Dave Crowell was one of the first people I met when my wife and I bought our house near Carlsbad, CA. I was looking for people to play Magic: the Gathering and other games with, and Dave answered my post in the neighborhood Facebook group within an hour. He and his son Dawson were pretty serious board gamers and dabbled in Magic, so we hit it off and quickly met up to geek out about all kinds of stuff.

I told them I made board games for a living, and that I occasionally needed volunteers to help playtest and refine designs. They were enthusiastically interested in getting involved, and I knew they had the skills to analyze, pinpoint, and communicate what was working and what wasn’t.

The Crowells helped me dial in player/character abilities when I worked on Star Wars Talisman, and they were some of my first playtesters when I created Disney Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances. The latter was designed and developed almost entirely during the early Covid lockdowns, so those playtests began with them sequestered in their home with a very crude physical prototype and video interviews. Later it progressed to online testing when I rebuilt the prototype in Tabletopia, a web-browser accessible simulated tabletop games platform.

When my family moved from California to Seattle for my job at Lorcana, the opportunities to playtest and game (verb) with Dave and Dawson pretty much dried up. But now with a new personal passion project, I had something I could bring back to them for feedback. Dave has been playing a wide variety of RPGs (role playing games) for several decades, so while Disco Candybar isn’t strictly an RPG per se, I knew the vibe is similar enough that he’d have great insight on its potential.

We met up over a Google call this past Friday, and I gave them the rundown on my goals for the game — audience, attention span considerations, accessibility, fun, and so on — along with a brief framework of how I want to blend story with combat sequences. We each grabbed a character setup. Together, we had the Warrior, the Mage, and the Cleric, and the game dealt us up a band of goblins to fight.

Within a minute or two, we were off to the races. Combat actions were selected, characters chose enemies to focus on, battle ensued.

We hit some challenges in the timing of things around the third or fourth round of combat, and made calls on the fly regarding how to resolve them. I made notes to try dividing some of my combat phases down into slightly more granular, defined steps. It goes a little bit against my goals of super-streamlining this game, but in the end I see it needs the clarity even if it adds 10% more rules to understand it, and to remove confusing loopholes.

By the end of the battle, both Dave and Dawson were doing the “long pause, head cocked, half-smile” thing that usually comes before generally positive feedback. “It’s good,” offered Dave. “There are a lot of ‘entry point’ RPGs out there that haven’t done a great job of simplifying combat. Most strip it down too far and it’s just ‘turn over a card or roll a die and compare numbers’. This has more to it, but it’s still simple and fun.”

Dawson had similar notes. “It’s fun, fast, and tactically meaningful.” He’d played as one of the more complex characters in the prototype (which isn’t tremendously complex, but there’s always a range), and he noted that he saw it felt different from the character his dad had used.

Dave later elaborated. “I’m surprised at the depth that this simple system delivers. It gives the fun of a classic RPG combat in a fraction of the time. It sparks the imagination and scratches that fantasy hero itch.”

He knows what he’s talking about, so if he likes this, I feel confident I’m doing something right.

I ran another playtest later in the day with another RPG-expert friend from our Southern-California game nerds group, but that’s another post for another day. I’ll catch you up on that soon…

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