Sometimes I think that a playtest which goes very well inhibits innovation. When the feedback is positive, change suggestions from players are very minor, you go to bed reassured that you’re on the right track. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a great feeling. But in those situations, my brain is just too lazy to innovate. Maybe I’m too much of an optimist, but after a great playtest I replay the game in my head and focus on the positives. In those cases, I find it difficult to think of ways to improve the game. To innovate, my brain just needs a kick in the backside, which often comes from a disastrous/failed playtest. Let me give you a few examples:
In one playtest, I mistakenly used token costs from competitive variant in the cooperative game version (4 times more expensive), which made the game totally unbalanced and impossible to win (which I only realised towards the end of the game). That playtest led to the idea that I could add scenarios to the cooperative variant, with different starting conditions and different token costs (not quite as much as 4 times the “normal” cost though!), adding tons of replayability. So we sat through a not-so-enjoyable 1 hour game just so that my brain could get the stimulus required to come up with an outside of a box idea.
In another playtest, the youngest player was around the age which I though would be the minimum age for my game. I was helping her in calculating profit in each of the 10 game rounds. I had hoped that after explaining it in the first few rounds, she would pick it up and manage herself, but it didn’t happen (she still won that game by the way!). I knew all along that profit calculation was not the most enjoyable part of the game, but until that game I accepted it. In that playtest, I realised that if the player with the strategic vision to win the game struggles to calculate their profit throughout the game, then the profit calculation is too cumbersome.
There was no easy fix to the profit calculation, no way to magically simplify it, but I knew that I had to spend time rethinking this. And again, it took 5+ attempts to explain the profit calculation to the youngest player to stimulate my brain to actually commit a few hours to thinking of an alternative solution.
I guess sometimes, the brain must go through a painful playtest in order to be kicked it into action and come up with an innovation.
Another stimulus which you can use to get your brain to innovate is playtester feedback. Countless times, someone suggested a wild change to the mechanics/cards etc. and my first thought was “okay, but that will never work, can’t do that”. That was my brain being too lazy to go outside of it’s box. If that happens to you, please dismiss the “can’t do that” thought, try to find ways to make the suggestion work, and do spend some time on it. Most times you will come to a dead end, but ovethinking that one crucial suggestion from a playtester and finally arriving at an improvement can be what makes or breaks your game.
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