NYC BGD Meeting - August 2010

Last week was the August meeting of the New York City Board Game Designers. This time we were down at the NYU Game Center. It was a nice space, though with a tad of an echo.

The first game I played was a combat game with a space theme it was very dice heavy. Very. Dice. Heavy. Even the ships were represented by dice. The type of ship you had was not a choice, but the random result of a die roll. Needless to say, it was a painful experience for me. However, I can say that the others at the table seemed to enjoy it. It was a rules test and I had no difficulty in learning the game, so that is what counts.

Municipality was up next. This playtest was . . . unique. The players' behavior was a distinct deviation from every other playtest of any even remotely recent version. It took over twice as long to complete and player behavior was completely unexpected. Players were routinely passing up opportunities to advance the game forward and their choices were mathematically negative.

This worries me.

I need to find way to point players back onto the path when they so drastically depart from self-interest. I don't want to dictate choices to players, but the game went so badly I need to do something to prevent the experience from bogging down so dreadfully.

Of course, this could have been a one-in-a-million aberration. Perhaps I can discount it. I don't know.

Last on the day was another test of Mark Salzwedel's Master Spy. The change Mark made to the game improved it, but didn't solve the problem he intended it to. However, in post-test discussions another tester came up with a way to eliminate that one-sided stalemate problem.