#brief 6b

[sandt22]

Playtest 2.0

For our second external playtest, we worked rapidly with the little time we were given to make more solid playing cards.

Unfortunately, I had to leave 1 hour early, and didn't get to participate in this playtest. It seems my teammates tried out the mute token though.

Thank you to @heyjonna @designerpernille (and more whom I cannot see on the image) for participating in the user test! Thank you to @andreadesignwork for photo documenting the playtest 📸.

Ideas for further development

Give the playing cards more uniform dimensions.

Affiliates

@andreadesignwork @lexlothe @hellypellymus

[sandt22]

Area 51: Playtesting 1.0

Thank you to @tenkdesign @designermaria-blog @designerlarsprosjekter @braathendesign @ruskesara @monamehus for participating in our very first playtest of Area 51! And an especially big thank you to @williamdalsto for taking on the GM role, and who impressively managed to memorize the different role cards in only a few minutes 👏! Fortunately most told us they found the game solid and fun, despite some balancing issues.

The Mute

We tested out turning the token mechanic into actual role cards, but it turned out it didn't work very well. The person who became the mute reported how it wasn't very fun, because no one else had pretended to be mute and no one found him suspicious, so he had nothing else to do other than listen to the other Earthlings discuss.

Participating in the discussion as a mute was too challenging, and could even come off as disturbing. Moving forward, we will leave the mute card as a token as I originally intended.

Furthermore, having myself experienced how it feels to became a normal Villager several times in a row while playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf during the gaming festival, having no night actions is kinda boring. The cards without any night actions understandably exist in order to give the werewolves an opportunity to pass off as innocent, but as a villager I ended up not participating in the discussion at all, because I had nothing to add. Instead, perhaps because people overestimated by calculative lying abilities, I came off as sort off suspicious most of the time by the other villagers.

Sleep phase

The role cards needs to be more solid and uniform, so that the Earthlings cannot tell that their card has been tampered with due to the deformation of the paper's shape.

Every player who performs a night action should also be instructed to slightly wriggle the other player's cards before closing their eyes again. This is to make sure that the other players cannot tell which cards has been tampered with, by simply memorizing the cards position and angle before they closed their eyes.

Ideas for further development

Give every role some sort of ability, so that everyone can participate in the discussion, while not making it too challenging for the Aliens to pass off as innocent.

Make the playing cards with a more solid material, that can be picked up and moved without its shape deforming.

Develop the second layer of game mechanics more, by creating more tokens like the mute token.

Figure out the mechanics of adding some more rounds / multiple sleep phases.

Affiliates

@andreadesignwork and @hellypellymus @lexlothe

[sandt22]

Playtest 1.1

I took the opportunity to playtest our game at a dinner this weekend. Didn't have time to recreate all the cards, but they found it fun and I got some experience with being a GM. I also tried out adapting the rules a little bit on the go.