Thoughts from a first time self-publisher before the Kickstarter part 8: First Impressions.
Welcome back! 4 weeks to go until the Kickstarter launch (phew!)
Best Part of my week (so far): William at the Hungry Gamer, released his top-5 games of “Covid Convalescence” (the games he played while home sick with Covid and missing a con he normally attends) and Super Snipers made the list! William has a prototype for filming a how-to-play and doing a preview, but he has really enjoyed the game and even connected me with someone he played with who dug it and wants to talk about it on their podcast (Patrick of the Level Up podcast). He even said that his preliminary impression is that this might sit in spot 3 of his top three 2-player games! Check out the video to hear what he had to say!
Most stressful part: While the above was super validating and exciting, I also had a more-or-less opposite experience with two other reviewers I have communicated with this week. For both, the rulebook proved to be a major and frustrating obstacle to learning the game. One of the reviewers will still be covering it but has walked away with some unfavorable impressions of the game (not all bad) and the other has chosen to just pass on doing the review. Major bummer that is hard not to dwell on. It has inspired me to get on top of revising the rulebook though!
The Numbers:
As of Wednesday at 2:30 pm compared to last week at the same time.
The Big Number: Nothing new this week: $22,399
FB page- 135 144 likes (+9)
Public Group- 103 105 (+2)
Private - 67 68 (+1)
Pre-launch- 232 263 (+31)
Email list- 698 743 (+45)
Discord- 59 60 (+1)
TTS- 118 136 (+18) - I wonder what happened here??
YouTube- 19 20 (+1)
Galen’s Games FB page: 157 165 (+8)
Growth is still happening. Really looking to hit 500 on that pre-launch page.
Rulebooks and the player’s initial experience:
I’ve had two experiences recently that relate to the initial contact a player has with my game and I wanted to spend this week’s blog talking a lit bit about that.
As the saying goes, you only get one chance at a good first impression. This is especially true in the land of games, where we are so spoiled for choice that there really is no reason to give a game that you didn’t enjoy a second try.
As you read above, Super Snipers has both managed to make tremendously strong first impressions and a few really poor ones (yes, the example above was of two bad impressions and one good, but overall I’d say I have a 90% enthusiastic response to people’s first experience with Super Snipers). Assuming that you have a good game with solid fundamentals, what are the elements involved in a game making a good first impression?
Does the game deliver on its promise? Does the experience match what the box cover shows?
How quickly are players able to transition from opening the box to playing their first game with the included rulebook?
Do players feel like they were able to make meaningful decisions, formulate a strategy, and understand the impact of their decisions?
Once the game is going, how quickly are players having fun?
There are probably more great questions to add to this list (let me know yours!). But let’s go with this for now. Where my game has stumbled (when it has) has mostly been with #’s 2 and 3. Let me talk a little bit about what happened and then how I can address it at this stage of development.
Situation #1: An excited player sets aside time to play the game, opens up the instructions and suddenly feels like they’ve gotten into something heavier than they expected. The information doesn’t flow and they realize that they need to read the whole instruction book before being able to start playing as opposed to “playing along” as they read. They find mistakes that make them question how well this has been tested.
They then play the game and end up making less than optimal tactical choices because of not fully understanding the game from the rules. They experience feeling like they were behind the whole game without a chance to catch-up.
Situation #2: After playing their first game, several players have reported that they didn’t really use their bonus powers and couldn’t really grasp their utility until after they’d played the game. These players have often suggested that the “learning game” could leave these out and it would have been less overwhelming. This represents a small percentage of the playtests/ playtesters, but is significant enough to consider how to make the onboarding game as successful and fun as possible.
Here we can see a couple of problems:
#1: Meeting Expectations: Super Snipers is a medium-light game. It really is quite simple, once you know what you are doing. One consistent piece of feedback I’ve got from all the recent playtests I’ve run is that it is clear the game has been playtested a lot. There are no “edge cases” , and there is always something you can do to make the best of your situation in the game. But, this feedback is from games that I taught. The player in this example expected what I just wrote. But the rulebook suggested otherwise.
#2: Getting to the game: For both reviewers that were frustrated by the rulebook, part of the issue is that they couldn’t just get playing. I have done well over 100 playtests in TTS and for most I can get the teach, game played, and a full feedback session in under an hour. For players who are a little more AP prone or longer feedback sessions, hour and a half. In real life teach situations, it’s more like 30-40 minutes. And when you know the game? 20-30 minutes. But this was not the reality for these poor folks using my rulebook as their guide.
#3: Feeling in control: If there was one single thing that I am the most proud of with Super Snipers it is the catch-up mechanisms and the way it always delivers close games and that “I just won” or “I just lost” feeling. So you could imagine my disappointment with Situation 1, to hear someone walk away feeling like someone who is behind has no chance of catching up. Now, they played exactly one game, they made some non-optimal decisions during the game compared to their opponent (who may not have understood why their decisions were more optimal), and they still ended 3-2, but with an anti-climactic final round where they felt they didn’t have a chance. With Situation 2, some players were feeling like they were trying to juggle one too many things and ignored using the bonuses.
#4: Having fun quickly: Once they got past the rules, this didn’t seem to be an issue.
What can I do about it?: While I have dumped many, many, many hours into this rulebook, gotten tons of help, and had this blind playtested with success, I will be the first to admit that the rulebook has issues, and is longer and more complicated than it needs to be. It does not relay the truth of the game; that it is fairly simple.
I am re-working the rulebook to more closely reflect the way I do the teach, simplifying the language, consolidating the fully thematic stuff in the back of the book instead of intermixed, and making better use of visuals wherever possible (showing instead of telling). If I do my job right, people should be up and playing 15 minutes from reading the rulebook.
As far as feeling in control goes. I also think the rulebook can do a better job here by relaying the information in a way that better illustrates the choices available and the power of the catch-up mechanisms. Additionally, the final version of the game will come with additional locations that will be much closer to one another, difficulty-wise, and therefore remove the sense of being in an un-winnable match-up in a particular round.
I have also re-organized the rulebook to suggest leaving out bonuses and character powers for the first game. Whenever you run into a section where these things are discussed, there’s red text letting you know you can skip this for your first game. Now, many players won’t need this simplified first game, but my hope is people can self-select the best experience for themselves.
One more thing worth mentioning that ties in expectations and the experience of control. The rulebook may have failed me in one more important way. If the reader of the rulebook gets the impression that the rules are not professional, tested, and fully developed, they will carry over that impression to the game itself. And when something happens in the game that doesn’t feel good (I fell behind and I didn’t feel I had any chance of catching up) they will be more likely to see this as something intrinsic to the game system as opposed to something they could adjust as a player to better navigate the game system. If you are playing a highly regarded Stonemaier game and you experience falling behind and not figuring out how to catch up, you will probably at least entertain the idea that you didn’t play optimally before deciding that the game is broken. Unfortunately, Galen’s Games won’t get that same benefit of the doubt without some social proof that I know what I am doing.
Thanks so much for reading. If you want to see what the latest rulebook looks like, I would love to get your feedback! Super Snipers Prototype Rules
As always, leave a comment and let me know what else you’d like to hear about!
