With sweaty palms and a lump in my throat, I’ve scheduled the first Doomed Colony playtest for this week. Will the game be a great success? Probably not; games are usually horrible the first time out of the gate. But in order to keep it from being a breathtaking disaster so horrific that my friends vow never to play with me again, I’ll first subject the thing to a pre-test.
A pre-test is basically a playtest you do by yourself. Specifically, you do everything you would for a real playtest:
- assemble all the components,
- set up the game, and
- play at least a few rounds (taking the role of each player in turn) as detailed in the rules.
Walking through these steps won’t ensure the game is great (again, first plays are usually bad), but it does ensure that you have all the pieces prototyped (“Oh no, I forgot the role cards!”), and that the rules are complete enough to play the game (“Hmm. Might need a victory condition.”).
In short, a pre-test keeps you from annoying and wasting the time of your playtesters as you scramble to whip up a missing component or scribble out some missing rules.
So how did the playtest go? I’ll let you know when I find out.
