BCM300 – Rules and Playtesting

Continuing on with my Prototype board game Volcano Run! I spent this week, allowing a group of different players have a go at play testing without my involvement, purely following the rules I had written down and leaving them to their own devices to understand and play.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, have a quick browse of my initial individual game idea, the material components and experimenting with abstraction and play testing.

This week was about fine tuning the rules for my game. Below is a copy of the rules I gave to my play testers.

I believe this play test went really well and the players seemed to enjoy it and told me about the rush at the end of the game when they realised they didn’t have long to get to a Safe Zone. They had a few improvements such as the need for slightly clearer instructions and forcing players to only go in one direction. They also added that you could make the game even shorter if I wanted, which has made me look at the possibility of different tiers of challenge modes for the game. Here are a few of the Playtesting Reflections from the group that played Volcano Run!

Using this information as well as the lecture and guide at the beginning of the lesson I have refined my rules in order to be more cohesive, present tense and to follow a natural direction from the goals of the game, the start, how to play and how to win. The new rules are below:

I also spent the rest of the lesson play testing other classmates games. All the games I played were engaging and fun, even the ones still in their early prototype versions. Having to read other peoples rules definitely give you an insight into how intricate and important this part of the game is. If we were confused at the beginning of the game, it would go slowly till we understood. Even rules that were listed, were perhaps not phrased as well as they could have which imparts how vital it is to have others play test and read your own work.

Here’s a few pictures from the other play tests including Blake’s game ‘Nouns and Adjectives’, Sam’s game, the pokemon-splendor hybrid and Tahlia’s ‘Carnival Ducks’!