First Time at UKGE
This weekend I attended UKGE (2022) for the first time, I’ve wanted to go for a long time but it never seemed to work out. It was an interesting experience. I spoke to a few manufacturers, bought some fun stuff, including Ominoes, a game I had just barely missed backing when it first came out on Kickstarter. The main reason for attending, however, was to bring a Taste for the King to the Playtest UK area. I managed to book a 3 hour playtest session between 1:30 and 4:30 on Friday.


Before my session I managed to play another game, a (currently) themeless set collection/playing game with a decent amount of strategy. For the vast time I was playing I felt like I might lose but due to the end game scoring I actually came out ahead by 3 points, which was a pleasant surprise.
During my session I managed to play 3 times. Two full games, 1 half game and a single round. The first game ran over a long time and while the players generally felt like the game was at least 1 round, maybe 2, too long, I do feel like for the most part they enjoyed their time playing it. One player in particular really liked the grandstanding nature of taking a turn, making everyone watch as you try to finish your meal.
The second game was a quick two player game between father and son. There wasn’t much feedback from this session but that’s fine, it was a good experience.
The third was a 4 player game with a mix of players, one was an absolute beginner at board games. I got some interesting feedback during this test. One suggestion was to reduce the number of dishes on each menu further, possibly down to two cards per course. I’ve been considering this myself but I’m not sure this would have the desired effect, with less cards from the pool to score you can in theory get through your menu faster, however during future turns there’s more cards to get through before you find one you need again. I also don’t like that it gets rid of the multiple of 3 that’s generally consistent across the game.I could maybe make the menus 9 dishes per player with one course having an extra dish to score, this might work and give a little more variety to the menus but I’m not sure. It might just be better to put in the rules that each player only needs to score 2 dishes from each course (8 instead of 12) on their menu to trigger the end game but that they can choose to continue past this if they want to guarantee the win (or bust).
Another suggestion was to make the turns concurrent, something I have considered multiple times but never really seems to work out. I decided to try this after the playtests, now that the game has changed a fair amount from its first few iterations. I thought the added card count of the deck might help. However, in an 8 player game, with just 14 hands (3 cards per hand) each player only gets one and a bit chances at the deck before the deck runs out. This breaks the push your luck aspect of the game beyond the first hand. The idea would be you can still discard, other players can choose to take those discarded cards and then play goes round to the next player, who can also choose to discard any card besides the one they might have just taken off you.
I really liked this suggestion as I could see it potentially fix the “downtime” problem the game has with larger player counts but I just don’t see it working unless I make hands a 1 or 2 card draw which I think would change the dynamic a little too much. I think it’s worth exploring this or something similar though.
The fourth game came a little too late and I felt bad because they had been coming back frequently to try and get a game in. Unfortunately there was only 20 minutes til the end of my session, some of which needed to be used for feedback and packing up so we only managed to play 1 round. Despite this I think they were intrigued by the game and they took my card to offer potential feedback after the event.
Thank you to everyone who played the game over the weekend. I look forward to the next UKGE where I hope to be able to spend more time.
If you would like to play test the game in its current state, feel free to join the official Drentsoft Games Discord server or hit me up during a Twitch stream and we can test it. In fact bring some friends and we can try to break it with as many people as possible!