Whimsical Creatures

Myre & Milton

Playtesting = Game Design

Today I playtested "the mansion game" three times. It's impressive how much changes from one game to the next. Rules are tweaked and in this case the size of the board was almost halved. The result a faster and probably funnier game.

I haven't written the rules down yet. The game is a puzzle game and the mechanics are about movement, shifting the board pieces aka rooms around and moving the character in order to snatch gems. The goal is to be the first to get all the gems in your color. While playing your objective is therefore to rearrange the board so you can move as freely as possible while hopefully limiting your opponents movement.

Two Board Games

Testing the four-player-game with two players

Lately I've been working on making a couple of board games. Well it started with one -a four-player-game but being designed for four I can only playtest when there are four people around with an hour or two to spar. Strangely enough even though I share a flat with four other people it rarely happens that they are here at the same time. So I began developing a second idea that could be playtested with only two people.

To begin with the allure of making a board game is really that it is something I can make on my own (with the brilliant input of playtesters). I find when working on digital games as you can see in the very old previous posts that I get stuck in the scripting part of the process. And then the game mechanic ideas are sidetracked by the fight with the code. Though I actually really like coding I don't seem to be good enough to work my way through to a finish prototype on my own. Board game prototyping could be the way forward. I guess you could just call paper prototyping.