Playtesting Round 1: Cihan's Zilchmaster

A rousing evening of playtesting. I participated in the testing of Cihan's Trivial Pursuit-inspired game, Zilchmaster. Here are the responses to the questions:

1. Game: Zilchmaster, Designer: Cihan

2. Platform/genre: board game

3. Core mechanic: voting

Unlike Trivial Pursuit, in which the core mechanic is answering trivial questions, Zilchmaster players spend most of their time voting true or false on opponents' answers. This is a welcome shift, as it adds a tactical element to a pretty stale board game.

4. Adjectives describing play experience:

Entertaining/humorous: The game's most enjoyable aspect is in coming up with answers to questions that don't have a definitive answer. Questions such as "Why are you here?" or "Is lameness a disease?" are antithetical to the usual trivia questions and encourage creative responses. The quality of the questions will make or break this game, I think.

5. Game structure:

Zilchmaster has all of the formal elements of a complete board game, including a clear goal (collecting all of the colored wedges) and meaningful play (the way one votes affects the game result). It does require a lusory attitude in that one must accept the rules governing how a wedge is earned, for example. I think, however, that the magic circle it creates is a little unstable because of some unclear rules. I am thinking specifically about the how questions are answered, and how those answers are judged. Because I was trying to play strategically, managing my "true" and "false" tokens as resources and basically ignoring the questions and answers, I was residing in a different magic circle than most of the other players, who were simply using their tokens to express how they truly felt about an answer. It seemed we were playing two different games. The rules may need clarification and/or reworking in order to make the questions and answers more meaningful to the game play.

6. Best developed game element: the tokens

Although there were problems with running out of tokens (which may be dependent on player order), I thought the inclusion of a resource to manage was the best way to modify Trivial Pursuit. Most trivia games do not incorporate a resource besides players' knowledge, and that resource is static. Most party games that involve voting do not require players to manage a limited number of true/false tokens. Having the player answering the question collect all of the tokens used to vote is an interesting mechanic that may have a balancing affect: the more "false" tokens a player collects, the more power he/she has to deny other players wedges.

7. Clarity of the rules: 5 (out of 10)

The main problem with the rule set was that they did not address how to answer questions or vote on answers. My main concern is that the questions and answers ultimately have no effect on the game. It becomes simply a matter of managing tokens to deny players wedges. We could have played the game without asking any questions. The rules need to be more specific about the relationship between the question and answer (for example, does the quality or accuracy of the answer matter?), and the basis of the voting (are we supposed to be passing judgment on the answer? how do we decide which token to use is the question has no right or wrong answer?). I understand that having questions without a definite answer was part of the designer's intention to subvert Trivial Pursuit, but in order to make the game play more meaningful, there needs to be stronger connection among all of the game's activities.

8. Strategy: The main strategy that arose when I played was in management of the tokens. Because the "false" tokens can prevent another player from getting a wedge, I found them to be more valuable. Thus, if I knew two other players were going to vote false, I could vote true and save my false tokens. There is no reason to use a "true" token except to avoid using a false token (why would you ever want to give another player another turn or a wedge?). Of course, sometimes you have vote "true" because you don't have any "false" tokens. I suspect that the value of "false" is too great and the value of "true" too low. There needs to be some instances in which voting "true" might be a positive thing. Could there be some kind of reward for players voting "true" if the majority votes "true"? Or perhaps there could be some kind of penalty for voting against the majority in general. I think the choice of how to vote needs to be more agonizing, to use a gamery word. Incorporating incentives and disincentives to voting with the majority would be a difficult mod to make and would probably take the game further away from Trivial Pursuit. That might be a good thing.

9. Emergent play:

As described above, I was surprised by how mathematical the game became for me. If I had more time, I would have tried to determine if it was possible for anyone to gain a wedge or win the game. As it was, the game proceeded very slowly. No one had a single piece at the end of 3o minutes. A redesign of the board might help the situation. Also, if players could earn a wedge more easily, then gaining or losing a wedge as a penalty or reward would become feasible. I was disappointed at how unimportant the questions and answers were to the game, especially since I found many of the questions and responses very entertaining.

10. Further development:

There's a good game waiting to emerge from Zilchmaster. I thought voting facedown helped, and Cihan came up with the idea of sometimes voting facedown and sometimes voting in turn face up, depending on which space a player lands on. That would add variety and require tactical flexibility. I am looking forward to see the new board and a stronger relationship between the questions/answers and the voting. Here's a random idea: add another kind of token to the game called a point marker. A wedge equals five point markers. In addition to earning a wedge the normal way, you can buy a wedge with five point markers. You earn one point marker if you voted with the majority. You lose one point marker if you voted in the minority. If you need to pay a point but don't have any markers, you must cash in a wedge for five markers. Players are not allowed to discuss how they intend to vote, but there now is a strong incentive to vote alike. The basis for knowing how to vote likely would shift to a legitimate response to the answer, and the players would be required to guess what the "common" response is (true or false). There's still the option to vote against the common response for tactical reasons, if one had a point marker to spare.

Just some food for thought.