Development Diaries: How to playtest and refine a new tabletop game | Part 2

Image showing a green cutting board with a ruler, Stanley knife and stacks of paper that are Betty Two Bricks's first prototype. Image exclusively on the Kaioss Games blog.

How do you make sure your game idea actually works? The answer is test, test and test again. In this Development Diary, learn how Betty Two Bricks changed during its prototyping (for how it all began, go back to the first Diary).

Betty had a different aim at first.

The first two prototypes — a handwritten one and a text-based one for printing — had eight Mob Bosses for players to randomly choose. Each Mob Boss had their own secret win conditions like removing three Mob Cards from other players or assembling a gang of five from the same Home Turf.

The first playtest outside of us (the designers) was with a close friend. Seeing how another person played the game and what they found confusing proved very useful. Some issues became clear but these didn’t seem so bad in a two-player game. With more players however...

It was obvious that the hidden roles weren’t working.

Our third playtest was with a group of fellow designers and testers called Playtest UK. We first went to their Enfield, London branch led by Andy.

Playing with other designers was invaluable. They had great suggestions on all aspects of the game, from overall flow to individual cards. This session showed that Mob Bosses were too unbalanced. Afterwards, we discussed the feedback and based on a slightly different idea by Andy, we decided to replace Bosses with ‘missions’ (later called grifts).

Digital intermission time. Suboptimally for playing cards together, the two designers spent most of the development time living in separate corners of the country. We used digital environment website Tabletopia to test each change to the game before printing and cutting a new version. With internet connections being fragile and digital play taking more time than in person games, it was a challenge to judge exactly how well we were improving gameplay pace with each iteration. 

Image of Tabletopia's interface showing a 2 player Betty Two Bricks game. In the foreground is a blue board split into 10 sections for cards. On the top row of the board are 3 face-down cards and one face-up Player Aid. On the bottom row, in the leftermost space is a face-down card with an illustration of two stacked bricks on it and on the rightermost section is another Player Aid. In the middle of the image is a stack of face-down Betty cards with a space titled 'Discard' next to them. In the background is another blue board with the same set up. Image exclusively on Kaioss Games.

Rather than a maximum six-player game, Betty was originally designed to be played with up to eight people.

Our first full capacity test was at The Ludoquist, Croydon.

Image is of a room whose 3 sides are lines with shelves filled with boardgames. In front of the shelves is a blue hexagonal table with four chairs around it and board games on top of it. A neon sign on top of the back wall shelf says 'Ludoquist!'. Image exclusively on Kaioss Games.

Led by Scott and Greg from Playtest UK, playing Betty at max capacity brought up more gameplay issues. A comment that Mobs needed more than one purpose to engage players more in thinking about strategy led to another big change: Mob Cards having unique jobs. 

Other feedback made us re-work the number of Mob, Action and Grift Cards leading to Betty becoming a 2—6 player game. 

We had more sessions with both Playtest UK groups.

Image on three stacks of cards on a cutting board. At the top of the image is a plastic container with the Betty Two Bricks rules folded inside. The right stack of face-down cards had 'Betty Two Bricks' printed in black at the top and an illustration of two stacked bricks in the middle. The middle card stack has 'Betty Two Bricks' printed in black at the top and an illustration of two stacked bricks with a cheese on them in the middle. The right stack shows a Player Aid. Image exclusively on Kaioss Games.

Players familiar with earlier versions of Betty were happy with the new changes. Issues raised started to be about specific cards. To us, this meant we were on the right track.

We went into playtesting with the attitude of taking everything on board. But, we found that players had different preferences — some wanted more strategy, some enjoyed more chaos — and it wasn’t possible for us to use every idea. It was valuable learning how to refine the many great perspectives and suggestions we got whilst staying within one vision for the game.

Our final test was at Tabletop Scotland.

This was our first time playing with people who weren’t designers (or friends). The feedback was delightful. People found the theme fun and most suggestions were about the card designs. This would be our next development step so… see you in Diary 3!

Back to blog