Playtesting Card Games

by Marie Vibbert

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our “Playtesting Game Narratives” series, curated by SFWA’s Game Writing Committee.

Every three months, the Cleveland Game Developers host a Play Test Night for our members.  Last time, I got to play a card game. It drove home the crucial differences between video games and physical games that designers might not expect, and so if you are interested in designing card games, here is my advice.

“Test as You Go” Means Something Different with Cards

Every software developer knows that you have to test each part as you build it to make sure it works before you integrate everything together. Most game engines these days let you pop into play mode to do this. (You whippersnappers! Back in my day, we had to COMPILE, and it took HOURS.)

With a card game, no matter how well you think you’ve worked out the mechanics in your head or on scrap paper, you can’t really “see” if it’s working until you make physical cards and lay them out. The theoretical realm hides flaws and strengths. Are those “stat” icons different enough if they are read across the table? Does the average person have the arm span for your layout?

You cannot start prototyping soon enough. I’m cheap, so I start with torn up pieces of notebook paper. This is fine for working on your own, but eventually you’ll want others to play, and that means making mock-ups that are strong enough to handle actual play.

A common playtesting method is to draw with a pencil on 3×5 cards. This is great, except as you shuffle and play, the graphite smears. I recommend a felt-tip pen instead—it dries fast and won’t smear. If you’re a card collector (which is a pretty safe bet if you’re a card designer), you might have some plastic card protector sleeves—tuck your hand-penciled paper into those.

Art is part of gameplay, and you’ll need your placeholders to be clear, but remember that this is strictly a mock-up, and you don’t want to spend hours perfecting drawings that are going to get replaced.

Immolate Your Darlings

You’ve perhaps heard writers talk about “Murdering their darlings,” which refers to the agony of having to cut a beautiful sentence, scene, or even a sub-plot that you love but doesn’t serve the overall arc of the story. I once twisted five drafts of a novel around a scene I absolutely adored before I realized that it had to go. Ow, it hurt.

The same thing happens in games. There might be a mechanic, a special card, an illustration, a subtle joke…and you love it, but it has to go. It’s worse when you have this nice physical card you made for the mock-up.

Even your game’s theme, which might seem the most essential part of it, must be disposable. On the off chance your game is picked up by a publisher, one of the most common things they want to do is re-theme it, probably for some big franchise. (In case you thought someone set out to create the Go Bots 50th Anniversary Card Game.)

You cannot grow attached before completion. The game is in flux. Consider every part expendable in service to the greater whole.

Look Beyond Your Buddies

Your roommate, your boyfriend, and your neighbor are convenient built-in playtesters, and that’s great for the first round, but they bring baggage. They know you. They share your tastes and perhaps have the same shared canon of played games. They have heard you talk about your mechanics over dinner a dozen times. They know which card is your favorite.

This is going to make them less useful as playtesters. You need to see how the game plays with an unprepared audience. You don’t even know what insider knowledge you have, what jargon you use, because to you it isn’t jargon. It’s part of your everyday speech.

The best way to find playtesters outside your friend group is to look for gaming clubs and game development groups in your area. I recommend meetup.com—you wouldn’t believe how many groups there are out there, from big cities to tiny farming communities.

Let Them Play

So, you’ve self-tested your mechanics, you’ve made sturdy mock-ups, and you’ve gathered a group of playtesters. Here’s one of the biggest challenges of game design:

You have to just let them play.

It will be hard, watching them miss obvious things, ignore the clever hints, misinterpret rules. You’ll want to swoop in and explain. Don’t. I know, but don’t.

Take notes. Write down what they do that’s unexpected. Remember, you won’t be in the room with eventual customers who buy your game. It has to stand on its own, and this is how you find out what it needs.

I strongly recommend giving them written rules; it’s never too early to playtest the instructions.

Of course, if there’s a quick rules question that will help the players enjoy the playtest, give them the answer—but write down that the answer needs to be in the instructions.

After Playtesting

It can feel intimidating, looking at a pile of Things Wrong with Your Game and trying to figure out what to do to fix them. Take a big breath, break it down. Here are some suggestions:

  1. You don’t have to fix everything. Flaws are happy little places for “house rules.”
  2. Look for solutions that resolve multiple errors. Eliminate a problematic mechanic, and all its problems go too. Or maybe it needs a new card type to support it.
  3. Listen to the symptoms your playtesters present to you, but ignore their diagnoses. They’ll say how they’d fix it if it were their game, and it can feel reasonable to follow that advice, but it is YOUR game, and they might be missing what is really important.
  4. Remember what is really important. What inspired you to start. Your core idea. Keep it in mind as you revise.
  5. If possible, have your next round of playtesters be different people, unencumbered by memories of what the game was like before revision.

I hope this helps. Eventually, of course, you have to finish playtesting and make the production version. When you get to that point, remember point number one: You don’t have to fix everything. That’s what your anniversary special edition is for!

Hugo and Nebula nominated author Marie Vibbert’s short fiction has appeared in top magazines like Nature, Analog, and Clarkesworld, and been translated into Czech, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Her debut novel, Galactic Hellcats, was long listed by the British Science Fiction Award, and her work has been called “everything science fiction should be” by the Oxford Culture Review. She also writes poetry, comics, and computer games. By day she is a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio.