[Post #4] The Rat Pack v2 to v3

Group: 11

Game Summary

        Our game is based on a Stealth-based Baking theme game, aimed at college students. In this game you play as a squadron of rats in a bakery trying to gather as much food as you can without being caught by the head chef. Each player has access to a number of routes, and a number of different rats to choose to send out to gather food. The player with the most food by the end of the game wins.

Version 2 to 3

With version one out of the way and some external playtesting with version 2, we were ready to make a number of important corrections. With this edition, we put in extra effort to clarify rules that were too easily being skipped by our playtesters. There was not a lot of time for our playtesters to read through all the rules, so they did a lot of skimming, which resulted in some thinking that certain mechanics had no effect on the game. We added in a few images to help guide the player back to these mechanics and further emphasize their importance. In the future, once we have done enough playtesting, we would like to make use of more icons to indicate importance. It would also be nice to include some of the rules embedded on the individual player boards so that referencing said rules would be more succinct. 

Rule wording has been our bane since the very beginning of this project. Our game doesn’t resemble very many mainstream games, so we don’t have as much to draw from. Without painstakingly searching hundreds of form posts or somehow playing a variety of exotic games, it’s hard to find a good example to base our rules off of. Even something as simple as explaining that a rat’s Load is the maximum amount of food they can bring back on a single run, poses quite a challenge. We also wanted to be very consistent with our keywords, so we combed through our rulesheet and made sure all our keywords were bold and capitalized. Ideally adding an icon next to a keyword would make for a nice way of tying the mechanics to a visual that we can place on the board, but those icons take work to create and format, so we had to leave that on the chopping block for now.

Playtester’s Feedback

The feedback we received on the game was pretty minimal, but one thing is clear, our playtesters do not want to read through all our rules to get started playing. This was the same problem I encountered with my Solitaire mod. Given that most of our playtesters are not in much of a position to dedicate a lot of time and effort to critiquing our work, it’s clear that the more we can do to relieve the burden of absorbing a complex rule system, the better. Most of the people who have or will playtest our game are not likely to play it more than once, so it’s best if we can make that one experience as stress free as possible. We also learned that not everyone understands our terminology, so it is important to include a visual to help clarify our intentions.

How to Proceed

Personally I would like to move most of the rules to the player board. I want to have any math-based rules there, as well as the actions one can take each turn. I think that the rulesheet is a good place for exceptions, side remarks, and other pieces of information that are a bit wordy, but that the board, or a rule card, would have a nice and concise summary of standard play. If we have the time to do something like this, I think it would greatly improve the readability and speed at which people are able to get up and play our game. That is how I would like to proceed from here.