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برچسب: Bazaar

  • Bazaar Diaries – Froggy Bazaar – Pt 1

    Bazaar Diaries – Froggy Bazaar – Pt 1



    I think an approach that is more useful to most designers is to get pen to paper as soon as possible and start playing, and tweaking, and iterating.

    Either way, eventually I get my components out in front of me and I get to ask myself the most important question: is it fun?

    And, if you haven’t realized it by the fact that I am writing an entire series on publishing this game, Froggy Bazaar is fun, it is a lot of fun.

    It also works, right out of the bat the gameplay was smooth. There is still a lot of work to do, but I’m already confident that we have something on our hands that people like (although we’ll eventually need blind playtesting to really solidify that assumption).

    Quick Overview

    Within the next few weeks I’ll have a Tabletop Simulator version of Froggy Bazaar up for general playtesting, but for now I think it’s worth giving a brief overview of what this game is mechanically.

    Froggy Bazaar is a tableau building and movement game, where you play a frog hopping from lily pad to lily pad collecting bugs (dice) to add to your rucksack. End of game scoring is based on secret and public bugjectives based on the pattern of dice (numbers and color) in your rucksack.

    On a player’s turn they have three optional actions

    1. Hop to an adjacent lily pad – collect the die on the tile to add to the top row of your tableau. Then replace the die with a random die from the bag.

    2. BIG hop – re-roll all dice on the top row of your tableau and re-distribute them (get one bonus froggy buck).

    3. Go to market – trade dice the top row of your tableau with the communal market.

    The game ends at the end of the round when a player fills their rucksack (12 slots). Whoever has the most points wins.

    Early Playtesting

    In early playtesting with my closest circle, I’ve answered two of the most important questions about Froggy Bazaar – 1. is it fun? and 2. does it work?

    I am in the process of making a basic Tabletop Simulator version so that I can test the game with a broader group of people – like our Pine Island community, and a broader group of friends and colleagues.





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  • From Prototype to Publication – The Bazaar Diaries Part 3: Preparing to Playtest

    From Prototype to Publication – The Bazaar Diaries Part 3: Preparing to Playtest


    [Read our full Froggy Bazaar series here: www.pineislandgames.com/bazaar-diaries]

    As I wrote about last week (in a regular blog post), as a game evolves through the development process the goals of your playtests, as well as the target playtest audience will change.

    We’re now at the point for Froggy Bazaar where I need to broaden our play tester base (beyond my immediate circle), and so have a few important questions to answer.

    1. What is the medium of playtesting?

    2. Who is playtesting?

    3. What are our goals for playtesting?

     

    Playtesting Medium

    We enlisted the help of Tabletop Simulator wizard Alexei Menardo to script our Froggy Bazaar mod. Alexei is great at getting TTS to do what you want including what could otherwise be fiddly set up [if you’d like to commission Alexei to build a mod for your game, you can reach him at pixelandboard@gmail.com].

    As such, most of our playtesting in the near term will be online through Tabletop Simulator. That said, if you’d like to print out your own version of Froggy Bazaar, we have PNP materials here, and very rough written rules here.

     

    Playtesters

    Since we’ve been through this process a couple of times, I am fortunate to have an audience of Pine Island Insiders who are excited to play our upcoming games. Over time I’ll be reaching out on the various forums to source an even broader audience.

    If you are looking for playtesters for your game, check out last week’s article Playtesting & Playtesters.

     

    Playtesting Goals

    These first rounds of playtesting are aimed at tightening up the game mechanically, finding pain points, and making sure every inch of the game is fun. Since this series focuses on a specific game, I’m going to go into a little more detail of my primary goals for this round of playtesting

    1. Make sure that the BIG HOP action is balanced.

    2. Figure out if we have the best end of game trigger (a player filling their rucksack).

    3. Balancing group bugjectives & figuring out whether we should separate them into separate color and number bugjectives.

    You can check out my full playtesting feedback form here. What I also love about these early rounds is that I run the playtesting, so can talk with players in real time about how they feel about different aspects of the gameplay.

    While I think each playtest should have a focus, it’s always helpful to have some level of consistency in what you are asking your play testers. JT Smith over at The Game Crafter put together a pretty decent starting point for a playtesting form. You can download a free pdf or buy printed booklets of it here.

    The Game Crafter Playtest Form

    I prefer to come up with my own forms rather than use a template, as the specifics of the playtest and game will determine the kinds of questions that are relevant. But, JT’s form is definitely a good starting point for inspiration.

     

    Do you want to playtest Froggy Bazaar?



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