Scythe, Wingspan, no one to extensively playtest with

 

Went over again last Friday and played another game of Scythe. I came in second again. It was another six player game, yet it still went by fairly quickly. maybe because everyone was familiar with it and knew what they were doing. 

My goal is to improve to the point that come Christmas or late November I'll be able to beat Alex at a game of Scythe. I cannot remember for the life of me if the Scythe my family owns still only has the tiny board or if they got the board piece that expands it into the giant board. If not, then the next Scythe thing they should get is the giant board addition. It's only $12 on Amazon and way worth it.

My cousin Alicia Marr sent me this article the other day: How Wingspan became a Surprise Blockbuster. It's an awesome article and got me to introspect. In the article it talks about how the designer, Hargrave, spent four years working on it and playtesting it every week. A quote from the article states, "The numbers work in Wingspan. What seems at the beginning like a set of coincidences or accidents reveal themselves by game's end as a cleverly designed system that ensures everyone finds a way to score points."

And therein lies my feelings of hopelessness. How am I ever going to get a game published, or be the very best it can be, if I can't playtest it? I want my games to be the very very best they can be. Wingspan took hundreds of iterations to be where it is now. Look at this prototype for Scythe: 

How many different prototype stages did that game go through? Hundreds and hundreds, probably. Getting the different land masses to produce the right thing and having the different factions and boards balanced--it probably took an entire army working on it to get everything right.

And I have nothing.

I have game ideas, sure. And I can make prototypes, sure. But that's where it hits the wall. That's all I can do. Some games, such as We Three Kings and Newlands, I playtested with myself dozens of times, being all the players and going around the table. But what about games where there's secret information? 

What about games that have multiple paths to victory (the kind of game I love and want to make)? Jamey Stegmaier says everyone plays slightly differently, and if I only play games with myself, I'm only getting one perspective. When I made Somerset I made the magic system but never really used it. It was only when I played with other players that they used the magic system and cast spells and did really well that I thought it could be a viable strategy.

*Sigh* If I seem really down in this post, it's because I don't know what to do. There is one hope, and that's if there's a group in Mesa that gets together to playtest games, I could hopefully join in and hopefully do something more. There is that guy Jay from a few weeks ago. I now know his actual last name now (I was wrong in my other post) and so I guess my next steps are contacting him and going from there.

Otherwise, I'm stuck being unable to playtest in a world where playtesting is the single most important thing to creating a great game.