Prepping for playtesting at GenCon

This post will discuss the preparation I did for the GenCon playtest, which was ample, and not the playtest itself. That may or may not get posted later.

Prototyping all the things

The playtest prototype featured two main groups: a whole lot of cards, and a whole lot of game components.

Game components

These were mostly acquired during GenCon 2023 from TheGameCrafter. I had bought a variety of pawns of 6 colors, assorted colored cubes for tokens, and little “money” cardboard chits (1 and 5 unit).

The color-oriented pawns are all stored in 6 individual plastic trays. The variety of colored cubes are in stackable plastic contains that I think are intended for jewelry-making.

Cards

This was a doozy.

The first challenge I had was that it was a bit of a moving target – there was a fair amount of content that was yet incomplete, so as I was printing and sleeving these cards, I was also writing content and modifying templates on dextrous.

The second challenge is that not all the cards were the same size. Many were functional as poker-cards, but two different groups of cards were half-size. Apparently there is a “european” style half-size cards that are nearly the same size but not quite. When I bought these at the local game store initially, I bought the smaller size by mistake.

Some of the cards were also larger than normal, double-sized, and were not sleeved at all. For these I printed the cards and then used a glue-stick to affix them to the larger blank card.

There were two different times where I had to completely de-sleeve and re-sleeve some of the cards. That was very tedious.

I think I burned through 3 or 4 gluesticks, altogether.

I encountered some printing issues where my printer-settings initially re-scaled the printouts to fit, but this ended up making the prototype prints being smaller than needed, so there was a considerable (a few dozen sheets) of wasted paper, since I didn’t realize the prints were too small until I had printed several sets. Oops!

Playtesting guide

I had started writing a playtesting guide but didn’t finish it.

The idea was to predetermine, for any number of players, what cards and assets everyone begins with and a predetermined way to set up the board. The goal is to have a way to do apples-to-apples comparisons where the initial game state is not a variable, and all that changes it player decisions.

Gathering into a kit

I had a black photobox that I had used for the previous year, so I was able to assemble all of the components and cards into a single box.

Challenges faced with playtesting

We did earmark some time to playtest while at GenCon, though it ended up in being one of the main exhibition halls (very noisy), and we had only done an hour, which is really insufficient to both set up the game, explain the rules, and play. Especially when the room is very noisy and difficult to hear!

While the final game’s table footprint might be smaller with bespoke printed components, we need more space because of so many cards being printed on poker-sized cards.

A second playtest was done at a friend’s house, where it was much quieter and we weren’t timebound. This went a bit more successfully.