on Sunday was played by exactly the same players who played the 5-hour game of Rus on Friday night. Four of them also played the interminable game of B&C on Saturday. So now I’m faced with the question: is this a function of the players, not the game? And does it matter if it is?
We all have at least one game-playing friend who makes you yearn for an egg-timer every time his turn comes around. Put two of them in a game, along with one who always has to explore the rules ramifications of every move before he makes it, and the game grinds to an ignominious halt.
But surely that’s the point: we ALL have at least one gaming friend who does this – and if a game can’t cope with their behaviour, then it’s failed.
So I have a duration problem to fix, which ain’t gonna be an easy one. I might shelve this for a while and mull it over. While I do, though, I might also send the old multi-counter version to America and see if they machine-gun all those counters back at me as I cower in my proverbial trench waiting for inspiration to strike.

Which just leaves KINGDOMS OF THE SUN.

KINGDOMS is set amongst the temple-building cultures of Mexico. Players use population and resources to build temples. Then they have to sacrifice to the Gods. Whoever has the biggest and best temples wins. Only problem is, the bigger your temple, the more it consumes and eventually you are sacrificing (or ‘skulling’) your population to keep up, which ends with your culture literally eating its own tail. It’s a fiendishly challenging representation of the ultimate in consumer societies and the problems that they faced.
It’s also broken.
Put simply, I thought I’d fixed it. But in fact, I’d only incorporated some half thought-out ideas into the original rules, then left them to marinate. So when we opened the box, we discovered a Pandora’s worth of muddled ideas that no longer bore any relation to the original quick reference sheets in a rulebook that might as well have been written in the original Mayan for all the sense it made.
We gave up.
But you know what? I’m not in the least bit downhearted. I know EXACTLY how to fix this, and when I do, it’s going to be the vampiric dark cousin of Eurogames like Puerto Rico and Settlers. Where their resources expand exponentially, Kingdoms is a desperate struggle to squeeze the last literal drop of blood out of your Kingdom before it disappears back into the jungle from whence it came. It’ll take a bit of work, but ironically, I think this is the game that has most potential out of all of them.

So there it is. The playtesting weekend went really well. My testers all knew what I needed from them, and while I’m sure they pulled their hardest punches, they didn’t hold back on constructive criticism. It was a joy to watch them enjoying RUS. It was agony to watch them struggle with B&C’s endgame and an EVOLUTION that took almost as long as the real thing. But the games are all stronger for it, as am I.
Next stop America.
Then, the world!
M<