Testing #2: FUN!!
FUN!! is a difficult thing to pin down. We spent a lot of time round the kitchen table, playing various versions of the Army Of Zero with our kids but also with anyone else of the appropriate age group who wandered through our front door. This was very useful in terms of seeing whether it was FUN!!, even though it was hard to quantify.
These playtesting sessions also helped us increase the FUN!! As much as we liked the original game mechanics, we went into the process wanting to jettison as many rules as we could, because rules aren’t FUN!! A lot of the games we like - just to pick some examples, Cluedo, Risk, and one of our new favourites, Sprouts - don’t have much in the way of actual rules. Or look at the iPod. Why is the iPod such a design classic? Partly because it has all your favourite music on it, and what’s not to like about that, and partly because its UI, at its best, is barely even there.
We (casually) asked our playtesters for some feedback, and here are some of the things our play-testers said they liked about the game.
- “Even when you’re being beaten, you still feel like you’ve got a chance.” We still talk about Fracture’s Stand, when that particular character was the last one standing for one player, while the other player still had five characters left. Fracture took them all out one after the other; after that, all our players knew that the game wasn’t over until it was over.
- “It’s good the way that you can defend for two rounds and then attack. It feels realistic”. We like this comment a lot. We like that the player thinks that the rules create the illusion of something realistic although they are really quite simple.
- “The fights are over very quickly. It makes it exciting.”. In the original rules, a character had to be wounded twice before he was out of the game. We changed that rule to make it that one good strike was all that was needed. We did this to speed up the combat, mainly to cut down on the time needed to play the game. But we also found out that it made the game more fun, because players know that each character is at risk all the time; each character can be out of the game in an instant.
