2022-2023: A playtesting retrospective

It seems like every couple of years I post a playtesting retrospective, taking a look at what I've been doing over the last 2 years. It's about that time again, so let's see what got played and what projects I worked on in 2022 and 2023:

2022

January

I kicked off the year with what looks like one final test of the Amun-Re Afterlife expansion module (for Alley Cat's 20th anniversary edition) - in particular looking at a dummy for 2 player (I believe that was to do with the offering each round, to ensure players didn't walk away with 2 rewards for just $1)

Other than that, and a couple of cancelled playtests for lack of players, I spent the rest of January testing the new additions to Deities & Demigods. The publisher had wanted the game to be heavier and more "4X"-y, so I had added a new deity (was using Hades for a stand-in): a god of exploration. In particular I was testing some generic Enemy tokens that you could encounter and dispatch in some way -- the details are fuzzy, but my notes say they were not necessary, so they didn't make the cut

February

Not much testing at all in February... it looks like my only session was spent on a play of a game I was doing a consultation on - a time track version of "Frostbite," which is what eventually became Expeditions, by Jamey Stegmaier

March

Looks like March was another light month, with some sessions skipped for one reason or another. We played Rick's game Starlight (which we'd played a bit last year), as well as a new version of "Frostbite," this time featuring deck building instead of a time track

April

April was much better, it appears I got back to more regular sessions, beginning with 2 more plays of the Frostbite

Beyond that, there were 3 plays of Keeping Up With The Joneses (including one in person!), trying to find a better version of the Social aspect (maybe one that was more interactive). Also tried a "strategic Joneses" variant, where the Joneses marker moved according to player choice rather than at random

May

In May I played one more game of Keeping Up With The Joneses, and decided that the "strategic Joneses idea was OK, but not better than random

Then I moved on to a brand new game, a Worker Placement Microgame that I prototyped on scraps of paper at my friend Mohan's house. I quickly iterated through a couple of drafts with three plays of the game in May, and more to come in the following months

June

Quite a few plays in June, including 6 more plays of the Worker Placement Microgame (v 2.0, v2.1, and v2.2), 1 more play of Keeping Up With The Joneses, 1 play of Keith Burgun's new card game Spellstorm (a follow up to Dragon Bridge, with deck building), as well as another brand new idea... a trick taking game where the card you played moves your piece on a grid... it crashed and burned pretty hard

July

A decent number of plays this month, partly because some of the games are short and got played back to back... two more plays of Keeping Up With The Joneses, I'd finally found what I think is the final format for the Social track (every couple of steps it lets you activate one of the adjacent tracks), followed by another brand new one: a Push-your-Luck Microgame - an idea which came together quickly and seemed to work very well right off the bat! I have 6 recorded TTS plays of the PYL Microgame in July, but there might have even been a few more than that, because I remember playing it in person as well

In addition to those games, I had another brand new idea that kinda crashed and burned pretty hard: I tried to make a lane combat microgame, which used a Rock/paper/Scissors mechanic in it. That did not work

We tried the first draft of another of Rick's games (called Tanglewood), which was an enjoyable area majority game with entangled decisions, and then finally ended the month with initial plays of a couple of games for a development gig I'd gotten with Pandasaurus Games: a prototype called Trailblazers (later re-themed and called Holiday in Rome)

August

In August I played an updated version of that Spellstorm game, by Keith Burgun, but the rest of that month was dedicated to 5 plays of Holiday In Rome. I spent 2 of those plays experimenting with a whole new format, which turned out to be "just OK," and not clearly better than the original format, so I set that new format idea aside and concentrated on the low hanging fruit of the original design

September

In seven more games of Holiday in Rome, I went through 2nd and 3rd pass development changes, and zeroed in on final tweaks

Another play of Tanglewood rounded out the month, along with another consultation playtest - a game called Fled

October

Another two plays of Fled and I would complete my consultation work on that project, then I played another iteration of Spellstorm, Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages (just to play an old design of mine), and a new idea for a 3-lane card game for an informal game design jam. This idea worked alright for a 1st attempt, but it wasn't great

The rest of the month was spent on Holiday In Rome (8 more tests - some finer details, and player powers)

November

We started off November with a 2nd draft of that 3-lane card game, which I think is the last time I ever played that one. Later in the month I had a different idea for a different lane based game, inspired by Rolling Realms and Animal Kingdoms, and I tried it 8 times over the course of the month

There was another development project (a game called Olroc, but think the name will change before it comes out), Daniel's 3-lane game, an interactive "flip & write" by Daniel called Shipdoku, and my Push-Your-Luck Microgame peppered in among5 more plays of Holiday In Rome (more player powers and last minute items)

December

To finish off the year we played with another game of Shipdoku, revisited Sails & Sorcery just for fun, and then dove into another development project: a reprint (and revamp) of Harvest. First, I played the original 2017 TMG release of Harvest to familiarize my playtesters and to discuss issues the publisher noted about it. The next 4 games we started in on the new version from the designer (Trey Chambers), and helped iterate through several versions of that.

