Many positive words are said and written about the creative openness of the game design community. My personal experiences and endeavors support this sentiment. In general, people in this industry are helpful and supportive of one another, which contributes to the pleasure of working in it. Even in this friendly social circle, I am especially pleased to encounter truly fantastic people. Pablo and Tove of Worldshapers Board Games are just such people.

Since early November, we have been participating in the playtesting community for Oceans by North Star Games. Oceans is the next stand-alone game in the award-winning Evolution series by Dominic Crapuchettes and, as voted by the BGG community, is one of the most anticipated games of 2019.

It has been a pleasure playtesting the game and watching it evolve (yep, I said that) into what is certainly not going to disappoint Evolution series fans. If you count yourself among them, or are new to the series, you will want to watch for the Kickstarter in Q1 2019 or for the game to hit the shelves at your favorite online store or FLGS later in the year.

We have been providing multiple services for a few small game publishers that are preparing their projects for Kickstarter. We will announce more as those designs complete and their Kickstarter projects launch. The services provided have ranged from editing rules and Kickstarter pages to playtesting and providing statistics to identify fragility in the design. In particular, we have been providing advice on solo play modes.

Setup

It has been over 8 months since I “completed” design work on Picky Packrats and discontinued regular playtesting. However, my friend Mike and I continued to play it fairly regularly during lunch at work for the entertainment value alone; that is, until late October when his FMLA for a newborn and then the holidays and then the early-year work pressures all got in the way. We finally played Picky Packrats again this week after a 3 month hiatus. Was the game as fun as we remembered? Did we discover anything new about the game or validate any previous conclusions? Let’s see.

In modern hobby board games player elimination has largely been eliminated. That’s a good thing, right? Probably, but it depends on the implementation. Let’s take a look.

Current Norm: Generally, most recent games avoid player elimination unless the game takes less than about 30 minutes and any player is unlikely to be out of the game for more than about 10-15 minutes. (Note: These statistics are based on a quick summary of games I have played recently and are not scientific, but you get the idea). The modern designer doesn’t want any player left in the cold for more than about 10 minutes and presumably that is based on the fact that most players don’t want to risk being out in the cold for more than that either.

As a designer working on a game design, you may ask yourself, “How do I keep all the players in the game to the end?” Depending on what you mean by “in the game” you may be asking yourself the wrong question. If your first thought is to let the player stay in, but without any real chance of winning (probably by some brute force method of basically starting over) then you are not only asking yourself the wrong question, but getting the wrong answer. Better to let them go jump into another game or Tweet on their phone for the rest of the game than to patronize them with a false sense of belonging in the current game. At least they will be Tweeting about how they sucked instead of how your game sucked. Maybe.

I was recently solo playtesting one of my designs (Nines Micro) as my twenty-something son, Daniel, looked on. I was gratified that he quickly figured out the game by what I was doing without me giving a rules breakdown. He does not play games much - although he did as a child - and the ones he does are usually the electronic variety. However, he is Mensa-Smart so his quick understanding of the rules may be more an indication of his intellectual prowess than the simplicity of my rules.