Reject Squad Design Blog

It's been a long, long time! First, why haven't we updated this in the interim? Well, I mentioned that we would be able to update again as soon as things calmed down, and things still haven't quite calmed down. Work and life have kept us both quite busy for the last few months. The other reason why we haven't updated this blog in forever is because it's a design blog for a game that is now done, or very, very close to done. We generally post updates to this blog after our weekly design meetings or our weekly playtests, but we have transitioned away from playtesting gameplay mechanics and towards playtesting rules documents, which means we have less to share here. Still, we do have improvements to make to the game. This August, at Gen Con, we went through about eighteen hours of blind playtests. The first day was a bit disappointing, because we got a lot of feedback about how the game didn't have a finale, an issue we had thought we'd addressed back whe...

It's been a long time since we last updated! Well, we've been busy. The game has changed some more, although in smaller ways. And we've been testing as much as possible considering how irregular our schedules have been lately. I'm going to describe the current state of the game, what we've been up to most recently, and what we have our eyes on for the future. Currently, the game has the talent scout drawing a crisis card and a twist card to determine the nature of the crisis. They create the situation and present it to the other players, who then have a chance to ask the talent scout questions about the crisis. Hero creation happens as normal, and the talent scout chooses a hero from amongst the options presented. From there, the next person in clockwise order becomes the talent scout, and the loop begins anew. Most recently, we've been testing a mode of play where the next person in clockwise order continues the existing crisis, defining a new goal within t...

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...

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...

This week we reimagined the implementation of the concepts we spoke about last week. After the advice we received, and the conversation we had, we knew we wanted our crisis round to more closely resemble the gameplay of assembling the players' reject squad. We knew we wanted crises to be composed of (1) A certain crisis premise and (2) A twist that makes that premise dumb. Beyond this, however, we hadn't really changed how players interacted with the system. We didn't want any one hero to be the one solving the crisis. We knew the purpose of the game should either be to tell a joke, or a story, or both. If we were leaning on a looser, more narrative way to play, we knew we didn't want players to simply look at the crisis and say "I win." And at the end of the day, we still wanted these crises to be "one-shot" rather than a collection of smaller tasks. Here's what we're going with: Each player has modification cards they can play onto a cr...

This week we tried to get a playtest together to test the changes we had made to the crisis cards we were developing. Instead, we got into an in-depth discussion which caused us to change the direction we were taking the crisis round. Because we couldn't find a group to playtest with this week, we decided to start examining several different board games of all shapes and sizes to see what their rulebooks looked like, how they were constructed, and what kinds of layouts they used. We were in the middle of this examination when a friend of ours, who had played Reject Squad more than a year ago, came over and asked us about how the development was going. We explained how it was going to him, which precipitated a lengthy discussion about how we were organizing things, what our ultimate goals for the game were, and what type of demographic we were targeting. He helped us re-examine a problem we had earlier identified - that the crisis feels almost like a completely different game fr...