The stages of playtesting and where to find your playtesters

I have yet to meet a designer who said “I have all the play testers I need, thanks.” Sure, the first few rounds of testing are easy enough to accomplish with your friend circle, family, designers group, etc. but what do you do once everyone you know already has a baseline for your game? Getting those fresh faces to the table for some new impressions, ideas, and notes can be a huge hurdle.

There are a few different stages of playtesting that will require different kinds of playtesters. You might use anyone at any stage, really, but in some cases, it pays to plan. If you have super experienced players or designers as acquaintances, you may not want to constantly bombard them with requests but rather bring them in at strategic times to get the most from their wealth of wisdom.

Below is a general outline of the stages of playtesting your board game and some ideas for how to find the right people to playtest, though it will look a bit different for everyone depending on your game and your network.

1. Quick playtesting

Quick playtesting is best defined by the mantra “Fail faster!” In a quick test, you’ll test one or two mechanisms at a time, just bits of the game, stopping, restarting, beginning in the middle as you rapidly iterate on what you, moments ago, thought was a pretty solid idea. But hey, this whole process is about learning. You don’t have all the answers or you wouldn’t need playtesters at all.

Family

You want to gather people who know what they’re getting into and/or are willing to be patient with you while you figure things out. Family is great for this because you can badger them as much as you need to and they still have to love you. This kind of playtesting is the most for you as a designer and the least for your testers as players. Your testers will mostly function as AI at this point. Even if your family members don’t play many games, you can program them to follow the rules and they can do their best to keep up with the iterations. There will be feedback involved of course, but you will often be able to see if a change is working or not pretty quickly.

Friends

At this stage I would selectively choose a couple of close friends who know at least a bit about board games to help you sort through the influx of thoughts and theories that come from those early brainstorming sessions. They can keep you on theme, help you kill your darlings as the saying goes, and tell you what kind of fun the game elicits for them.

2. Guided playtesting

Guided playtests are where you get to see everything come together, which might work exactly how you expect or you might discover you’ve built a different thing than you set out to. Gather a group of people, teach them the game, watch it play out and see what kind of fun they find in it. Try not to interfere too much and NEVER make game choices for your testers. Your AI players have become sentient and you have to hope you’ve given them all the tools they need to succeed (and not destroy humanity). If you haven’t, there’s more developing to be done!

Pretty much anyone could be a good candidate for a guided playtest. If you’re testing with people who helped with quick tests, they’ll probably be excited to see it all the pieces fit together. When you test with new folks, you’ll get valuable new first impressions. So, in addition to playing your game with the people who helped in earlier stages, try reaching out to:

Other board game designers

You don’t need to come out of this stage with a fully polished diamond but if you go into stress testing with an unfinished game, you might be in trouble, so this is a great time to bring in your heavy-hitter designer friends. They can poke holes, tell you what’s working well, and call you on making decisions about things you’ve been putting off or haven’t fully considered.

If you live in a city, there’s a good chance a group of designers is already meeting on a weekly or monthly basis to test or show off their designs. Try searching for a “Game Jam” event or a Game Designer’s group on Facebook, Discord, Meetup, or Aftergame. If there doesn’t seem to be one in your area, start one! Surely you’re not the only one in an entire city that wants this to exist!

Pro tip: Look for a game jam or other meeting of local designers. Having everyone in the same place for the same reason takes the pressure off of your game to be perfect because everyone is there to work stuff out.

Players in your area

Much like with the designers above, there are almost certainly multiple groups of gamers meeting in your area. Each group probably has a slightly different focus. Reach out to the admins to see if they think your game would appeal to their group. The admins may also be able to put you in touch with a few group members who might be interested if the group isn’t a good fit (like, if you’ve made a real-time party game but the group normally plays three-hour euros).

Players not in your area

You can put your game on Tabletop Simulator (TTS) and conduct playtests with anyone from anywhere at anytime! It may seem daunting to make a digital copy of your game and make it function but it could be very worthwhile for you, especially if you’re struggling to find players in your vicinity. It doesn’t even have to be a fully realized version of your game. Much like making a paper prototype, you can use the components available in TTS to make a digital facsimile if you have yet to level up your tech skill.

Aftergame

There are loads of people in your area who would be interested in playtesting a game if they knew how to find someone who was looking to have their game playtested. There are also a lot of people who don’t know that playtesting is a thing they could do but are very excited to get involved when they find out it’s a possibility.

