C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I just got home from a long day of sitting in the Operations/Registration room at U-Con, not playing games. It has certainly not been a fun con for me, (except when I ignored my responsibilities and went to my game-designing happy place).

So I got home past midnight, needing to go to sleep in order to get up early enough to go back in the morning. In my living room was a group of my friends, playing a roleplaying game. The room was more full than some of the rooms at U-Con.

One of them complained about me not participating in the regular game night in my own home. Apparently she did not know that she could have played the game at the local game con, put on with great blood, sweat, and tears, which I told them about over and over, repeatedly, for months, particularly while they watched me put together the program book. The game master replied to this by asking if I was referring to a game con in Ohio.

Balls.

This is not one of those "stay the course" moments. My apartment is a vital hub of local gaming, to whom U-Con is utterly irrelevant. It is not a good sign for a game convention to be the thing that keeps me away from games. This realization strengthens my resolve not to do any work for U-Con during the con weekend in the future.

I would much rather contribute to U-Con's online scheduling software, a task which engages my mind. In return for my contributions, it will be made open-source.

My playtest of Ingeniators at U-Con had six attendees, despite being a four-player game. There were two others who wanted to participate but had schedule conflicts.

One player, who was there with his son, disliked brainy games and spacial reasoning challenges. You always need to be careful to alleviate the feeling of intimidation that a casual gamer experiences with the typical mid-to-high-heaviness game. If you can reassure them past their initial palpable fear of boredom and humiliation, they will get comfortable. This player took an early lead, which helped a lot. The other players were familiar with games of similar weight.

I sought to answer these questions with a playtest. Did players...

1 ... catch onto the rules quickly?
2 ... develop strategies?
3 ... collaborate to achieve goals?
4 ... give each other advice for the sheer beauty of a clever solution?
5 ... achieve victory before too much time has passed?
6 ... not know who was assured of victory, until victory was near?
7 ... say or demonstrate that they're having fun?

The answers were all yes. As always, the playtesters made helpful suggestions. I'll try some more tweaking in future playtests, but Ingeniators is ready for me to draw illustrations of example plays, paint cover art, and show it to publishers.

U-Con starts tomorrow, setup is tonight! I am in Ann Arbor for the duration.

In addition to serving as Ops and Reg, I made the program book this year. Here it is as a web-ready PDF (1.22MB), and a re-paginated PDF (1.19MB) that you can print, fold, and staple into your own booklet.