Wednesday 23 May 2012

May Meetup Debrief


We returned to the Morpeth Arms for May's Playtest meetup and welcomed three new members to the group. 

After a good chat and a hearty meal we split into groups to playtest some new games. The first was a chase card game from Andrew called 'Zombies at you Heels'. He is currently funding the production through indiegogo: http://www.indiegogo.com/zayh with all profits going to charity. It's an exciting design and the characters really mesh together well to allow some killer combos. Another group were playing 'Cash on Delivery', a strategy game from David. It elicited a great response from the playtesting team, who were impressed with how well the parts of the design fitted together.

'Lord of the Realm' by Lawrence was the next game to be playtested, which will be premiered at the UK Games Expo this weekend:http://www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk/newgames.php#davies
with a new ruleset and graphics. The design has been honed through many iterations and the responses were very positive, with many useful suggestions being made. Next up was Paul's prototype, 'Time Crooks' which was a lot of fun to play, zipping back and forth in time making money. Opinions were split on some aspects of the gameplay, but Paul was already planning how to tweak it. I'm looking forward to seeing the next version of the design.

We finished on another game from David, 'Fantasy Railways'. An interesting take on the train game genre, that had us building a whole network and fighting over the spoils. Great to see this game back in development.

Next week we'll be at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham, running a Playtest Zone for the attendees and any budding designers that want to bring their prototypes along.

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