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.