Dreamation was a rousing success.I arrived early Saturday morning and headed for the Strategic Space booth. Mark Salzwedel, founder of Strategic Space, needed help staffing the booth for a couple of hours, so I volunteered.
I had placed a playtest for Municipality on the convention schedule for Saturday afternoon at 2:00pm. I headed over, got the paperwork from the convention staff, and set up. At first, things weren't looking so promising. 5 minutes after the scheduled start time, no one had yet shown up. Playtests aren't allowed to have pre-registrations, so it is impossible to know if people are late or no one was interested.
Soon, though, someone did arrive. It was someone I had known for years from these conventions. It turns out that he is a publisher and he wanted to playtest Municipality. My good friend Andrew Parks, of Quixotic Games, had mentioned the game to this publisher, whom I will refer to as "Gamma". Andy playtested Municipality last month and apparently said some nice things about it, because it got Gamma to want to see the game.
The playtest itself went well enough. He seemed to be really into the Political Capital mechanic that's become the heart of the game. He thoroughly enjoyed trying to bluff people into spending their Political Capital by bidding even when he didn't want to win the bid. That was a great sign. Unfortunately, one of the relatively new rules, money being worth points at the end, was too overpowered and overwhelmed the normal score. We agreed I should tone down the value of the money for the next version.
Despite that hiccup and a few more suggestions, both of them seemed really positive about Municipality. When I complete the game in a few months (knock on wood), I will definitely contact them.
Geoff Engelstein, who does a segment on The Dice Tower, watched a good portion of the playtest. He said it looked interesting. It may have been out of politeness, but it's always nice to have people compliment your design in front of a publisher. :-)
After the playtest, I went and played a game of Alhambra (came in distant second) and spoke with Andy for a while. I find that during the Dreamation and Dexcon conventions, I spend less than a third of my time playing games. Most of my time is spent socializing, which is often more fun than the tournament-driven, structured gaming schedule.
A bunch of us then went to dinner. Afterwards, I also showed the publisher Titans of Industry, which, in an astonishing coincidence, arrived in the mail the previous day. The previous publisher to whom I had sent it returned the game without comment. I wish they had given some feedback about it, but I do appreciate them returning the prototype.
Anyway, after giving publisher Gamma a quick overview of Titans of Industry, we agreed I would e-mail them the rulebook to look over. After that, we'll see if they're interested in moving forward with it.
Saturday was a very good day. It was one of my best days as a game designer wannabe in a long time.
To be continued . . .
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