@|<+;o(\) Games Blog: I Bet You Can't

Not to long ago we had a high-resolution playtest of "I Bet You Can't" using a printed board, spinner, tokens, and cards we had made at The Game Crafter. Its a little early in the process to get things printed, but this is a pretty simple game overall and we wanted to get a playtest in where we had a chance to test out the board and spinner design. We really feel that readability and color are important to the playability and fun-factor.

Low Res Spinner and Prototype Cards

Ditto for the cards, the Aktion Cards have full descriptions of each challenge type so we needed to test how readable they were with the graphics and at the final font size. So while we are still working on balancing the spinner and aren't quite sure about all of the Aktion Cards, it was nominal to get this printed and give us something we can playtest and demo without fiddling with paper cards and unmarked plastic poker chips.

The High-Resolution Prototype for I Bet You Can't

The game is pretty simple, players are split into two teams and each takes a turn trying to complete a charade-like challenge after two rounds of betting using chips. In this playtest we let the team learn the game using our printed instructions and brief introduction from us. Some of these players had some exposure to the game already as they were part of our first playtests. Some had never seen the game before. We let them play and work out the rules from there. Everything went really smooth, the only clarifications were really deficiencies in our instructions or things missing from cards. The game played well and was pretty easy to pick up. Both of these are huge goals for us, as the focus is a fun, pick up and play party game you can play with everybody!

#gamenight #gametesting #ibetyoucant

A photo posted by @|<+;0(\) Games (@aktiongames) on Apr 17, 2016 at 6:09am PDT

There are a few interesting take aways from this playtest and few unexpected things.

Swapping the draw/spin sequence works much better. The game was more intense and more than a few games shifted on a single clutch play. Its something psychological, knowing the aktion card item is critical to determining the right bet for the challenge. The other way around just is not as fun.
The spinner needs re-weighting. Choice and Twist don't come up often enough. Twist especially.
Gesture is considered the most difficult category and is used as a weapon when Choice comes up, which is cool. Even cooler, sometimes this backfires.
There are a few twist cards that could use better or more complete explanations.
We only found one suspect Aktion Card! Yeah! We got through about 25 of the 100 cards. We are hoping to have 200 in the game box. This is probably the toughest part of making this game.
Our chip distribution is all wrong still. This time we had 1s, 5s, 10s. It should probably just be 5s and 10s.
The betting areas and ante track really help keep things moving and let the players stay organized during the betting phase effortlessly.
I think we need to either make the ante track have some gradient of color or change the ante token color to green. The black token on the black track was hard to see.

The playtest was a huge success. The game is super fun, lots of anxiety and laughter, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, and more important: the teams wanted to play again! I Bet You Can't is shaping up to be a really fun game and I'm hoping we can bring it Kickstarter by early next year.

Any tips for the next playtest? Are you in the Orlando, FL area and interested in being part of a future playtest? Let us know in the comments!

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Monday, May 2, 2016

I Bet You Can't - the latest playtest

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