The week of October 25th

We weren't able to get a playtest together on the 15th, but Billy did have a great idea for how to change our pass/fail cards. We were considering adapting them into three roles, but his solution was much simpler: just have everyone vote for who they think should complete the task. The winner of the vote narrates how the task was handled, and if there is no majority, the task is failed. The winner of the most recent task is not eligible to do the current task. We liked this a lot because it was simple, it was quick, it required no extra materials (you could really just point to who you thought should do the task) and it still required people to be on the same page about all of their different powers.

On the 25th we were able to get two playtests in, with this system. I have a lot of notes on these, but in short:

  • As we began to note during GenCon, it's difficult to keep track of who everybody is. Especially in larger games
  • For 4-player games, we should consider having the talent scout be in charge of breaking ties.
  • Our crises in general can be a little vague. I believe this is partly a presentation issue, since we don't yet have cards for our scene-setting tasks, but also partly an issue with our scene-setting tasks suddenly thrusting players into a situation they're unfamiliar with.
  • While Billy's voting system worked, it was very difficult to keep people from giving away who they were going to vote for. In our second playthrough, players decided not to talk at all, and the voting was bit more uncertain. That being said, only one vote ever ended in failure, because it was surprisingly easy to tell who should be doing what.
The next things we want to test are:
  1. How does play proceed when only the talent scout is allowed to ask questions? At GenCon, we only used this rule for 4 and 5 player games, but it might be fine as just the default. A hidden consequence of this may be that the crisis is a little more challenging, since fewer questions will be asked of the heroes, and therefore it will be less obvious who is best for each task.
  2. How do player react to being told that they straight up can't talk for the crisis? The only thing keeping us from testing this before was the fact that the group had to come up with certain story details together for each task. However, since the winner of each vote gets to tell the story of how they solve their task, they're in charge of those details.

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