Post-playtest report

So, last week we did a playtest of the basic game with six and then later four players.

So just to review briefly, the basic game has each player with a hand of cards, discarding into their own discard pile and drawing to replace from their own draw pile. Everyone acts simultaneously to try to lay down sets and runs from their hand to match customer cards that are worth various amounts of points. Customer cards are drawn from a deck that moves around to each player, one at a time.

As was expected, the first playthrough or two was horribly broken, though gave enough insight to tweak the rules into a pretty good state. I won't be exhaustive about all the changes yet, but we removed all upgrades from the special deck (making into the "customer" deck), we allowed people to pass the customer deck without drawing to reduce the build-up of customers, we increased base hand size to seven, and rather than making the player to your right discard their hand when their discard pile is empty and you need to draw, you just grab the first non-empty discard pile, going around to your right. It worked out alright with six players, but once we reduced that to four, it was genuinely pretty fun, and held people's attention for several hours.

Playtest take-aways

1. The game is actually kind of engaging
2. The pace was about right: hurried but not grueling
3. There was a lot of variance in the difficulty-to-reward ratio on various customer cards, which was no surprise
4. With the current customer deck, low-cost, easy-to-complete customers are by far the best
5. People can get stuck with tunnel-vision, trying to match the card in front of them. Perhaps more risk of outside interaction would be useful?
6. Play needs to build a bit more, so games have a more dynamic arc
7. There is little interaction between players. While direct competition isn't what I'm going for, it would be nice to have a bit more going on.

Runs were more difficult than sets by a long shot. While we noticed that it's easier to draw strategically to complete a run than it is to try to get a pair (since you might have 2 out of 3 for a run, but simply be forced to hope to pair something that was in your hand), the difficulty difference was vast enough that this didn't really help out those poor customers who wanted a run of three red toppings. In the rules we were playing, runs all had to be of one suit (though some players didn't realize this at first), but in retrospect, they almost certainly shouldn't be.

It didn't feel like there was a lot of drama in trying to score the bonuses on the cards. Since no one else can steal your customer, the question of whether to go for the bonus is simply one of whether it is more economical to do that or to finish that customer and go on to another. While this is a perfectly valid and interesting strategic choice, it doesn't reinforce the experience to a great degree. I'd like to tempt players to push their luck and reward creativity, if a very limited form of it.

Shane introduced me to Pink Godzilla Dev Kit, which is a card game about making videogames that has at its core the idea of playing components out of your hand to build a game that fulfills certain requirements and then potentially exceeds them, yielding bonus points. In it, other players can clone your game before it is done to gain a reward when you complete it. While this is not a mechanic I intend to copy, it gets at the basic idea of the dynamic I'm looking for -- tempting players to push their luck.

One solution I'm considering is a fairly radical departure.

There is one customer in the middle for each player. The customer deck sits off to the side, not being passed around. Each player has a hand of four or five cards and may play cards down on the table at any time in addition to having the option to discard, meaning played cards do not count towards your hand total. Players may not claim a customer until they have a hotdog that fulfills the customer's requirements, at which point they are paid out as before. The player may discard the partially-constructed hotdog at any time, but must discard the entire thing. Once a customer is fulfilled, the filling player must draw another customer to replace it. In this case, if two players lay claim to a customer at once, the customer favors the vendor to whom he is worth the most. If there is still contention, I'm not sure how this would be resolved -- probably by card rank on the toppings.

Additionally, when we played, we moved purchasing upgrades to be an auction between rounds. While this worked alright, I didn't think it added much. I'd like to see the game feel like it has more of an arc within rounds. One idea is to replace some or all bonuses on customers with draws from a separate specials (without customers) deck, which might contain one-time-use cards as well as upgrades. Many of these would likely still cost money and could be traded, but it would allow players to try to make calculated risks to acquire resources which would give them bonuses later in the game. Some of these would likely have direct and indirect negative effects on other players, such as the Health Inspector which would cause everyone to discard their hand (or in the above variant, their prepared dog), or allow you to replace a customer card in play.

In general, while it's not supposed to be a directly competitive game, I'd like to veer slightly more away from multiplayer solitaire.

On playtesting

The combination of marked-up playing cards and index cards for toppings and customers respectively worked pretty well. The big drawback of the playing cards was that at least one player kept thinking in terms of red and black instead of the three suits. The yellow marker on the spade cards didn't show up very well, which I'm sure compounded this issue, but ideally, custom cards will remedy this entirely.

The photos I got of the playtest were staged after-the-fact, since I was too busy playing during the playtest. While it's essential for me to play the game, I should probably also make it a point to sit out a few rounds as well. In general, I need to be better to not get carried away, and instead to observe more closely. It's tough to think like a player and a designer all at once, but it's a skill I need to get better at.

There was also some definite rules confusion. It wasn't until most of the way through the night that we figured out some people thought sets had to always be of the same suit and others didn't realize runs had to be the same suit.

Scheduling

Finally, this is obviously coming pretty late in the month. I have no intention of letting deadlines slip, but since about half my month got eaten up by work (including the evenings) and even less fun stuff, The Hotdog Cart Game won't be getting quite the iteration time and finishing time I'd like to give it. I guess this is just one of those learning experiences.

Still, I'll get a final playtest and final post up, including pictures and the rules right around month's end. Stay tuned.