Oh, man... 2022 was a pretty big year for me! It saw me start to finally get Seth Jaffee Development up and running, taking on 3 consultation jobs and a heavy development project. In addition, I came up with several new game ideas (at least one of which was actually good, maybe two!), worked on one of my own games (KUWtJ) quite a bit, and effectively co-designed a TMG favorite of mine for a new publisher.  

Now let's take a look at 2023:

2023

January

The beginning of the year was spent mostly on 7 plays of Harvest 2.0, though we also played 2 games of a new design by Rick: Scarab of Ra (a tabletop game reminiscent of an old Mac shareware game that he made in 1987(!) )

February

This month, among 5 more plays of Harvest 2.0, I started a new commissioned project... a publisher had signed the old Knizia title Merchants of Amsterdam, and they wanted it to be updated a bit. I had played the original game *years* ago, so in February I managed to get a TTS mod together for it (with the help of a photo of some of the cards from Rick!) and try the game out with my testers -- Rick and I hadn't played in over a decade, and the others had never played at all. Then we tried again with a "big new idea" I had for it, as a sort of proof of concept, and started to identify other ways to improve or update the game.

March

March was almost entirely taken up with 10 plays of "Revampsterdam" (my amusing code name for the Merchants of Amsterdam update), iterating on various rules and dynamics each time, honing in on something I considered good

In addition, we played a new design from Aaron, which was an interesting game where you were forced into interaction with each neighbor

April

April saw 1 more play of Aaron's game, and 7 more plays of Revampsterdam, iterating on a few details of the round structure and events

May

May was a weird month... we played two of Rick's games (Starlight with a new expansion module for God powers, and Ultimus Libre, a sort of deck building game. We only played 2 games of Revampsterdam, and one of those was to show another team of developers that the publisher usually uses, and who are evidently working on the game now

We also played a game of All For One, just for fun

June

Speaking of weird months... in June we didn't have any regular playtest sessions at all. however, I had a couple of unusual ones: 

First was a brainstorming session with Rick and Daniel, where we each talked about something we'd been thinking about or stuck on (Rick's was "trick taking as a mechanism," Daniel's was a sort of CCG/Eurogame mashup, and mine was I-Cut-You-Choose Worker Placement)

Then later in the month I toyed around with some of the kid's game stuff I'd considered before: a memory/rondel game, and the race mechanism that would later become the Balloon Race game). We tried each of the mechanisms, brainstormed a bit, even tried combining the two into one game

July

Late last month, Vincent was born, so all playtesting went on hiatus for the month of July. Fortunately, this time there was no "living int he hospital for 6 weeks" like when Corbin was born, so come mid-August I was able to start getting back into the swing of things, though regular twice-a-week playtesting wouldn't begin again until October or so

August

Playtesting was minimal in August, due to the new baby, but I did manage one play of Revampsterdam, and one play of a new game that my friend Steve came up with (and which I have since come in as a co-designer on). At the time it didn't have a title or setting, but we're now leaning towards a Japan theme circa late 1500s, with the title Taiko Kiri. In Taiko Kiri, you rebuild a war-torn Japan by placing tiles to *either* collect resources *or* spend them on projects, which score based on the configuration of the communal board

In addition to those couple of plays, I had a few meetings with a publisher who was interested in not one, not two, but *three* of my games! I played Keeping Up With the Joneses, Sails & Sorcery, and All For One with the publisher's rep, and the last 2 of those made it past that first hurdle, the rep wanted to play them with the team!

