My Playtesting Journey: A Seat at the Table
My Playtesting Journey: A Seat at the Table
My Playtesting Journey: A Seat at the Table
By Cathlena Martin
November 27, 2023
Summary
I wanted to share the playtesting journey of that game as a way to encourage other designers to be brave and bold in their playtesting.
The initial playtesting session included undergraduate students in our university's Game Studies and Design program.
We created a preface to the game to establish a brief narrative: you are playing as a tabletop publisher/designer trying to get a game published first.
In our alpha version, the suits were mechanics or genres of games: deck-building, press your luck, set collection, roll and write, auction, worker placement, area control, drafting, role-playing game, and social deduction.
We selected these to represent different genres within the game industry and types of games that are published.
With the narrative's imperative to gather components for game publication, the suits changed to represent game pieces: dice, cards, tokens, tiles, boards, meeples, miniatures, draw bags, resources, and hexes.
We used the opportunity of changing the cards types to create a more aesthetically pleasing game: Sara Perry created original graphic design for the final version using a majority of the cards present in the beta game.
Reference
Martin, C. (2023, November 27). My playtesting journey: A seat at the Table. NASAGA. https://www.nasaga.org/blog/my-playtesting-journey-a-seat-at-the-table