Week 11

On Thursday, we playtested our game Devil’s Hand. Players may have seen the game as a little complicated, as each turn there are multiple options a player has to progress. For example, discarding, playing number cards to draw tokens and spending tokens on demon cards. However, once everyone got the rules down, the gameplay was fun and fast pace. This is why I decided to add instructions to every card to limit confusion about what each card is able to do. According to James Ernest in Writing Effective Rules, “Stories can help set the mood and inform the mechanics and style of play.” Our card game does have a story, that involves the devil's angels using their demon slaves to gain power in order to gain the Devil’s favor, however, we did not go over the story much while we were playtesting as it was not imperative to understanding how to play. Earnest also said, “Many players will skip over the story section, rushing to get into the procedure of the game.” Some players do like to read the story that is associated with the game, and I think we would have if we had more time in class. 

In our components list, as described by Earnest as a “list any physical components of the game, describing anything special about them.” we made sure to include all the cards (of which there were 54) and what type of cards there were (the number cards and the demon cards). This is the section of the rules that kept changing as we were playtesting. We were trying to find the right balance of cards to make the game not too long but not too easy. I think we eventually got it to a good balance of making the game fun while giving the players several options and keeping the challenge of the game. 

Players immediately understood the concept of playing cards on their turn, as that is what you do in all card games. However, several players seemed to be confused regarding the concept of earning tokens and spending tokens to play cards that give you an advantage in the game. This is similar to what we did in Battle-Battle, so I’m not sure what exactly people were getting confused about, but I think that goes to show that games are difficult to explain and understand, and people learn better by seeing the game being played as opposed to listening to game instructions. Eventually, players could pick up some strategies like saving their tokens to play bigger cards, keeping track of who likely has sixes in their hand and how to effectively play their cards to get the most use from them.