Tabletop Mentorship Stories

The Queen Must Die is a long game.  Not Twilight Imperium long. But well over an hour, realistically two even without the shackles of Tabletop Simulator. For the first half of the mentorship that was my big goal – to trim the game down. And I knew it was happening – but I really couldn’t know for sure to what degree thanks to the ‘playing-one-handed-with-an-oven-mitt-on’ experience of playing on-line.   What was important was that the game had been trimmed enough that I was no longer feeling like that was my main issue. I even said, out loud, that I felt like the low-hanging fruit was getting to be pretty small. Never say that stuff out loud. Right? I knew that I needed to play the end of the game more. Due to the length it was not uncommon for us to not get to the endgame in a playtest. And the endgame is one of the outstanding ideas of this game. And not by a little-bit. Consistently it was what people who I explained the game to keyed in on as the most exciting elem...

Sunday again.  This is a regular part of my cadence. On Sunday my playtest pool for The Queen Must Die knows I will be testing - the only question is "what time?" They are in many time zones, so I shake it up for them... okay - as dictated by the specific openings in my schedule. Gawd, I am thankful for them. It's a deep group and I can rely on getting the 3-6 players I need once a week. And they are all players only - no designers. I don't need to trade game testing with them. I want to stress - this is a temporary situation. I DO NOT have an unlimited supply of goodwill flowing from a bunch of unicorn-gamers who just want to play test what ever digital cardboard I put in front of them. I know how lucky I have been to get this group going and supporting me. I do not take them for granted. They are here just for The Queen Must Die, and just for this three month window of the mentorship, and I will be lucky if I can tap anywhere near this number of them again for a f...