Today, we playtested in class with Jessica, Judy, and Alex.
We focused on two key mechanics: modifying the spinner values and having players negotiate and collaborate to achieve goals.
We observed the following:
- Having four separate spinners that players could modify felt clunky.
- We could potentially have one spinner players swap out, or use dice and counters instead.
- One player (when bringing up spinners) described the feeling as “gambling.” The spinner mechanic does create a large amount of output randomness, which may be felt as making the game one of chance, rather than skill.
- Alex chose to modify his strategy (in boosting his spinners) after observing other player’s strategies.
- However, this ultimately backfired as he chose the least relevant stat to boost, causing other players to leave him out of missions.
- Jessica mentioned she was not sure what (if anything) she was learning from the game.
- However, this might have been because we created a tech tree that was based in science so it felt like the objective was to learn specific moments in time.
- The game may have not been played long enough for players to learn from the system, rather than learning facts.
- Players with weaker/less relevant skill sets were left out of joining discoveries and thus ended up behind, point wise.
Our key questions after this playtest were:
- Should we make roulettes / rolls deceivable? If we hide the per-player board, then we can add a strategy to lie and potentially sabotage other players. This could help mitigate the issue of players being purposefully left out of missions, but may add unnecessary complexity or not fit the system we are attempting to portray.
- Should we incur risk even when you succeed in an invention? Technically you’re on the watchlist from the establishment, regardless of whether you succeed or not.
- This may also help mitigate players being left behind: they can deliberately help take on risk.
- What part of scientific discovery/process do we want players to notice?
- Should we have a mechanic that allows players to choose their audience for scientific discoveries? Eg: Publish to favor church vs. publish to favor academia vs. publish to favor public
Some changes we were considering were:
- Use max score instead of summing scores to increase risk and difficulty
