.: QMB Testing 2 Part 2 :.

Designed Board Testing
Queen Mother Building
Session 2

Changes from previous user testing

Escape, Blueprint and Tool card are no longer dealt at beginning
Instead dealt 2 defence cards and 2 attack cards (in order to prevent early escapes, therefore increasing the length of the game)

Users now start with 2 defence and 2 attack cards, this seemed to please the users and made the start of the game more interesting with early attacks occurring across the board.

Movement

A question was brought up was whether or not a user can enter another room after he has entered one room on that turn: for example Iain enters medical room and still has enough rolls left that he can enter the wardens office. This is not allowed, a user cannot enter 2 or more rooms on the same turn… otherwise the guards may grow suspicious. A lot of questions were asked during the game referring to the rules, it was easy to keep the users straight but I did worry how long and complicated it may have been if I wasn’t there for the users. The need for an instruction manual definitely presented itself during this phase of the user testing, with users getting confused with how to attack, how to exit and enter rooms and some other minor questions were raised.

The fact that users could enter 2 rooms on one roll of the dice did concern me about the design of the board or perhaps the rules, this caused me to look into redesigning the rules or changing the method to how the users navigate the board (instead of 2 dice perhaps one or a similar method). I decided that if I stuck with the current design it would continue to cause confusion and I decided to change the rules to make this impossible.

Attack/Defence

Due to the high number of attack and defence cards it was a worry among the users that defence cards would be pointless and unnecessary, although they were partly right this was part of my idea. I wanted the players to rarely be able to counter an attack, this added more excitement when the users did manage to counter an attack,; out of all the attacks made during the game (ranging up to 15) only 3 were countered.

I observed the players attack one another and they informed me that the attacking element was good fun but the element that I wanted in the game was not as strong as it should be – the strategy. Strategy did play a large role in the game, it did however have room for improvement. The game seemed to excel in areas such as competitiveness and fun.

The attack and run option seemed to work well with the dice but I felt that I had to design a more strategic use of the attack/defence cards so that the game became based more on strategy than luck.

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Manual

This user testing made me realise the requirement for an instruction manual. There was more than one situation that arose causing the game to come to a short halt when the users did not know how to proceed, as they did not know some of the game rules. The user testing helped me realize that scenarios may need to be added to the manual so the users know how to deal with certain situations during the game.

It is clear that a manual is a high priority for the next user testing session.

End Game

I ended the game before it reached the end as I felt that I had tested enough to work on. The trading part of the game worked well last time and there was currently no need to change this part of the game until the rest of the board game was given more structure. I had little time to revise the rules after this user testing before going to meet my second user group.