Soho! (or why games need playtesters)

[palfrey]

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

Comments

[luckykaa]

Doesn't seem a very interesting game. Looks like it uses the basic roll/move mechanic and seems very much designed my people who've only played mainstream games.

How did you get invited to a board game launch?

[palfrey]

The move mechanic was slightly more interesting than that, in that there's a notion of "overshoot" in the sense that you have to use your complete roll (well, there's exceptions to that). It's about the one bit I wouldn't strip down! It was in desperate need of input from people who'd played a variety of games though.

Open invite to the public, especially if you'd read the Londonist article which advertised it.

[pogodragon]

Second attempt at commenting...

I like the idea of the game, it sounds a fun concept. But holy hell that's one complicated set of rules there, I think I lost the will to live while reading it.

Cut the rules down to something sensible and intuitive and it could be a fun after-pub type game.

[palfrey]

Yeah, I gave up the first time I read them. Luckily I read them through a second time, so I could guide the bunch of rather confused writer/editor/literary types through the basic playing of it, otherwise it probably would have been even more of a waste of time.

Given it was possibly doing not so bad as a work of sarcasm, they possibly could have trimmed it down to a much smaller board and some notion of herding writers into a particular pub-of-choice or something.

[pogodragon]

It has the feel of a first draft set of rules, a few playtests through and I would expect it to be cut down to something tighter and less fussy.

It doesn't have the look of a game that justifies that level of twiddlyness in the rules. Less is more.