So, with no further input from either gaming group, I've stopped working on Captcha Chaos aka Tile Pile aka Wild Tile aka FTW!(Fuck This Word!) I have 1 of the guys in the store testgroup who wants to buy the game already. I still don't think it's ready and I need another group (who I don't know) to test it for me. Without those tests I can't improve the game. Some want the cutthroat randomness of the 2nd incarnation and some want the structured chaos of the 3rd incarnation.
Also, I'm not feeling the "2 of the same consonants" word set I'm using in the v.3. I might just simplify it to something like... Medium difficulty contains 5 letter words of all different letters and 6 letter words which contain 2 of the same vowels. It's a bitch to find 2 consonants as it is, but having the Wild Tiles increases the chance of getting what you need. (Doubles the chance, as a matter of fact.) I'm going to make some new Captcha sticks and see how that goes.
Comments
Getting Testers
At The Game Crafter we get gaming groups from around the country offering to test games for people. So what I might suggest would be to take that sort of knowledge and apply it to yourself. Head over to some place like meetup.com and seek out gaming groups around the country and see if they would be willing to playtest your game if you send them a copy.
I would really love that but
I would really love that but I'm too worried something will happen to my game, either in the mail, misuse by the group, or just never seeing it again. Replicating my game is VERY tedious when taking into account the contents used for my prototype.
I wish I didn't work on Saturdays. All the gaming groups from meetup meet that day. I thank you for your suggestion though!