Testing becomes a grind

I can definitely relate to having a game go stale. It can be even more difficult if you are using just a small group of testers and/or no (stand-in) art!

My suggestion is actually to play other games. Play published, fun games. Play with lots of people. Do other things in the hobby, like watching video reviews, reading blogs, and entering BGG contests.

When you are playing your game... Sometimes you just have to play through the rough patches. There is a real sense of "fake it till you make it" at times!

One thing that helps my enthusiasm is teaching a new player and hearing THEIR enthusiasm. Just this morning I read some feedback from a guy who played my game for the first time last night - it's always encouraging!

I even like getting some hardball questions and heavy criticism from new players. It helps keep my analytic process going, and can help expose blind spots or weaknesses in the game.

Hope that helps!

Make sure that you also have other people playtest it outside of your group, and catalog your data with the precision of a scientist. Then put it down and come back to it. Just this morning, a game I had worked on 4 months ago began to make sense in a new light, and it's taking off again.

When you have a working game, you'll reach a point where you will do intensive play testing. It will be very repetitive and boring, but it is important to find outliers, which are outcome that could hapen to your game in a rare situation.

You could give yourself some testing objectives like making a player go against the current of the game, try to use different strategies and focus to see if you can break your own game.

Still at that point, the best solution is to test with different groups of real people. They will find a way to break your game. If you have a PNP version, you can send your prorotype on the internet, some people are willing to PnP Prototypes and give you feedback.

Yeah, I've definitely had this. I've been working on a video game for almost 2 years (or maybe 4, depending on how you count it) and a board game for a year and a half, and you definitely feel the fatigue after a while. Despite the video game getting through Steam Greenlight, winning a few awards and getting a publisher, I actually had to be reminded a few months ago that what we were making was actually good and worthwhile. As has been mentioned above, the way you do this is to get someone new to have a go - it's awesome seeing that look of discovery again.

On the board game front, I worry that I keep changing the rules now not so much because they actually need changing, but because I want to try something new. I have to keep checking 'is this actually making it better? Is it better fulfilling the purpose of the game?' That stuff is actually pretty hard to get right, but you've just gotta keep at it.

The other thing that's mentioned above is to let things go for a bit. I'd actually recommend making a bunch of things quickly and letting them all go for a while. The one you come back to is the one worth pursuing, and the one you'll actually put the time and effort into.

While I play plenty of multiplayer of my own games, I do watch ALOT of people play games. Not only the one that I'm working on and needs testing but many different games.

It can be amazing to see how people think and what they enjoy or get confused by. The other neat thing is that you can see the moments that effect a player either positively or negatively that they forget about when it comes time for feedback.
It's amazing how often I see someone struggle to with a game for the first half... yet when asked "Was it easy to learn and play?" answer "Yes".

In my experience with blind playtesting, it was like an entire new world of design opened up when I received my first lot of feedback. When you're not coaching players from the sidelines or playing through the game with them, you have a chance to see just how well your rules are written, what works and what doesn't work, what sticks with the theme and what doesn't, and even some of the fun factor. More than that, if you take it constructively then your game becomes better and you can gain more confidence as a designer because you have some direction to your revisions and follow-up work.

I'd say blind playtesting is ESSENTIAL. If you don't do it, then you're not doing a thorough enough job as a designer. Plus, if you don't do it, as a designer you're missing out on a tremendous learning experience.

I have exactly the same problem, but I am going to give you a very different response from the others. The Chaz and McTeddy are obviously serious game developers, and maybe even make money at it. If you want to get to the point where they are, you should stop reading now and you should follow their excellent advice.

On the other hand, it is important to know yourself and to understand what you want to get out of the hobby. For myself, designing games is a hobby that I enjoy, and I do the part of it that I enjoy. I completely understand that if I ever want to publish one of these games and possibly even recoup the considerable expenses I have incurred in creating them, I would have to change my attitude, buckle down, and do the hard parts. I have actually gone through all that with one game, and I'm quite proud that I followed through. But I don't choose to do that with any of the other 9ish games that I have under development. I don't feel "guilty" or unhappy that I've let them languish. I am happy with what I've done and occasionally I pick one of them up and do some more work on it.

It's about understanding what your own goals are. If you are burning to see your games in a real gaming store and reviewed in magazines, then you have to do all the hard work, even when it is hard. :-) But if you get pleasure just from writing down your ideas and imagining the finished result, then take your pleasure where you can and don't feel badly that you never actually get there.