Apr 1 – 5, 2024
We planned on having a playtest of the whole session at Wednesday’s instructor meeting. Before that, we are doing subtle iteration, assets refinement and fabrication. Besides the board game itself, we are also making the slideshow including the tutorial at the beginning and the takeaways at the end. We did the final playtest before Wednesday on our team to make sure everybody fully understood our game mechanics.
Instructor meeting:
However, the playtest session did not go well. The main failure is that we give too much information to our naive guests all at once, and they easily forget them. During the play, the player’s motive is not clear so players get confused. Plus the trading session is all the countries trading together so it was really a chaos. Based on the feedback, we realize there are two main changes we need to make: simplify and clarify the game, and here are the changes we made:
Simplify:
Reduced the amount of cards each country needs to process.
Reduced the categories of cards they need to sort, at the same time the categories of recycle plants are reduced.
Reduced each country’s environment unfriendly ways: burn, landfill and sea dump into each country one way as we set up.
Remove shipping fee and cargo buying process.
Clarify:
Set a tutorial turn to teach our player each possible action in the game.
Make the trading phase turn based so only one country offers import or export to the other counties at each turn.
Give the pollution token a specific position to place.
Give each country a goal so they know their motive.
Provide a cheat sheet including all the possible actions in each phase.
Based on the feedback, we redesign the board, the cards, and the game mechanics. We had several other rounds of playtest with group members, peers and faculties, and decided to make animations step by step for the tutorial to not only teach them each action, but also give them the freedom to choose what to do late in the game. We stay up late on Thursday to make all the assets we need for the playtest day.
