Playground City's First Full Playtest - It's Fun!

Recently three very dedicated playtesters braved the Montreal snow with me for the first full gameplay test of Playground City. Turns out, the game is fun!

We played Connect 4, the first game mode in the app. This game is just like traditional Connect 4, except each square (circle?) is an entire neighbourhood, and you claim a neighbourhood by going there and doing a silly challenge.

In this post I’m going to explain what we tested, what we found out, and how we’re going to make the game better.

Too Many Insta-win Challenges

In our game, Red team (my team) leapt out of the gate by claiming 3 neighbourhoods in a row before Blue got any.

This was mostly because we started with three really quick challenges - Write an Ode to the Other Team, Create a Sign Haiku, and Go Somewhere Nice.

These challenges aren’t all easy, but if you do good, or get lucky, they can be really fast.

This is a super important lesson for challenge design. If too many challenges can be completed in less than a minute, a team can potentially swipe a victory before the other team has a chance to react.

I’m going to update the challenges so there are more with an unavoidable time commitment. This has the added bonus of adding more downtime to the game. Challenges are meant to be fun, and if they take a little longer, players don’t feel as stressed out about logistics and strategy.

Connect Four is a fast game!

I scheduled 3 hours for this test, and I worried the game might take longer. This game, though, took only 1 hour and 45 minutes. That’s quite fast even for a regular board game, let alone one where you travel across the entire city!

Now, it didn’t have to be so quick. We had a nail-biter ending, where Red team rushed across town to block Blue from finishing a line. The Blue team barely got there first, but if Red had succeeded, the game could easily have gone for another hour.

The thing is, nobody was sad about the early finish! It was a thrilling game end, and everyone felt the victory was earned by the strategic decisions of both teams, even if it could easily have gone the other way. So, you can have a satisfying game of Connect 4 in under 2 hours.

This really cemented the decision to have Connect 4 be the first/default game mode. I’m very confident other modes will take longer to play, some potentially all day.

Testimonials

It made me think strategically of transportation times … I spent all day doing fun little tasks in the snow and it was fun.

Leo

I honestly expected that to be way more messy but for a first proper play test it went really smoothly!

Tristan

Full disclosure, this first playtest was with close friends and people who’ve contributed to the game, so they’re not unbiased. However they also love to mock me and my choices, so it probably balances out.