Tonight a friend at my game group did me a favour of trying to learn my card game from the rules, having never seen it before, and teach it to three people who had never played it. This is about as close as I can get to "blind" play testing as I sat there and forced myself not to correct the minor mistakes that occurred.
The overall result was good, it worked and the players enjoyed it. The main point for me was that I needed to be explicit in the text on the cards whether the card's ability was mandatory or optional. I thought this was obvious but it wasn't and they played every card ability as mandatory. The game still works that way but it meant some players felt forced to execute an ability that hurt their score.
I have reworded the cards in question and further clarified the rules. This game is first and foremost a gift for a friend who owns the IP it's based on so I'll be sending her a custom deck via Artscow. With her permission, I'll make this version of the game available as print and play but as the IP is actually quite obscure it has become clear that it would reach a wider audience if it had a more "generic" theme applied to it.
I'm probably going to go with a steampunk theme because A) it's somewhat in vogue, and B) it's the closest genre to the original IP so will "feel" most appropriate to me. The problem with that is going to be sourcing the artwork but maybe I can put together enough Victorian style clip art to make it work...
