Soho! (or why games need playtesters)
Tonight I was at the launch thing for Soho!, a board game about being editors at a small London literary magazine. I'm not entirely sure if I managed to piss some people off slighty, but it was pretty much that or shut up entirely and I'll pick honest criticism over that any day.
The core mechanic was not bad. You're wandering around London, trying to track down a bunch of writers in pubs, while navigating via various means of transport - walking, boris bikes, taxis - and that basic idea of switching between different methods was pretty good. There's a trade-off in that there's a continuum between slow methods that can go anywhere (walking) through to fast methods which will run into the one-way system and more obstructions (taxis) with bikes as a middle option.
The problem was that there was all this other crap: lots and lots of extra rules tagged onto this mechanic; overly complicated methods that take many turns to switch between transport modalities; an awful lot of board changes without sufficient player moves inbetween; etc.
I had a bit of a chat with the author, and he admitted that it's entire playtesting was him and his girlfriend repeatedly going over it again and again. It's possibly quite funny to readers of Smoke (the literary magazine this is being done off the back of), but it's not worth it for the rest of us. Given the cool shit going on with boardgames in London, this was somewhat disappointing...
The core mechanic was not bad. You're wandering around London, trying to track down a bunch of writers in pubs, while navigating via various means of transport - walking, boris bikes, taxis - and that basic idea of switching between different methods was pretty good. There's a trade-off in that there's a continuum between slow methods that can go anywhere (walking) through to fast methods which will run into the one-way system and more obstructions (taxis) with bikes as a middle option.
The problem was that there was all this other crap: lots and lots of extra rules tagged onto this mechanic; overly complicated methods that take many turns to switch between transport modalities; an awful lot of board changes without sufficient player moves inbetween; etc.
I had a bit of a chat with the author, and he admitted that it's entire playtesting was him and his girlfriend repeatedly going over it again and again. It's possibly quite funny to readers of Smoke (the literary magazine this is being done off the back of), but it's not worth it for the rest of us. Given the cool shit going on with boardgames in London, this was somewhat disappointing...