Play testing is one of the least understood, and most bungled aspect of war gaming. Almost all of the major, glossy, commercially printed sets today have glaring errors because they have not been play tested well – if at all. The reason is simple, few people really know how to play test, and fewer still are good testers.

Play testing IS NOT simply running a lot of games. That’s probably the worst way to play test and it will make a good set of rules bad, and a bad set of rules worse. The reason is that in that situation, games become like court precedents and rules are added on top of rules to “remedy” the injustice, but as a rule is already in ‘the book’ it could not be taken out because one player or the other would ‘lose’ his advantage, and therefore it had to be ‘fixed.’

The rules then grow exponentially until everyone says, “THEY’RE REALLY GREAT!” which means they’re all heartily sick of them and want to move onto something else, and they’ll tell you anything you want to hear just to accomplish this.

Play testing is a process with rules all its own, and it is A LOT OF WORK. More than that—it is a lot of work that is frustrating, boring, repetitive, and –almost no fun at all.

I’m already assuming you have a set of rules you’ve designed and that “THEY’RE REALLY GREAT!” and this is before you’ve even play tested them. Always keep in mind that you are like any proud mother, who having produced this little darling, believe him to be the best, most beautiful, most wonderful baby ever born. In fact, this Messiah you’ve created is going to save all war gamers from the mistakes and sins of other game creators.

You Need Help

You can’t do this yourself—remember you love these rules and can’t view them rationally. If you try to do it yourself, you’ll subconsciously smooth over al the rough spots and not go where you’ll run into trouble. Play testers will inject the real world into the process, (making you very miserable in the process).

A Play tester is a person who can play the game without being a player. That is, he can distance himself from personal involvement with the game such that he can force situations, take directions from you, and carry on, while jumping back and forth between trying to win, studying the rules, and trying to lose, with blinding rapidity. He also has to be workaholic and a prolific writer. A Play tester who is trying to win the game is not a fair tester, and is doing you more harm than good. Remember, the tester is testing out the rules and the structures of how the game goes and flows. The tester, as they say in industrial QC, testing a sample of failure.

A good tester is a person who looks at a situation and say, “OK, I see my infantry is in square and the enemy’s cavalry is within charge range. My common-sense reading of the rules says that if cavalry charge me, he’ll be toasted and that is the actual results on the field. Therefore, I’ll put my infantry in extended skirmish order and have them field-strip their muskets to see if not only are good tactics rewarded, but bad tactics punished!” Few “gamers” want to experience such gratuitous butchery.

Fix It Now

One of the almost universal mantra is when an obvious (or not so obvious) flaw is revealed, the testers say “Ok, we’ll keep it that way for this game, but change it in the next.” Wrong! Play testing time is too valuable to waste. Change it right now and bash on. Back up, change it, and bash on again. If you discover it doesn’t work, toss it out! There can be no continuity or justice here, only a brutal mania to shake the rules to death. In Play testing, you can change things midstream to test the rules, not make a balanced game for your testers.

English Please

All players must understand rules. This means, if you have to stop the play and launch into a complex disquisition into the logic behind a rule, do so and make sure each Play tester knows why he is doing what he is doing. If the rule is vague, ambiguous, or just plain illogical, change it.

Test Each Section

Do not simply give the rulebook to your Play tester and start a game. Decide carefully which rules will be used for each session of testing. This means stripping them down to the barest essentials. For example, the first few times you run a play test, regardless of period, it is probably better to have simple infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and forget about all the wonderful and exotic troupe types you have. What you want to test the first few times through is:

Sequence of action
Relative troop relationships
Unwritten factors

The first two are fairly self-explanatory. The third is the most important (and least considered). Of the unwritten factors, the most important are comfort, convenience, and time. Get yourself a stopwatch and, like a good IE (Industrial Engineer), make a study of how long it takes your players to do things. This means not only figuring out how long a turn takes, but also what they are doing in each turn and how long they take to do it.

This means breaking down the time of actions such as moving troops, rolling dice, and talking tactics, which are good and ADD to the value of the game, and other things like looking up the rule, fidgeting with troops, counting and calculating, and arguing about a rules, which are bad and must be eliminated completely. Conform and conveniences are things like:

Do the rules require a table so huge that the gamers can’t reach the troops in the center?

Is the record keeping so complex that players have to juggle a lot of forms and reference or have to constantly fiddle with the stands and troops?

Another key factor is to watch their eyes.

Are they looking at the troops?
Are they looking at each other?
Are they looking for dice?
Are they looking at the rules?
Are they looking at your paint job?
Are they looking at you books?
Are they looking for the door?

The first two are good, the last bad, and the final one is a killer!

Pass the Baton

Another thing to do is after a few times through, assign the role of GM to another player and join the game yourself. You may know the rules well, and you can do the explaining well, but remember you’re going to want people who DON’T know the rules to be able to pick up your rulebook and do their own gaming. It’s also a good indication of how the clearest, most plainspoken rule can be re-interpreted. This is food not for argument, but to show you where you might have to do some rewriting.

