Capstone Project: Play testing 4 players

This round of playtesting explored whether or not my game was functional for 4 players with the current amount of cards that I have designed. I ran through two playtests on this day and gathered some really useful feedback that will allow me to improve not just the visuals of the game but also how the game plays.

Feedback -

Firstly, what went well?:

Asking my play testers what they liked best I gathered that most players found the game fun, engaging and suitably silly. Some of the players had never really played a card game before and they said it was a very easy game to pick up and the competitive nature of it made it very enjoyable. On top of this, the replayability of the game was great, this was something I was worried about with the amount of cards that I had.

What could be improved?:

Below I will list all the changes I gathered, then separate the ones I am choosing to implement.

- Make employee cards anonymous, adds an extra level of gambling to the game

- Kidnap employee card

- Events during the week like a sale or weather event to impact players, makes the game more interesting

- More ways to gain back money and energy

-Maybe employees could have traits assigned to them to incentivise players to keep their employees at the end of the week instead of letting them go for their money back

- More ways to rob people, this adds to the competitive nature of the game.

- Alternatively, trading mechanics for furniture cards?

- Swap out action cards being bought for money and instead have them be bought for energy to make the energy resource more valuable

- Make advertising a one time purchase

Implementing Feedback-

Reviewing this feedback, I agree that there should be more ways to gain back money and energy, to fix this issue i have amended the rules to return 1 energy and 1 money at the end of every day. On top of this, I have thrown in 2 new action cards that reward extra money and energy.

I have also increased the total action cards [now bought with 2 energy tokens] to 16, see below for the new actions.

Advertising is indeed now a one time purchase to make it less overpowered and employee cards have all been assigned a cave attribute stat. 

I chose not to have the employees be randomized as i think that would conflict with the new cave attribute addition, i think the action cards and client cards being randomized and hidden adds sufficient suspense and "gambling" elements to the game. Hotel Bunga is more resource management focused so i felt keeping this mechanic as it is fits better with that genre.

As you can see below, I have indeed given more opportunities to steal items from other players, as this was a really fun mechanic that was used a lot in gameplay. I am very glad the action cards saw so much use, I was debating on removing them as in my previous playtests my players did not use them at all, so it was nice to see them being used. I think removing them would have severely impacted the competitive and engaging element of Hotel Bunga so it was very useful to run this playtest.

Updated Action card list-

x2 Delivery 

x2 Me Share

x2 Me Take

x1 Me think?

x1 Free Meal?

x1 Hairy coming!!!

x1 Midnight "borrowing"

x1 Kind donation

x1 Goodnight!

x1 Hungry fish

x1 Visit Market

With the total action cards now amounting to 16, I think drawing them in a cave painting style will help me get them all illustrated much quicker than sticking to the art style used everywhere else in the game. I think it will still keep with the overall theme of Hotel Bunga and also add an extra bit of comedic value to the visual style of the game.

Trello-

This playtest has allowed me to really refine the mechanics of my game and I strongly feel that I am close to having a final version, although i now have a few more assets to design, I don't think this is an impossible addition to my workload. What was also shown to me with the feedback I got is that Hotel Bunga could definitely be expanded in the future, with opportunities for more employees, complex mechanics and other gameplay additions. This is great as i can always return to this at some point in the future to continue to develop it. My goals for the next week is to finalize all 16 furniture cards so that I can move onto designing the remaining 5 employees. I feel this will be the most time consuming part of the process so once I have them completed the 16 action cards and 4 player boards will be much quicker to design. 

As a slight note so that I do not forget, I have decided to design the player boards with dry erase elements as i think that will cut down on the amount of tokens I need, making it less confusing for younger players. I think it also adds an extra level of originality to my product so this seems like the best decision for the board design. I will come back to this in a later post when I discuss how I will be producing the physical assets.