On this particular occasion there was one game-breaking exploit that was discovered early. I was aware of the potential problem but wanted to see if the players picked up on it. They did. But aside from that, the game was quite playable. Here's a quick rundown on how the play goes:
The game is based primarily on the cards which all have various "warning sign" symbols on them. Cards are dealt to the players which they take into their hands and 10 cards are dealt onto the board as "hazards". Players also have 10 "workers" that they are responsible for. Each player starts with one worker on the board.
All the left over cards are placed in a draw pile and the game begins. Players can pass cards to their left or play cards to hazard spots on the board as long as the card they are playing has a symbol that matches the one on the card on that hazard spot.
Every time a player plays a card to the board, ALL their workers must move one space. If a worker lands on a hazard card, the player has to be able to match one of the symbols on that card to a symbol on a card in their hand. Otherwise the worker is hurt (which counts against the players final scoring)
Players can also draw cards from the draw deck. Each time he does so, he adds another worker from his supply to the board.
Players who manage to get their workers through to the "finish" space will receive bonus points in the final scoring.
There are a few other wrinkles but that's the gist of it except for one crucial part. There are no "turns". With few exceptions, players all act simultaneously and whenever they want to or are able to.
This makes for some satisfyingly frantic game play.
What worked:
My goal in terms of "player experience" was fast and frantic -- manageable chaos. It seemed like the fast and frantic part was well represented here, and there was a healthy serving of chaos to be sure. The manageable part I'm not so sure about.
What needs work:
Players were unable to move a single worker from start to finish. It was too difficult to get them through all the hazards on the board. This seems to be a common theme in my early iterations -- that I make things too hard for my players and the primary goal is largely unattainable.
The main reason for this seems to be that the testers found it too difficult to match the symbols up. This was not necessarily because they were hard to see but more because the matches were too infrequent. I'll need to adjust the cards to fix this.
There were also problems with keeping the board up-to-date. Players naturally had a tendency to take actions quickly but in the wrong order, and missing important steps. For example: Players would frequently place a new worker on the board and THEN grab a new card (when this should really be reversed). Worse still, players would often play a card to the table and fail to move their worker pawns. This is a HUGE problem as it gives players a potential "out" of situations specifically meant to challenge them -- forgetting to move a worker could inadvertently save that worker from harm (it could also rob the player of positive movement towards their goal).
In other words, the "frantic chaos" worked too well and it meant players were unable to keep track of their pieces.
Another potential problem is pacing. Currently there are events in the game that require everyone to stop so that something can be resolved. It's not that this didn't work, but all the stopping and starting might run counter to the play experience I'm trying to engineer.
We also ran into a situation that I had not accounted for involving players who had all their workers out on the board. This was a problem because currently the action of taking a new card from the stack is tied to adding more workers to the board. So I'll have to figure out what to do there.
Lastly there was a big problem with players running out of workers all together (usually because they were all injured). This wasn't really accounted for in my original rules so I decided to just call this trigger for ending the game and commencing with final scoring.
The game played very quickly (another design goal)...about 30 minutes.
So I have some work to do still, but I got a lot of very valuable feedback. For a first play-test I would say "Warning Signs" was a success.
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