TTGDMY playtesting

TTGDMY (Tabletop Game Designers Malaysia) has been busy attending events in June and July, and we only resumed regular playtesting in August. Vivae boardgame cafe (Ampang branch) invited us to have our session there on Merdeka Day, so we had the opportunity to playtest with the public. It's always useful to do playtesting with the end user. Usually at TTGDMY playtest sessions it's just us game designers helping one another with playtesting. 

I played several of my prototypes with this group above. I managed to play my upcoming game Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves with them too.

That day the prototype I most wanted to playtest was Taking Sides. This was a newer game I brought. I had the idea for the game some time ago and I did some initial brainstorming then, but it was only recently I resumed work and managed to get a prototype out with complete first draft rules. A week earlier when we had our first playtesting session of the month at Central Market, I had brought it out for the first round of testing. I quickly found a number of issues with it, and received much feedback from fellow designers. Issues and criticisms are great! They are much better than people politely and generically telling me yes nice keep it up, which basically means the game is not interesting at all. I was quite excited with the problems and quickly worked on them to create version 2. 

Taking Sides is, at least for now, a game for 3 to 8 players. The core idea is everyone must pick sides. You are with me, or you are against me. Every round, the players will split into two teams. Every player gets a character card, which has a strength value and a power. The teams add up their strengths, and the team with the higher strength total wins. The winning team gets to split the loot available that round. The twist comes from the powers of the characters, which can modify the strengths of the characters. This is not a team game. Every round you can pick a different team to be on. You choose who to partner with. Teams are temporary alliances. This is still an everyone for themselves game. 

When we playtested, my designer friends said this was a very Chok Sien game (Chok Sien is my given name). I wonder whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. It can be good in that I've developed a signature, a unique style that people can recognise. It can also be a bad sign if it means I've become restrained to only making a certain type of game. There is still a lot I need to learn and explore and I don't want to limit myself. 

That day I got to try a game from Faris about making batik. In Malaysia, batik is painted cloth which uses wax in the painting process. The batik game is a heavy Eurogame. Not many Malaysian designers make such games. 

The game is played over four rounds, and each round you get to perform four actions. The game felt complicated when I listened to the rules, but now that I have played it, I have a much better idea of the overall process. This is a game with polyominoes and a big part is about fitting them into grids. The polyominoes are batik cloths in different styles. In general, you collect batik, and then you place them in three different areas. As you fill the grids in these different areas, you will score points, increase your storage capacity, unlock workers (a resource type), gain new abilities, and also gain new ways of scoring points. 

This is the central game board. The seven rows are seven different action types you can perform. Within a round, you will choose four to perform. 

This is the player board. Part of it is your storage area. You also keep track of your special powers and extra scoring criteria here. You place polyominoes in the two grids to increase storage and to unlock workers. The polyominoes in the game reminds me of Uwe Rosenberg games. The overall game reminds me of Vital Lacerda designs. There are many interwoven parts and you need to know how to balance your progress in each area. I am keen to see how this game develops and to see the eventual final product. 

Another game I managed to try was the lion dance game from Darryl Tan. This was the champion in the ButtonShy global game design competition last year. It is great fun. It is a 2-player drafting game in which you draft cards from a central pool to build your own lion dance performance platform. The cards are pillars and you collect and order them to build your platform. The pillars have various powers and properties. There are a few different ways to score points. As you build your platform, your lion can start dancing on top of the pillars. The further it moves across the platform, the more points it will score. This is just one of the ways you score points. 

This is an 18 card game and it's pretty fast. The game ends when the pool runs out of cards. You want to score as many points as you can in all the categories, but it's not possible to work on everything. This is the delicious part of the game. You want to do just a bit more, but you only have that many turns. You have to make those difficult choices. What to work on, what to let go of. I find the game mechanisms quite fitting. This is not a mechanism-first game looking for a theme to paint on. 

ButtonShy will be publishing this game. Now Darryl is still doing development and tuning. He's also working on an expansion for it. The expansion will probably be released at the same time as the base game. This is also a game I am looking forward to.