.: User Testing 5 Speedwell V2 :.

User Testing 5
Speedwell V2

Changes from last user testing

2 attack and 2 defence cards dealt at beginning to increase chances of early attacks and decrease chance of being able to defend against them
Inmates can now trade in any room on the board as long as they have 2 spare action points on their turn

Game start rules

4 Players – Brian, Greg, Peter and myself
Everyone choose cell randomly
Game proceeded clockwise from myself with me going first

Movement

These users picked up the action point system faster than my previous user testing group.This may have been due to the fact we were actually playing at a board game club, with players who already had experience playing games with action points. They were able to grasp the game much faster and navigated the board easily. There was however some complaints about the layout of the board – the users did not like travelling across the board for 2 turns to get to a room and felt that I had to decrease the size of the board or increase the number of action points so they can travel faster.

Attack/Defence

Brian who won this game informed me that he had a strategy before he started the game. He played an early attack on myself forcing me to miss 2 turns, this caused me to ignore the objective of the game and spend most of my time chasing him across the board rather than acquiring the items required to escape. He stated that because he knew my personality that he knew I would waste time chasing him, so he could gather more escape cards than myself as I wasted action points attacking him.

This made me realise the amount of different strategies in the game, some would dedicate their time to attacking, others would avoid conflict and try to obtain the cards without wasting their attack points and saving their attack cards until the end. It made the game feel like it had much more freedom and allowed the players to follow their own strategies.

Trade

Players were able to trade in any room on the board this time so they were not confined to only one room. The players were happy with the introduction of this new rule initially but soon realised that people were avoiding staying in rooms so that people could not take away their cards and felt they were safer in the open against attack cards. Soon after the game was over it was recommended that forcing players to remain inside rooms once they entered would fix this problem. I was not too keen on this idea and Peter recommended that allowing users to trade anywhere on the board would make it much more fun with the cost of 2-3 action points being required to trade.

End Game

Game ended 30 minutes after the game started with Brian being the first inmate to escape.