Jul 8, 2006

Designer Testing

Today I am up near Albany, NY for a playtest session with other game designers. I was invited to this meeting by way of my membership on the Board Game Designers Forum. I just got here and the others should be arriving within a half an hour. Despite the ridiculous sum I am spending on gasoline to get here from central New Jersey, I think it will be worth it.

This is because all of my previous feedback on my designs have been from friends of differing levels of game-playing experience. Today I will be getting feedback from people who are not only other designers, but whom I have never met in person before. This will make the comments received come from a perspective that I have not previously heard from (save for my experience at Dreamation 2006).

It will also mean that those comments are unbiased by friendship. While my playtesting experiences with my friends have been invaluable, I have always suspected that they were holding back their criticisms in either volume or intensity to avoid hurting my feelings. This is of course ridiculous, because they take every other opportunity to hurt my feelings.
;-)

In addition, Zev from Z-Man Games might be coming by today. If he does, I am hopeful he will like the changes I have made to Programmer, which came in response to his comments at the aforementioned Dreamation convention. He did express interest in the previous version, save for the overbearing complexity of the game. Therefore this could represent a very strong chance at getting my first design published.

So, I am looking forward to seeing how the day progresses. I have brought two of my prototypes with me today: Programmer and Television Executive.

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