September

Unfortunately, after playing with the publisher team in September, they decided to pass on both of those games. *Sigh* oh well, just getting those pitch meetings feels like progress

To round out the month, I played Taiko Kiri once more with Steve, and I got Goballoon Racing (what became of that kid's racing mechanism from before) to the table 3 times

October

October was filled with games of Goballoon Racing (x3), and Taiko Kiri (x6). They both made great strides in that time

We also had another sort of brainstorming session to talk about an RPG idea Aaron had, and to discuss some of the comments I received from that publisher on All For One, including what a "modernized pickup/deliver" mechanism might be

November

November brought two more games of Taiko Kiri, and I think the game is settling into that "seems close to done" situation, where sometimes games sit for a long time, until they're either pitched around, or a breakthrough is made otherwise

It also brought two more chat/brainstorm sessions, one with Rick about Taiko Kiri, which yielded at least one idea that ended up being a keeper, and the other was about an idea I had for a cooperative mode for Eminent Domain

Speaking of... I put together a prototype and started testing EmDo: Coalition, and got 3 plays in, quickly zeroing in on a solid format

Another interesting thing that happened in November was that I finally got a "near final" version of The Sixth Realm from the publisher, and it's pretty much unrecognizable! It's much heavier and more involved, and in both games we played of it, it took us almost an hour to go through the rules, and another hour to get through the first (of 3) rounds of play. I sent a bunch of feedback to the developer, and it sounds like they took some of my suggestions to heart, so that's good. 

December

I'm posting this in early December, and so far I've just had 1 game of Eminent Domain: Coalition. That game is getting to a really good place, and I was really antsy to test it again with the latest changes on Thursday, but unfortunately, my players weren't around. Hopefully we can play it tomorrow, and I'd also like to get Taiko Kiri back to the table this month

I'm told that the deadline for The Sixth Realm is fast approaching, and that they've been tweaking and playing that feverishly at the publisher, and I hope to get to play the latest update to that as well this month

And one more thing that's on the horizon, and which may be ready to try this month, is an Isle of Trains follow up that I'm working on with Dan called Isle of Advanture

That's a lot of stuff to want to test this month, and with the holidays, everyone's schedule is screwey, but sometimes that means more opportunistic time for playtesting :)

Heavy is the game that holds the crown... Strategic weight vs Logistical weight

There are some games of a particular type that I sometimes refer to as "ducks-in-a-row" games, where the fun is in logistically executing actions rather than actually planning the actions themselves. Often in those types of games the strategic depth is low, so it's fairly easy to decide what you'd like to do... but actually getting it done is far from trivial. That can be a fun, puzzle-y challenge. While in other games, it might be easy to execute what you want to do, but coming up with what's a good thing to do is less clear

So maybe it's reasonable to split "heavy" games into 2 categories -- let's call them "logistically heavy" and "strategically heavy." For example, Ark Nova is strongly in the "logistically heavy" group, while 

Are there any games you can think of that are both logistically heavy AND strategically heavy?

The thing I'm thinking about isn't long term vs short term (strategic vs tactical), and when I say "logistically heavy," I don't mean planning... perhaps I should try again. The thing I've got in mind is (to throw a few more terms in the mix) Decision Cognition vs Compliance Cognition, as we talked about them on The Argument Hour... if you happened to catch that podcast.

Ark Nova has a lot of stuff that feels more like Compliance Cognition: 

I want to play this animal, so I will use my Animal action - no problem. I need an enclosure - it says I need size 4, oh and it says it needs to be by water. So I have to build that. Ok, what else do I need? A partner zoo in Asia? Ok, so I'll use an Association action to get that. Oh, I also need to upgrade my Animal action first? Ok, how do I do that? Oh, I need ANOTHER partner zoo, or I can get 3 more hat icons to do it... oh, or if I can find a way to get 2 Shields, then I can get it that way (as long as someone else doesn't do it first)...

In more general terms, this boils down to something like: "I want to do this? Ok, now I need to do these 5 other things first."

Some players play a game like that and think "I just want to decide to do the thing, then do the thing!"

This is what I mean by games that are logistically heavy. In order to do the thing, you need to do several other things, and each of those things might have a couple of steps or pre-requisites as well

But deciding which thing you want to do in the first place in Ark Nova isn't terribly complex -- it's pretty straightforward in fact. It's not the 'what' that's tricky, but the 'how', so it's not strategically heavy. The weight of the game comes primarily from the logistics -- from getting your ducks in a row

... As opposed to games where the what is challenging, but the how is not. I think these tend to be called "lighter" by folks

I think there's compliance cognition (which isn't quite the above, but is similar), there's logistics, and there's the strategic decision. At the highest level, you make your strategic decision, the move that's going to (hopefully) advance you toward winning. The next level down is logistics -- what has to happen in order to enact your plan, decided above? Below that there's a layer of rules that you need to navigate in order to achieve each logistical step.

In the simplest case, you decide what you want to do (decision), then you just do it (logistics), and you're allowed to (rules)

In a more complicated case, you decide what you want to do (decision), there are prerequisites and steps you have to take in order to do it (logistics), and then there are compliance considerations about what you're allowed to do (rules)