Assignment 2: Creating and Playtesting a Boardgame

Assignment 2: Creating and Playtesting a Boardgame

Playtesting Notes - 10th Oct

This assignment specified that I create a boardgame, card game, etc. Based on the phrase "What's yours is Mine", I have created this game on my own.

      My game "Fleet Control" closely resembles the boardgame called "Risk"; Risk is a game where your aim is control the world by fighting for different countries/ continents, and Fleet Control is a smaller scale in terms of you are only aiming to control a small fleet of spaceships.

     Originally I wanted to include a trading card/ battle card feature into the game, because it would add more replay-ability to it; as well as create a for entertaining experience. But after a period of trying to test and create the card feature it became too complicated for how simple the game would be.

     Fleet Control is a game that requires a low level of skill in terms of planning out a simple tactic to obtain certain areas on the board, but because it uses dice; the game mainly gets decided by chance, the chance that comes with the dice can be altered in one players favour if they have more counters than the other player, so they will have more chances to win.

Once I came up with the initial game i was able to have classmates playtest the game to see whether or not it was fun to play. The first playtest I did gave a lot of feedback due to the game being fairly complicated in the start-up and slow overall. The main criticism was to do with how clear the rules were, because no one seemed to understand what they needed to do even after looking over the rules.
     On the board itself the areas that players occupy seemed to create confusion as they were divided by lines but players sometimes placed counters in empty spaces thinking they were areas, so to fix this all areas now have a complete box around it so it is more clear.
     After the players read the rules I decided on leaving them to play the game to see whether they were able to work out what they needed to do, and from this I realised they weren't able to get far without me explaining what they had to do; so therefore in the next playtest I will be explaining more into what they need to do before they start playing, so that they know exactly what they are doing.
     There were a few rules that needed changing from what players said as well as from seeing the results on the board, this is due to the original rules creating confusion when they were explained as well as they didn't work very well when they came into effect.

To play Fleet Control you require:
     - The Fleet Control board
     - At least 40 of each team counter
     - Two 6 sided dice
     - Rule sheet



Group Work: Playtesting a Boardgame

Group Work: Playtesting a Boardgame

In the lesson a classmate and I were tasked with making a simple boardgame in 10-20 mins to preview how playtesting worked.

We created "Bunker Scramble", the game centred around up to 4 players racing to the 'Bunker' in the middle of the board.

After thinking over the how big we should make the board, we decided on using a 6 sided dice as this was sufficient enough for the players to get to the centre fast enough so they didn't get bored.

Once we had decided on the dice we moved on to, how to make the game more entertaining; we decided on the simple concepts of:

     -Some spaces that the players would move over, would have special effects on them; some good, some bad. These consisted of:
     Mud - lose your next turn
     Barbed Wire - your next turns movement is halved
     Land Mine - you get blown back 3 spaces
     Equipment Drop - Pick up an Equipment card

     -Equipment cards; these tied into the space effects as the players would have to land on an "Equipment Drop" space to be able to pick up a card. The equipment cards we decided on were:
     Hand Grenade - you throw at specified target and they miss 2 turns
     Artillery Strike - you fire at the opposite side of the map, hitting at most 2 players; knocking them back 4 spaces
     Adrenaline - move forward 1 space
     Med-Pack - on your next turn, move 2 more spaces
     Minigun - aim at specified target, and take 1 off their next movement

After we had created the idea we were able to ask other members of our class to playtest our game, as well as playtest their own game.

     Overall our game got a very good reception from everyone else, as the only real criticism was to remove some of the "Mud" space effects from the board as it seemed like everyone landed on them quite frequently which slowed the game down substantially.
       As everyone played our game I took note that they all seemed to be enjoying themselves, due to the simple competitivness that the race to centre created.