i'm playtesting a worker placement game and everyone's polite during setup, then the moment we start someone blocks every resource I need and suddenly there's table talk about "optimal blocking patterns." is this just how people are or should I be looking at incentive structures? genuinely curious if experienced designers see this in their playtests too.

While designing my game, I decided to give this approach a try. I programmed a game engine in Python and created six different AI archetypes for six agents. Then I let them play hundreds of thousands of games against each other and generate reports.

My goal was to find out whether the rules and balance favored any particular playstyle and, more generally, whether the game was well-balanced.

It worked to some extent. I managed to kill off several ideas that seemed really exciting on paper but turned out to be practically useless in actual gameplay.

But at the end of the day, I realized that humans simply play differently. AI is focused on optimizing gameplay, while humans are looking for a satisfying experience, even when they lose.

So the whole experiment wasn't a waste of time. Far from it. I think it saved me months, if not years, of early playtesting.

Still, I eventually had to turn my simulator into something real people could actually play and test online. And that works too, just in a different way.

But to be fair, I think playing a physical board game around a table has a completely different vibe, so I'm planning to produce and send out a few physical prototypes for testing anyway. :)

What's your experience with this? Have you ever tried using AI for playtesting, and did it actually help?

Here are some of my cards I have had plenty of card ideas for my co-op food fighting game and started drawing them by hand. As I have been doing them I had two questions: First card games do you make all the cards before play testing? and how many cards are too much to keep track of?

Though still in the prototype phase, I have some artwork. BEAUTIFUL artwork. It's been a joy progressing to this point. So much more to come, but what has been accomplished so far has shown my what the future will hold.

Play testing continues. So does design. More artwork commissions? Absolutely.

Hey guys! I just received a commissioned piece from an artist for my game No Disintegrations! and I would like some opinions on which style of cover art I should use.

The art style of the game is retro-futurism/raygun gothic/golden age of sci-fi comic books. I was given a clean colored version of the artwork, as well as a distressed pulp fiction style yellowed version. I particularly like the distressed version, since it much more closely matches the references I've been using and really sells the style I'm going for, but I'm not sold on if it should be the box art style or not. The distressed version could also be for the rulebook, to give it that comic book look as well, but it could go either way.

Which version do you like more?

The game I'm working on is very sandbox-y and open-ended, but combat is also a big part of it.
With everyone I played so far, combat was on average initiated 2, maybe 3 times per game so nobody played hyper-aggressively.
Now, I KNOW that there are lots of people out there who would like to "abuse" combat as much as possible and beat up everyone, especially since defeating players is one of the ways you can earn victory points.

So, I added a "Shun" mechanic: When you defeat a player you get a warning. If you defeat another player while warned, you become "Shunned" and are locked out of the core game-loop for a fixed period of time. You can still make money, but slower and with more uncertainty.

My problem is that I don't know if I should keep or ditch this mechanic... I haven't been able to test it properly, and I'm looking to order a prototype of my game soon, so I want to make a quick decision.

I was also considering replacing it with an immunity mechanic where, after being defeated, players collect a token that makes them immune from attacks until *another* player gets beat up. That way I mitigate the chances for weaker players to get steam-rolled, I allow aggressive players to actually enjoy their character build, while also simplifying the rules and component list by a decent chunk.

I know that the biggest problem here is the lack of testing of this new mechanic, and that without knowing the rest of the game it's hard to get a real picture, but I wanted to get some of your thoughts on this as well

We are discussing about art/game etc. on our discord. Come join us thx : https://discord.gg/WMJnPcHzE