Prototype Review

For the last 2 weeks I had my game “Animal Rescue” played tested. The first week I brought in a really rough prototype of the game, really looking for help on the rules. The game is made for 2-4 players and it was first played with 3. The guys helped me figure out more issues that could happen with 3 people. Like do we really need the 4^th animal on the opposite side of the board or was it okay with 3.? We did become successful at playing the rough prototype, making up extra rules as we went along. This also lead me to think of extra rules and restrictions about the board setup and how characters can move. After the first play test, I took the game and all my notes home and fixed everything we talked about. The 2^nd week we play tested the game with 4 people. It became a little more interesting adding an extra person. I also added more animals to make the game go longer, rules so you cannot jump over another character, and a restriction on one spot on the board. That spot is the direct middle square between the animals where the “tree” is located. No one can use that spot or jump over the tree to get to the animal on the other side, you must go around. The game was going well until some terminology struck with the chance card. I am not really good at writing down what I really mean, so I did have to ask everyone what the statement should really say. Because what something means to me, doesn’t mean to someone else. Also, the question kept up with the “do we really need 5 game pieces each”. I thought yes, because if it is a 2-player game with 8 animals, you don’t want a tie. But no, because if it is a 4-player game with 8 animals, we all really only played 2 or 3 characters at once. So maybe for a 4-player game, everyone could have 3 characters to play with 8 animals to rescue. If it’s a 3-player game there would be 3 characters and 6 animals to rescue. Then for a 2-player game you would have all 5 characters with 8 animals. Also, I originally planned for the game to have a 6-sided dice, then I dropped it to a 4-sided. This actually worked out better but I think maybe a spinner would be best. Also, for the chance card, instead of having a deck of cards to pick up from, I changed to an 8-sided dice and one card with 8 chance options. Eventually I would like to have my own characters instead of the Lego people, unless Lego wants to buy my game idea. I also still need to find a way so that the characters can carry their animal. I made the place-mat cards as a temporary thing but no one used it and when they saved their animal they just took it off the board and placed it behind their character. So, I could extend the board to have a place holder for the animals. The final big question everyone was asking was if you could place your character in someone else’s ‘home’ so that they couldn’t make it home with their animal. I wanted to say yes, because I never thought about that happening, but I wanted to say no because it’s not your characters ‘home’, it’s someone else’s. There are still so many questions and problems to solve, making this game. Eventually it could be a real game.