This past Monday, I posted that I was scrambling to get a physical prototype ready to show to a friend. That friend is Korby Sears, board game producer/designer/developer, musician, and all-round cool human being extraordinaire. He and I used to work together at Forrest-Pruzan Creative, and he’s really good at spotting the adjustments a game needs to be great.

We met up in person for some food and a game, which is something we don’t get to do often enough, even with me back in Seattle. This would be the first time I’d put the Disco Candybar prologue tutorials in front of another designer, so I was a little more nervous than I’ve been for the online demos I’ve been chronicling here.

“This is an ‘out of the box’ test, huh?” Korby asked. “Out of the box” (OoB) tests simulate the experience a player has when they open the game box for the very first time. I nodded with a shrug, and told him it was really just the beginnings of an OoB, since I’d just started writing the tutorials that morning, and that the Lore Book prologue chapter in the bin was maybe 20% done.

“Noted,” he said.

I handed him the plastic bin. Upon opening it, he found the Start-Up Sheet I’d packed at the very top. He read it, and raised an eyebrow when he got to the part about there being no rulebook. He checked the list of components, making a few comments about potential costing, and verified that (almost) everything was there.

Naturally, I’d forgotten the first page of the Lore Book on the printer at home.

It’s hard to play a game that tells you to start your adventure by jumping right into reading the Lore Book when the very first page isn’t there. It quickly occurred to me though that, as luck would have it, I had actually posted a photo of page 1 here earlier that day. So that was good… but I’d intentionally not taken any photos of page 2, which had all the instructions and diagrams for how to play through the very first tutorial. This could be a minor disaster.

Korby read what he could of the story from the photo on my phone. When we got to the end of the page, I did my best to recreate the next piece of the story from memory, then started describing the steps that would get him through the first encounter. We had to chase a bunch of rats out of the tavern cellar, learning the basics of how to run the enemy AI system along the way. I’d stripped out all of the hero character routines for this bit, and limited the first real interaction with the game to just a demonstration of “did the rat bite us, or did it run away?”

Despite my years of designing and demoing games, I’m not great at verbally walking people step-by-step through how to play something for the first time. I’m better at procedurally writing out the rules step by step, where I can easily go backwards and forwards in time, determining if everything was spelled out precisely and and inserting things I’d forgotten as they occur to me. Right there, with Korby looking to be able to get the OoB experience, I was in a low-grade panic. Maybe it showed, maybe it didn’t, but it was there.

I temporarily abandoned the goals of showing the self-guided design of the game, and just grabbed the necessary components from the bin. I showed Korby, as close as I could recall the written order, the steps to make the rats do their thing.

And with my nerves slightly shaken, I was not great at it.

Later, when I asked Korby for his High/Low/Buffalo review (high points, low points, and something unexpected), he called out confusion over the AI process as the low. I’m reasonably confident that if the actual written instructions had been there, diagrams and all, things would have gone much smoother. Text on a page doesn’t get nervous or panic. If it was done right, it doesn’t jump around and clarify things it forgot to cover earlier.

Down the line, Korby’s concerns with that process came up again; the entire hero/character side of the encounter system — the real mechanical substance of the game — is based on the basic structure of the enemy AI. If the tutorial didn’t explain the enemy AI clearly, then it complicated the learning curve for learning to pilot the heroes. Our playthrough of the “heroes get weapons and fight some Wolves!” training montage took a few minutes longer than it should have for the lack of well-written and diagrammed rules.

So there’s a few lessons. If the goal is to get OoB experience feedback, make sure the self-guided elements of the game are actually in the box. Memorize the step-by-step instructions. Have a backup of the diagram. Check the stupid printer. Also, don’t rush out the door with barely enough time to get where you’re going and realize your gas tank is empty five minutes out of the driveway. But that’s a different kind of lesson, even if it raised stress levels before the demo began.

On the upside, what I did have with me was enough to give Korby a feel for how the “game with no rulebook” could work — and he really liked that concept. This was both his “high” and “buffalo” in his final notes. Disco Candybar started with a promise that you could be up and playing in mere minutes after cracking the plastic wrap on the box, and from what he saw, he felt it would deliver.

That makes me a lot less nervous. The first OoB could have gone quite a bit better, but it wasn’t a complete crash-and-burn disaster. The next one will be an improvement. Now I just need to find another local game designer that hasn’t seen any of it yet — or start building another copy of the prototype that I’m comfortable sending out on the road without me.

When it was time to split the dinner check, he had one really pressing question for me.

“Are you sure the real name’s not going to be Disco Candybar?”

Pretty sure. Catchy and memorable as it is, it’s feeling more and more like an inside joke that will never play unexplained on a store shelf.

C’est la vie.

---