Well, I got my first game published in May, and that was an unambiguously good thing from my point of view. But things didn't go, at the time of release, quite as smoothly as they could have done due to a really basic error we made.
I thought I'd share the incident here, if only as means of public confession for the most basic of mechanical oversights, or perhaps because it might help someone else who would have considered making the same mistake at some point in the future...
Without boring you by explaining the game's rules, players take actions to draw cards or perform other functions. Originally, I had used a rather tall deck of cards, and the exhaustion of the deck was the criterion for the end of the game.
Shortly before printing, the publisher suggested to me that we halve the size of the deck and play through it twice. This would lead to a shorter deck (which would fall over less) and halve the number of cards per game.
Playtesting of this showed no change in the way the game played, and I didn't forsee any problem. We therefore reacted with great surprise to comments that it ended too quickly from those players who had been sent preview copies with which to practice for the UK Spielchamps tournament. For us, it still ended when the game had matured and longer term strategies had long enough to pay their fruits.
Our mistake was not to consider that the playing style of newbies (as opposed to playtesters who knew the game well) would affect the smaller deck in a fundamental way.
People approaching the game for the first time tended to draw cards rather than make long-term investments. This had always been the case, but when playing with the single large deck of cards it had generally fallen to more nuanced strategies.
However, we had failed to consider that newbies hoarding cards in their hands would, when reshuffling a smaller deck to through it for a second time, greatly reduce the playing time, as they were denying the cards they held from the recycled deck. Thus, heavy card drawing was, when the cards were being hoarded, multiplying the rate at which the game ended.
Anyway- the end result was a game which wasn't playing as it had done as a prototype. The solution has simply been to return to the old method, and make the decks larger and return to a "once through" system. The publisher has mailed replacements to everyone who bought a copy and supplied them in all new ones. This doesn't mitigate the problems encountered by the tournament players, and I've already resolved never to work on something that is being advanced to meet a tournament deadline (as we hadn't had time to find this wrinkle in advance of the competition and correct it), but it all ended well and is restored to former functionality.
So ends a cautionary tale on the ramifications of what seem like minor production changes. I still can't quite believe I never thought through the problems that occurred, but these things happen, I guess...!
Best wishes,
Richard.
Hopefully not too many feel like that but I know there are group in Finchley who have taken severe umbrage, apparently. It's quite difficult to change peoples' minds after a negative experience, I fear, but at least the number of people exposed to the flawed rules are fairly minimal. I was very worried we'd suffer negative word-of-mouth, but so far things are picking up; the Counter and Games Journal reviews, in the next few months, will be the real test, though.
Looking back, it now seems quite amusing to think just how perplexed I was at why groups such as yours encountered that problem. I remember Tanya, Markus and Mark were suggesting that everyone must be burning the draftable cards every round, or making some other mistake, in order to get through the deck that quickly. It took us ages to work out how it was physically possible to get through the cards that quickly, because we hadn't imagined people hoarding so many cards and never using them.
I suspect these sorts of things will always happen from time to time. Whilst the golden rule of playtesting should always be that you don't change anything without rigorously testing it, getting "blind playtests" by people who are completely fresh to the game is always difficult when you've got a deadline. In our case, we only knew in January that we'd be required to have fully printed copies ready for 1st May, as opposed to Essen. While the game had been in a finished state for 6 to 12 months, it didn't leave very long to actually fine tune things. For example, the capacity to play with up to 6 players got scrapped, as we decided we didn't have time to smooth it out properly. The change in the way the deck and game end conditions interacted seemed so unimportant that there seemed no need to send it back to the playtesting process: Mistake no.1. ;-)
Yes, it can be awkward when a game goes beyond the explanation of rules to providing a strategy primer. It always feels odd if a game has to be played in a particular way to function properly. (Indeed, as I said above, there was nothing wrong with the prerelease MM rules, if you played it exactly how we'd intended ;-). There is a slightly tangental issue of whether a game should function in the face of one player acting completely irrationally, but I'll shut up on that for now.
There are plenty of games where the first experience is hopeless, but I often find this encouraging as it suggests experience is rewarded. This said, there's a difference between ending a game thinking 'right, let's play again; I know exactly what I'd do differently' and 'wow, that made me feel I was stupid'. I think Mao is the only game I've ever played where it truly was unpleasant the first time but not since, and that is for very different reasons from most German-style games.
Best wishes,
Richard.