We are trying to quickly, and cheaply, get a sense for what is fun and what isn’t in our game, “I swear”.
Main questions we want answered:
Are people comfortable enough having others experiment with their ‘never have I evers’. These could be personal and individuals may not like the direction that some people take the prompt. Equally, defending the contrary to the prompt may make people uncomfortable. We want to make sure this is fun for all types of people in various group settings. We believe that people will take this game in the same spirit as the original ‘never have I ever’, and keep things light. This will just require some quick cards and instructions to be drawn up and have the game played multiple times with as little interruption as possible to see where the game goes.
We want to check how many prefabricated materials need to come with the game. Is it enough to just make people tear up pieces of paper and have the rules be simple enough that they can be passed by word-of-mouth? Or do we need to construct a set with template cards that could somehow be reused, a sheet with rules on it, etc. We will likely need to create a few different versions of the game (just with pen and paper is fine, with components of varying amounts of instruction/prewritten prompts) and have many people play with them and then survey them on their experience to determine the right materials to provide for the game. We think that the game will ultimately become quite simple to play so think that very few materials will be needed, but definitely want to check this.
Finally, we want to get a sense for whether or not the game needs a moderator. Do players prefer to read off prompts that they draw and have others guess there and then? Or does it flow better for a moderator to lead the conversation regarding each player’s prompt and mitigate players being able to guess from prompts via handwriting. The prototype here would just include extra instructions for how the moderator should run the game, and the flow would be different as a result. We mostly believe that a moderator leading the conversation will be best but there was some initial disagreement/discussion about it within our own team, so clearly there are differing opinions.
