Links: Deciphering Feedback from Playtesters, Why Spiel Is (or Isn't) Important & Too Much Game Knowledge?

There have been many times I've dismissed feedback because it was outlandish. I am certainly at fault for this. This year, at Gen Con, I got to sit in on a panel with James Ernest. One thing he talked about extensively was playtesting. I don't have an exact quote, but he talked about listening to what your playtesters were saying and trying to figure out why they were saying it. They are telling you that they like or disliked something and while their fix might not be what you need, they are inadvertently telling you something is wrong.

I can give a direct example: At Gen Con, I was showing a prototype to a well-known publisher. We were playing the game and I could tell it wasn't going well. This is a zombie game, the one I write about on my website. The game was dragging on and I was working to end it as quickly as possible. After it was over, one of the players suggested adding a bunch more of one card, "Molotov Cocktail". This card is a game changer. It can get rid of a bunch of zombies for you, or it MAY just burn your house down and kill you. He wanted more of them. This change would completely unbalance things and normally I would have scoffed at it. As a direct result of sitting in on James' talk, I thought about what he was asking for. What he wanted was not more "Molotov Cocktail"s; he wanted the excitement and tension that the card brought. I needed to figure out how to get more of those moments in the game.

At the end of the day, I caught the train back to Berlin. I was exhausted, but I had enjoyed my second Essen experience, this time from the "other side" of the fair. Instead of arriving with empty suitcases and leaving packed full of new games, I had arrived with a full bag which I had "emptied" during the convention, hoping that one day, those prototypes will be published and fill others’ suitcases.

Caterina called me because there was a problem in mathematics (set theory) that she just wasn't able to solve ... something really unusual. We look at the problem that said "Draw the set of numbers in a deck of 40 cards and those that may come out with the die and highlight their intersection." Well, pretty easy. I asked, "Caterina, what's the problem?" and she told me, "How do I know which numbers are in a deck of 40 cards? The problem doesn't tell me which game. And what die does it mean? Six-sided? Eight? Ten or even twenty?