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Blind playtested a prototype and the 10 year old girl at the table spotted the broken card in 4 minutes
I brought my unplaytested deck builder to a local game cafe in Portland last Tuesday, feeling pretty good after 6 months of solo testing. A family sat down and the kid immediately asked if she could shuffle - which I should have taken as a red flag, honestly. She drew a combo that let her cycle through 14 cards per turn while everyone else was stuck at 3 actions. I sat there watching my hour long game design get dismantled in under 20 minutes by a child who was just reading the words on the cards. Learned a hard lesson about how much fresh eyes can reveal that your own brain just skips over after staring at the same text for months. Has anyone else had a playtester find a glaring balance issue that you completely missed during development?
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markhall20d ago
Kid on a mission. She didn't even have to think about it, just saw the words and knew. That's the thing about fresh eyes, they don't have your brain's blind spots. Six months of you staring at those cards and you probably memorized the combo as "working" instead of "broken." Kids are brutal that way, they read the card exactly as written without any of your designer context getting in the way. Hopefully you fixed the combo and brought it back for round two.
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kim19120d agoMost Upvoted
Man, that's the TRUTH right there! @markhall, you hit the nail on the head about fresh eyes catching stuff we've just memorized as "fine." I've been there myself, staring at a messed up part on a truck for hours until someone else walks up and points right at it. Kids especially don't have all that extra noise in their head, they just read the words and call it out. Six months is way too long to look at something without a break, your brain just fills in the blanks with what you wanted it to say. Glad that kid saved you from shipping a broken combo, that would have been a nightmare to fix later.
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