Patches:

At this stage4 you will come to the hardest part of all. Some parts of your rules will be good and some things will be bad. Some of the bad things you can fix with a few modifications. If you can do this – fine! If you can’t, you’re going to get into make more and more complex ‘patches’ to ‘fix’ the rules and eventually, you will wind up with this huge monstrosity. Ever wonder why they’re so many “home-built” systems out there, which fixes the problems’ with this or that commercial set? Remember my harsh opinion on commercial sets? Now you know why! When you’re at this point – you’re there.

For you, however, it’s time to simply tear it up and start with a new sheet of paper and a new idea for the basic module or rule you are having problems with. Here we come back to the Play testers who have to be eager and forthcoming with feedback. Note, I said, feedback. Once again a Play tester who simply complains is no play tester – he’s another lazy, worthless, ungrateful bitchin’ gamer.

And now the REAL hard part! Yourself. Can you take the heat? Can you take the feedback? Or will you resist being told that contrary to what you think; your rules are not REALLY GREAT.

I once volunteered to help a guy who was designing a set of rules for fantasy/historical miniatures, and basically was a “Warhammer” wanna-be. He wanted me to critically review the background information (political information, cultural items, social and economic modules) for the game, which was set in the Renaissance era (where I have my PhD.) Each time I sent him a critique, not just pointing out mistakes, gaffes, and logical inconsistencies, (including such things as wondering where a Mongol-like Horse Empire was going to get the horses when it lived in a super-Himalayan type environment) but had suggestions on how to cure it or get over it, or even a completely rewritten copy, I received a long, long, detailed argument over each point and how it was “really good the way it was—and wouldn’t cause a problem at all—and that I didn’t really understand what he was trying to do—and that I really didn’t understand the period well—Or that I should go back and re-read Burckhardt because I really didn’t understand him—“Needless to say, I soon simply dropped out. If you want to make a good product, you have to make sure the dog will each the dog food. Consider this—who’s your better friend, the guy who tells you in private that you have bad breath, or the guy who acts like your friend, but says nothing, and let’s you make a bad impression on others?

One of the absolutely worst games ever put out was “Birthright” by a famous FRP company. A simple sentence will serve to disclose why it was just God-awful. The basic premise was that each person was a king or sovereign or high noble, and they went off adventuring, killing dragons, slaying enemies, mugging monsters and looting dungeons. Of course, how they were going to do that and still run their countries, engage in the politics and diplomacy, trade and dealing with other high political issues, was a good question. Besides that, the game materials were written in a terrible argot of faux-15th century English, interspersed with words like socio-economic, Interface, Bourgeoisie, Download, Infrastructure, & On-Line. And this was in the supposed ‘histories’ written by the contemporaries of the player sovereigns.

Testing one thing at a time is also extremely important. If you built a car, you wouldn’t just hop in and turn on the key. You’d test each system as you added it, bench testing it, and then testing it in situ, and then moving on. Same with a computer program. You modularize it and run test data through to see if it works in all paths. Same with a set of rules. After you get past the basics you might test the effect of different types of cavalry, different types of infantry, etc. Once you get past that, and you want to get into things like advanced firing considerations, you take out all the special troop types and put in the different firing types and see what they do, or it the two are inextricably linked you try out one different troop type per game, and here again you need players who will test that troop type many, many times, perhaps even bringing it back if eliminated. Once done, you take out the stuff you just tested and go on to the next part.

You remember when I told you about the stopwatch? Here’s another piece of equipment you’ll need—a scale. Well, kind of--. You have to make for yourself very stringent restrictions on the total package. My own standard is simple. Single-spaced, 12 pt Times Roman Bold--10 pages. Anything smaller, more crammed, or larger than the 10 pages, get out the red pencil and the scissors! If you can’t fit all the rules you need to run a battle in 10 and be a fast enjoyable game, your rules are way too complex and you’ll NEVER be able to run them successfully at a CON where you have a lot of gamers who will not know them.

If not at a CON, few other new gamers, unless they are going to make your rules a ‘vocation’ will be able to either. This ‘weight’ factor, as it were, is also important for your play testing. Take a look at your rules when you begin. Generally, you can figure you’ll need at least two play test ‘meetings’ and two months of work time PER PAGE! So, if you’ve got a 65-page rulebook—plan on publishing it posthumously!

Conventions and Play tests—great together! Once you have all the play testing done at your home or with your group, and they say it’s fine, and have played a few real games with it, if it works well, there is no better place to REALLY test them out than at a convention, BUT ONLY IF YOU’VE USED THE ABOVE METHOD RELIGIOUSLY.

Treat the con games like play tests in the sense of stripping down the rules to the barebones stuff and ad a few bells and whistles that you know work well. Putting this on at a CON will be like ‘testing to destruction’ in industrial quality control. You will have a rack of gamers completely unaffected by your own, and your play testers emotional attachment, and they will be ignorant of the rules, difficult, and probably think they know more than you. They will be crude, opinionated, greedy, ungrateful, and uncaring. If your rules survive them, you probably have a pretty good thing there, and your lil’ Darling might be in line for the Ringmaster of High-Wire Diva rather than the freak-show!