The Week of October 11th

On October 11th we conducted the first playtest we'd done in quite a while. The biggest thing we wanted to look at for this test was the crisis resolution system we'd been talking about for so long. The results of the test taught us a lot of new things and reminded us of a lot of old things:

  • Because you never pick up your cards, you learn more and more about each other's remaining hand as time goes on. This makes the final task a foregone conclusion. We knew about this in advance, but it was good to see it in real life too.
  • One of the players at the table had the expectation that the bulk of the crisis round would involve coming up with a plan to fight the opposition
  • The "no-talking" rule is still stepping on people's fun.
As we spoke with our testers, the idea of replacing the pass/fail cards with something less binary came up. We really liked the idea of turning them into role cards, such as "Lead" "Support" and "Hang Back." Success could require nobody to double up on the above roles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The week of January 24th

This week we realized we put the horse before the cart, so to speak. We weren't able to get a group to test with last week (hence the lack of an update) but since then we've tested with a four player game (two of which were us) and a 6 player game (none of which were us). The crisis system we had settled on was put through the ringer and we realized that it's... not really working. For some groups - groups that are far more comfortable with improv, groups that are happy telling stories together at the drop of a hat - the crisis system works fine. Rarely, they may be saddled with a truly terrible reject squad and they'll have their work cut out for them, but in general they'll be able to tell a fun story and move on to another crisis.  But for other groups, this step of the game just falls... flat. The game suddenly stops, flips around, and asks you to do something completely different. As one of our testers today put it, the hero creation part of the game is
Read more

The week of January 10th

So we're now in the new year. To celebrate, we had our first real test of the new crisis system. As a refresher, under this system, all players draw 3 "twist" cards, then the crisis is revealed, then the players all simply play one of their three twist cards onto that crisis. This is how you get things like a hundred invisible kittens stuck in a tree with no gravity. This method of crisis generation is good. We knew that. The major problem is: what does it lead to? We want the game to be about telling funny stories about dumb superheroes, and we want the crisis to be the celebratory capstone to all the fantastic ground work that gets done during hero creation. The best we have so far is that, once the crisis is created, players simply tell a story about how their heroes accomplish their goal. We weren't sure how that was going to play, or if it was going to work at all. The good news is that it does work. Our earlier hypothesis, that making the crisis crazy enough
Read more

Is this thing still on?

Hi! Really  long time since we last updated - but that's a good thing. We've been busy working on: Getting Reject Squad  published and A new project called Lanternkeepers  that we'll have to start a new blog for at some point We're looking into a bunch of options for publishing Reject Squad  still. One of those is self-publishing. If you're interested in getting notifications when Reject Squad  does go up for sale (Probably in like another year) please send an email to RejectSquadGame@Gmail.com Thanks!
Read more