Time to Get Started

It seems I lost my groove.

I have excuses.

Busy at work.  Spring break.  Death in the family - and a death in my mentor's even more immediate family.

It all adds up and the less-immediate - in this case, dutifully contributing to the mentorship blog - falls to the wayside.

And now - nearly a month after my last post, we are approaching the end of the program. Less than two weeks to go.

In that time I've attended two virtual conferences - presenting The Queen Must Die at both - and done a top-to-bottom overhaul of the graphic design and wording of just about everything except the rulebook.

The first conference was my local annual conference - Terminal City Tabletop Convention. A year ago it was the first conference I was attending that got cancelled and the first to pivot to on-line. It did the latter in mere days... and, well, to be kind to the first on-line event a year ago, the second one was a vast improvement. Of course it was. I got some playtesting in and it was fine. It was kinda tough to rope in play testers as there were two other games at "Proto-Alley" that have - to their credit - done a really good job of local marketing and they collectively sucked up most of the air.  Hell, I even played both of them over the weekend - even-though I already have a KS copy of one of them here on my shelf.

And then my mentor had his family tragedy, and I had an extra week without his immediate guidance.

I took the opportunity to dig into a bunch of consolidation and consistency work, including my first crack at some serious iconography. And, gosh-darn if I didn't learn something.  It had never really occurred to be that there would be such a thing as "First Draft Iconography," but of course there is.  Analyzing all the myriad effects and text to find commonalities, then trying to find the best Webdings and basic silhouettes I could to represent, even mediocrely, the concepts involved. And there's the point: mediocrely. I could not possibly have come up with the best version of any of them on my first try - getting to the parking-lot of the proverbial ballpark was a win. I will definitely have to cycle back to that chore even before a trained graphic designer takes the reigns. I also bought a few hours of time from a friend whose job it is to edit lectures and research papers for clarity and we drilled down into how best to communicate various effects with brevity. That was illuminating. Anyone who has read any of my posts knows that I am more prone to the purple-prose and tiresome gift-of-the-gab tendencies than lexicographic efficiency. ;-)   Overall I was very happy with the results of these two efforts.

After another homegrown playtest and some number crunching I made a few last balance-related tweaks. The fact was that despite the name of the game, the Queen had NOT died in the past several weeks worth of testing - that had to be fixed. And then it was time for the humbling...

Protospiel Online was this past weekend. I had never done Protospiel before, and like so many conventions, having it be online made it possible where it was previously prohibitive.
I know at least two other TTMP participants were in attendance as I played games with them.

Friday I took the day off work and dove right in. Got the lay of the land. Played a few games. Had a challenging run in with another tester who was not being respectful of other players (ugh) and then dove into my first playtest. It went swimmingly - lots of good (and humbling) feedback - and even one player who seemed like he would happily walk away with a copy of the game right here. (Too bad for him that there is still more work to be done.)

Day 2 saw another playtest of my own. It went totally pear-shaped. I think I may have been too tired when pitching it and not communicated the weight of the game effectively - not one of my play testers were the target. The less said about that play test, the better.

And then my Uncle died. So I pulled the plug on that test mid stream. Thanked the play testers for their time and went and dealt with family stuff. 
 
Roy's death wasn't unexpected. He'd been doing poorly for months. He was going to be 87 next month. Nothing I could or can do about it. I can't travel to where he and his family is. But it still sucks, and kind of threw a pall over my evening. Once everyone was asleep here I went back to testing to get my mind off the whole thing and get in some of that precious "giving back" time that is so necessary at such an event. 
Happily I got to play the single best game I played all weekend - and I would have walked away with a copy of the game right there. Watch for it. "Synchronized."  Simple. Elegant. Infuriating. Fun.

Day 3 I got my play test in early. Most of the players seemed to really enjoy it - though not without questions and comments all along the way. I was surprised at the end when one of them admitted that the game was absolutely NOT his kind of game. He had really bought in and tested with gusto. I was impressed at that effort. He also had great feedback.

I played more of other people's games through the rest of the day - no duds in that batch. Met some good people. Will definitely go back and do it all again.

But walking away - what did I learn about The Queen Must Die?

I learned that I have a choice. I could throw some more polish - better iconography among it - onto the game and balance some more numbers and try to sell the game to the sliver of the market that includes myself, the one guy who loved it in the first play test of the weekend, and a few of my regular play testers; or I could challenge myself to aim at a larger market. To lean in to the two things that people universally remark about positively - the theme/premise (and to a lesser degree the apparent hilarity of sheer carnage that the protagonists endure though out the game), and the unique take on a betrayal mechanic (which to be perfectly honest has never quite worked, but everyone seems intrigued by.) and make those the main-dish of the game while everything else gets simplified further and stripped away where necessary. To take my 90+ minute game down to 60 max and aim at a rule set that don't leave casual gamers asking the same question three times in three turns (yeah, that happened in my ill-fated second playtest.)
And I want to take up that challenge. The Queen Must Die is never going to be Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride. But with effort maybe it could be Libertalia or Dungeon Petz if I really work on hitting the right level of accessibility. And I think I've known that for quite some time - that while so much of the game fundamentally works, that I've designed a game that would have been thought of fondly in 1982 and long gone out of print by now with no hope of a Dune-like revival.
So it's back to the drawing table. Not quite throwing it all out and designing a new game that is based upon the original, but more snipping critical strands of DNA and replacing them with brand new refined sequences that start and end in the similar places, but skip over entire sections of small choices that accumulate to a lot, but don't in and of themselves represent a lot.  Facilitating the journey from Stage A to Stage B in a single move with less complication and nuance, but more elegance and approachability.

I do know what a few of those answers are. But I have to create a new blueprint and determine what my non-negotiables are and what streamlined processes I already have ready to insert, and then figure out what parts of the scaffold can be re-purposed without spoiling the intention of the effort and what needs to be reimagined from whole cloth.  I know I won't have a fully functioning new version by the wrap-party, but perhaps I'll have something ready that can start beta testing that weekend.

I can't believe that after these months of to-the-grind-stone game design, that I am wrapping this up by saying "I have to go now, 'cause I really have to get started on the work."