The Botched Playtest (and Why That’s OK)

Following feedback from the playtests at UKGE I quickly took A Taste for the King to a Break My Game session with some major changes. One person had suggested a potential solution to add simultaneous play to the game, allowing each player to draw a hand at once before going through each in turn with the usual discarding and revealing loop. While this seemed potentially viable in the heat of the moment, it quickly dawned on me that there just aren’t enough cards in the game to allow this for anything more than 3 players. While I could add more cards this would [a] make the game a lot more expensive to produce and buy [b] make the deck unwieldy in size [c] would likely change the feel of the mechanics a lot in regards to how they fit the theme.

I did have a thought though, what if two players take their turn at the same time. This may solve some of the downtime, essentially turning the game into a feasting duel between taste testers. The game was a little hectic as we tried to work out the logistics. At first I had envisioned each player taking half the deck but I had concerns about fair distribution of poisons and actions. We tried this but it just confused things, because I’d had the idea not long before the play testing session I hadn’t been able to setup the board on Screentop to take into account two turns being played at once*. Each turn, the deck was split into two, each with 18 cards and one player chose one deck to draw from and the other player from the other deck. While this may have worked with a dedicated layout, I quickly realised it wasn’t necessary as it would be simpler, fairer and more in keeping with the theme to just have both players draw from one deck and we switched to this style of play a few turns in.

The next issue came with turn order, should each player discard one at a time, then reveal together or should both sets of actions be done one at a time? The latter gives the second player a slight advantage as they get a little more information about the deck than the first player does. In a game with an odd number of players I don’t see this being a particular issue as no two players would go head to head twice immediately and each should have a chance at being the second player in a duel. However, in a game with an even number of players the pairing would always be the same and one player would always get a slight advantage over the other. Not a lot, but enough that it might cause a distinct winning pattern over time.

While the game did finish in relatively record time, at least for recent versions of the game, possibly in part thanks to the new scoring rule requiring just 2 dishes from each course to be scored instead of the entire menu (8 dishes vs 12), it was a little bit of a disaster. That said, it did show me that introducing simultaneous play while trying to keep the game’s core loop in tact may not work. I also got to show the game to, and get feedback from, more people whose games I also got to test so it was still a very worthwhile session even if, ultimately, the tested version is somewhat of a dead end.

I do have a couple of other ideas for simultaneous play that I would like to explore but I would like to see how the changes mentioned in the previous blog post affect things before I put the time and effort into setting these up for testing as they, again, have the potential to radically change the feel of the game as far as the theme is concerned.

While this playtest was somewhat of a disaster on my end, it helped rule out the possibility of concurrent play and I received more valuable feedback about the game from some very helpful playtesters and it helped cement some other ideas to trial.

*In hindsight this was a hidden blessing as it could have been a hassle resetting the Screentop project for single player play when the playtest proved that multiplayer turns were a bust.

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!

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