Small Box Challenge Community Voting Results
The community votes are in for the Small Box Challenge contest on The Game Crafter and out of 168 initial entries (166 by the time the community vote ended) only 20 made it to the semi finals. It’s sad to say that A Taste for the King didn’t make it into the top 20, ending up with only 140 community vote points vs the 270 that the last finalist received. Thank you to all who viewed, voted and commented on the game, it was by and large a pleasant experience interacting with the other contestants.
I thought I would do a quick post-mortem of my experience with the contest as a whole. It’s interesting to note that the game received about 130 views during the voting period which means it was voted around 1 in every 10 views. Talking with other contestants this seems to be about average percentage vote rate which suggests there may have been ways to improve the visibility of the game during the same period, thus increasing the views.
I received some good feedback, including one query about a specific rule which made me smack my head and immediately sent me to the rules to clarify. It related to the showing of discarded cards which is designed to increase interplay between players by encouraging taunting and mind games but I realised this isn’t explained anywhere, a simple fix that should make the rules more clear.
Generally people seemed to like the theme of medieval feasting and the how to play video, linked below, was praised for being clear and straight to the point. That said I have thought of a few ways to improve the how to play video for the final release such as adding a quick parts list and a quick list break down of the actions a player can take before going into the setup and subsequent example turns. This shouldn’t add too much runtime to the video but will make the video feel less speedy and hopefully easier to understand.
One thing I quite liked was that each person that views the contest voting page gets their own randomised view of the entries that persists for the duration of the contest. This gives everyone a fairer chance to be seen at or near the top of the list which I think is a novel approach to making the voting more even.