Turning lemons into play-monade

How my worst playtests turned out to be my best

“Playtesting is a super-duper-hyper-important part of board game design.”

— said every board game designer EVER.

Playtesting my game — Cube Monster

Playtesting is the process of testing your game with a group of people. It is during playtests when you understand what works well in your game and what’s fun, but also what’s confusing and what’s frustrating. In playtests, you balance your game and fine-tune your game’s mechanics. With each test, you try new approaches to solve the different problems and bugs in your game. And how can you find these problems and bugs in the first place, you ask? By playtesting (dah…).

Playtesting can be really fun, but it can also be very frustrating.

In this article, I’m going to share a few examples of how some of the hardest playtests I ran turned out to be the most valuable ones.

Some background on my game

For you to understand the playtest examples I’m about to present, you should have a general understanding of my game — “Cube Monster”. So here is the text I use on the prototype box:

In Cube Monster, you use wooden cubes of different colors to build structures.

Build Factories to manufacture cubes, Thieves to steal cubes from your friends, Marketplaces to swap cubes for different colors and Defense Towers for protection.

To win the game you need to please the Cube Monster by building Statues and offering it cubes.

Players who do the monster’s bidding get Reward cards and level up. Players who fail suffer the consequences of Disaster cards.

Build structures, get more and more cubes, and mess up your friends’ plans in this Cubeful 2–4 player strategy game!

Cube Monster prototype — art by Renflower Grapx

Worst playtests example time

Playtest #10 — AKA “snoozefest…”

Let’s start with a short one. In this playtest, my wife and three good friends were playing the game. These guys are not heavy board-gamers, which is very important to test.

During the playtest, I noticed that they constantly checked their phones, that they were pretty bored, and not that engaged. They were not having fun, to say the least. When I asked, “Would you play the game again?”, they replied, “Yes, after a while…”. And these are my closest friends!

I also asked the following questions:

Q: “What was your favorite part of the game?”

A: “Getting and using cool cards.”

Q: ”What was your least favorite part of the game?”

A: “There are not enough possible ways to damage other players. I did not feel any suspense or excitement.”

I understood that they were missing ways to interact with other players and the ability to make meaningful strategic moves. This insight came up in previous playtests, but not as clearly as in this one.

In this playtest, players only received Reward cards (then called “Level Up cards”) when they leveled up. This meant that each player can only get up to four Reward cards in a game. These cards both help players directly, for example, by giving them cubes, and allow them to interact with other players, for example, by destroying opponents’ structures, or swapping structures with an opponent.

Modifications made following this game:

Players now get Reward cards every time they level up, AND every time they successfully make an offering to the monster.

This change works on many levels; Players get and use more cards, which speeds up the game and brings in some “action”. Also, thematically, the monster rewards players for pleasing it.

Playtest #20 — AKA “this is hard to watch”

Just so you will have the full context for playtest #20, I will shortly mention playtest #19 — AKA “I don’t fear the monster”.

Playtest 19 was actually a pretty good playtest. The players had fun. The game went relatively smoothly. Good times.

At the end of the game, when I asked, “What was your least favorite part of the game?”, they answered, “When a Disaster card does not affect anyone”.

They said that they do not fear the monster #WeDontFearTheMonster. I could not have that.

I realized that they do not fear the monster because the Disaster cards were too specific. Cards like “The monster destroys one yellow Factory to each affected player” only affects players who have yellow Factories. And so, I created “Deadly Disaster cards”. Just so the difference will be clear: when applied, normal Disaster cards may affect you, while Deadly Disaster cards are likely to affect you. So instead of destroying a specific Factory, a Deadly Disaster can destroy a Factory, no matter what color. But we didn’t stop there! I also made it that your opponents decide how Deadly Disaster cards apply (to continue the above example — player X decided which specific Factory the monster destroys to player Y).

Now, let’s review playtest #20 — AKA “this is hard to watch”.

In this game, I played with my wife, my brother, and sister in law.

The game lasted 1:50 hours, which is ~20 minutes more than what I’m going for. However, the duration did not bother me. What bothered me was the fact that the game knocked us down, and then started kicking. There were rounds where players got set back dramatically. Needless to say — we feared the monster too much #FearTheMonsterTooMuch.

*Reminder — a disaster applies to players who fail to make an offering to the monster.

Due to the game mechanics in that playtest, having the resources to make an offering to the monster was a hard thing to achieve. And so, it was hard to avoid Disaster cards, and we experienced them often. Also, there was a “double-trouble” mechanic that caused two disasters to apply in the same round. Add that to the shiny new Deadly Disaster cards, and you got yourself a harsh experience. This experience resulted in a longer game (because people struggled to progress), and an unpleasant tension between the players.

Modifications made following this game:

No more double trouble.

Reduce situations where the monster asks for an offering.

The offering the monster asks for is a predictable mechanic that players can prepare for.

The way a Deadly Disaster affects a player is decided by that player.

I fine-tuned these changes over the following playtests, and they still stand (playtest #50).

And don’t you worry, players still fear the monster #FearTheMonster.

Playtest #31 — AKA “will this game ever end?!”

The last example is a playtest played by three friends from work. This game lasted 2:20 hours, which is about an hour more than what I’m going for in a 3 player game. It was long and brutal. I should have cut this game short, but being new to the game design world, I was not aware of this awesome option.

Why did it take so long?

I had many assumptions, but the most important ones were the following:

In this playtest, to reach level 2, players needed to build a structure named “Statue”. This structure does not help the players and is only required to level up. It is different from the Factory structure, which manufactures cubes.

There is another mechanic for leveling up where the first player who builds a few specific structures, one of them being the Statue, levels up. This is a late game mechanic.

mechanic. New players have a lot to think about learning the rules and trying to understand what’s going on, and so, driven by the goal “Level up to level 6 and win the game”, they only played to level up. They do this instead of building the right infrastructure to win the game strategically. They built a Statue to reach level 2 and then tried to use the late game mechanic to reach level 3, which is a waste.

The above is, of course, not the player’s fault, but mine. I should build the game in a way that creates the best first-time player experience #BestFTPU.

Modifications made following this game:

Instead of building a Statue, players now need to build two Factories to reach level 2.

Cube Monster prototype — Summary card

This small change showed results fast, and players now learn about the game’s mechanics without intending to, while achieving their most “in your face” goal of leveling up.

Cracking the FTPU is an extremely hard and important challenge.

Let’s wrap it up

The playtests I mentioned made me ask existential questions about my game. Some of them brought me down, frustrated me, and were super hard to tackle.

However! As long as you methodologically write down your observations, ask the right feedback questions, and listen #listenDontArgue to your playtesters, you will understand the root cause of your problems and come up with creative and awesome solutions.