You could plan a couple of playtests in your area to find the folks who are outside the inner circles.

3. Extreme playtesting

By this point, you should at least have a solid game with the rules written down. This is where you invite all the most semantic, hard-core, experienced players you can find to try to break your game by going further than you thought possible with every imaginable strategy. This stage will likely take an amount of time proportionate to the length and complexity of your game. If you’ve made a quick, light party game, for example, you may not need to spend as much time here as someone who’s making a heavy euro with special roles and player abilities.

Players who are willing to play your game many times are the water that drips through any cracks you’ve got left. Cherish them as you resent them for tearing apart your incredibly hard work. You need to find people who can tell you that something isn’t working or doesn’t feel good to the player and huge bonus if they have some theories about why that is. If you are not already acquainted with people who can fill this role for you, it can be hard to find them.

Local game groups

Again, there’s likely an organised group near you with some people who would love the opportunity to dig into a game in such depth. Intense, repeated testing is definitely not universally appealing, but you’ll probably have some luck approaching the folks who gravitate towards the heavier games at the game nights or who get into debates about game theory.

Look online

Ask in relevant Facebook, Meetup, BGG, and Discord groups if anyone is interested in playtesting your game and if they’re not local, well, good thing you already set your game up on Tabletop Simulator! While it can be cumbersome to test digitally, it’s a better alternative than very little or no testing.

Aftergame

If you’re planning playtests through Aftergame, you can put notes in the description of a planned playtest to make it clear that you’re conducting a specific kind of test and looking for a particular type of player.

4. Blind playtesting

By now, you should be pretty confident that you’ve got a board game that can be played and enjoyed by anyone who likes the type of fun your game offers. The most important thing that will come from this stage of playtesting is your refined, edited, polished rulebook. There will still be some tweaking, of course, but it’s unlikely at this late stage in the game that you’ll do any major overhauling. (I mean, always stay open-minded, I’m just saying it’s less likely.) In a blind playtest, you give people the game and the rules and let them play. You will probably be nearby taking copious notes and biting your tongue as they figure out your board game. Try to only jump in if you need to real-time correct the rulebook because you realize you’ve forgotten an important detail or have worded something ambiguously, and even then, it may be interesting to live in the confusion and see what comes of it.

This stage should be easier to find playtesters for because your average (board gaming) Joe is your target demographic. No bells (special skills) or whistles (particular personality traits) required. If the game appeals to them as a player, they’re perfect. This does mean that you need a steady source of new players who have to learn the game from your rulebook, which is the tricky part.

Your friendly local game store (FLGS)

Small business owners often have community support built into their DNA. It’s always worth asking if they can help in some way. Depending on the kind of place it is, they might be able to give you table space for playtests, put a call out to their network to help you find players, connect you with regulars they think would be interested, sit down and play through it themselves, let you leave a copy with a feedback form to be played at any time, or, at the very least, let you put up a notice that they can point their customers toward.

Aftergame

You get to plan a playtest and invite players to try something unpublished but whole. You might plan a few playtests in a row so you only have to travel and set up once, or you might do them one at a time to give yourself time to implement changes and reprint the rules between tests.

Board game convention or other large tabletop gaming event

If you have the opportunity, getting a table or time slot at a large board game event to playtest your game is a great way to get it in front of a LOT of new players. You could do this at any stage, but you’ll probably earn more buzz for your game the closer it is to a finished product.

We’ve already covered how to demo your game at a convention and most of the advice also applies to playtesting.

• The point I’d add is that you want to make sure people understand what stage of testing you’re in. If they sit down expecting to play a mostly finished game but you’re still working with a paper prototype, they may leave disappointed for reasons that have nothing to do with the content of your game.
• The point I’d take away is that you probably don’t want to put much time and money into printed and promo materials, especially if you’re not at the stage of having an artistic through line. It’s more important right now to get feedback so you can make sure you have a game rather than hyping up an idea that might look very different by the end. The thing that’s most worth doing is having either a sign-up sheet or a QR code so people can join your mailing list and get updates as your game develops.

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With these ideas on how to find your players, you should be able to start growing a network around your design efforts. Learn from other designers and players, test every part of your game as much as you can, and thank your lucky stars you get to do something as cool as designing board games! Good luck!

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