Tabletop Day Feedback

We made the conscious decision to launch our Kickstarter campaign on International Tabletop Day, with people in the Tabletop frame of mind, knowing we’d also use that day to visit a few friendly local game shops and get some play testing of Cursed! from excited participants.

We’ve begun to incorporate the excellent feedback we got and thus to refine Cursed! into the game we know it can be.

The biggest trouble at this stage of the process is the end game. When it gets down to two players, what had been a fast-paced slugfest becomes a deliberate and then slow process. We’ve known this but thanks to our play testers at Battleground Games & Hobbies and Knight Moves Board Game Cafe, we have some better ideas on solving it.

The best, although not totally useful, feedback we got was from Joe, one of the players at Battleground, who angrily sneered at his cards one draw, showing the game capable of creating the emotional edge we’d like it to do.

Luckily, the end game was the primary game play criticism we got, and people otherwise enjoyed the game. The other feedback we have now is polish, which is our main development task for the next few months anyway (other than publicizing the Kickstarter). We got lots of suggestions for clearing up the directions and core gameplay mechanics, a few card design suggestions, and more.

I don’t think there’s anyone who doubts the importance of play testing, but it’s always good to be reminded that, while it’s terrifying to out the game you’ve been laboring over into the hands of strangers, that is the whole point of making it.