HandyCon10 – Our First Playtesting Event

Running from October 27th to the 29th, Quaeleon’s Quest did pretty much non-stop playtesting at HandyCon, we had:

• 12 Playtesters
• 20 Games
• 80 Rounds
• 20 Winners
• 10 Page of Notes

What is Handycon?

From the HandyCon website:

HandyCon is a thrilling three-day board gaming convention that takes place four times a year in the UK.

handycon.co.uk

What does that mean, really? It’s 100’s of people, congregating at a hotel and having a great time playing board games together.

Aside from people playing games, there is:

• a “bring and buy” where you can bring games to sell, and buy games from others.
• social gaming, e.g. Blood on the Clocktower.
• game tournaments, this time there was a Quorridor tournament for example.
• a huge game library to borrow from and try new games.
• playtesting tables, which is of course where we spent most of our time.

Playtesting

Luckily, Quaeleon’s Quest is only a 20-40 minute game, so we were able to get a lot of games in over the weekend.

Playtester Experience

Overall, people really liked the game. Most people wanted to play a second (or third, or fourth) game unprompted.

Playtesters were asked how long they thought the game they just played was, and everyone either underestimated or was quite accurate (time flies when you’re having fun – a good sign!).

There were no serious flaws found, although we had lots of really interesting and helpful feedback, which we will be considering over the coming week for the next iteration of the game.

We had some playtesters read the rules and then play through the game on their own, and that went well, with only some minor revisions to the rules.

A playtester also tried explaining the rules to another playtester after having played once before, which also went well – a good sign!

The First Game

One area where clear improvement was needed was the first game that people play.

Due to the complexity of the cards and effects, the first game can be quite overwhelming and lead to a very unsatisfactory experience.

This is a big problem, because if people don’t have a fun first game, they probably won’t want to play a second. Hence, this is going to be a key area for improvement going forward.

One of the issues is that there are a lot of cards without a base attack/defence stat.

Some ideas from playtesters included:

• A “first game” deck where certain cards are removed.
• Give cards healing, attack or defence if they currently do not.
• It’s fine as it is, as first games tend to be short, you just play again.
• Some “background strategies” or “hints” mentioned in the rules, particularly for the faction cards.

Game Design

Everyone was very positive about the design of the game in general.

Most people thought some polish was needed, but that overall it felt like a largely finished game.

Everyone liked that artwork, and was not at all bothered by the fact it was a.i. generated, with most people saying it was better for it.

Health Tracking App

Everyone thought the health tracking app was a big hit, and thought as a standalone product it had legs of its own! People did, however, want to see it as a dedicated app in the appstore, and with some quality of life improvements.

Stats

• The average game length was 30 minutes and 3 seconds. We had:
  • 3 x 10-20 minute games
  • 7 x 20-30 minute games
  • 4 x 30-40 minute games
  • 3 x 40-50 minute games
  • 1 x 50-60 minute game
• We played:
  • 11 x 2 player games
  • 4 x 3 player games
  • 3 x 4 player games
  • No games of 5+
• We asked most playtesters to rate how fun they thought the game was from 1 to 10:
  • The lowest was 6
  • The highest was 9
  • The average was 7.625

Playtesters

A humungous thank you to everyone who helped us to playtest the game – we can’t thank you enough.

We have added each and every one of you to our playtester thanks page.