Playtesting Round 1: Basic Mechanisms

For the first round of playtesting, we had simply focused on the game's basic mechanisms such as the movement of various game pieces which were being allocated with different hit ranges and patterns, the keeping of score/game progress, how strategies (if any) could be implemented in the course of playing, etc.

As our game consists of 4 different types of "role" game pieces, each would be allocated with different number of life/hit points as well as a different die to represent its attack/defend hits respectively. Initially, this had been a small problem for me as I found it confusing sometimes to switch between the different dice (or maybe it could be because it was the first time that I was playing with anything but a typical 6-sided die :p) as well as to remember the different attack patterns of various game pieces. However after about 10 to 15 minutes into playing, I managed to catch on so I think the part on learning the game went rather well :) Check.

As we played the game, an interesting phenomenen popped up... Less than half an hour into the game and it seemed to have split into two games being played simultaneously such that there are 2 players "battling" each other at one end of the game board and another 2 players "battling" each other at the other end. In other words, the game itself could have continued even if one of the 2 pairs of players just decide to stop playing all together. Wouldn't that seem to defeat the purpose of playing the game with 4 players in the first place? Perhaps this could be solved by the players playing with "alliances"? But whether it's feasible, that would be another story for another time.

In addition, we had also seemed to make the "student" game piece more "powerful" (it took quite a while to "kill" one) than we initially thought so for the next round, we are going to lower its life/hit points. At the same time, we had originally intended to use a percentile die for the "Dean" piece but we found it to be too cumbersome (e.g try to calculate, say 70% of 19 without having to use the calculator? :p) so we decided to scrap the idea and change it to a normal die instead.

Overall, there had been some good feedback going on (i.e. you win some and you lose some :). However, towards the end of the game, we realized that it could come to a standstill if a player chooses to let the "Dean" piece sit in his office throughout the game. Perhaps there could be a rule written about this somewhere eventually but this would also need more pondering over... Last but not least, I think the game could be more fun when we include other features, for example, special zones/marked-out areas on the game board that would provide incentives for players to take a risk which could result in rewards or if they're unlucky, forfeits.

Stay tuned for Playtesting Round 2...